apple ii
A new in box Apple //c system was recently sold on eBay. This is quite remarkable; a vintage computer – twenty-three years old – that has never been opened. The people who ultimately won the auction posted a beautiful set of unboxing pictures. For a brief moment, it was 1984 all over
ruby
Joseph Cooney reminds us that, in January 2005, 37signals went live with a product they built in 579 lines of code: You read that right, not 60,000 or 600,000 but instead a commercial project written in less than 600 lines of Ruby code. When I first saw this
keyboard shortcuts
Nobody has time to memorize a complete list of web browser keyboard shortcuts, and really, why should they? I only know a handful of web browser keyboard shortcuts, myself, and I probably use the same five shortcuts a hundred times a day. But not everyone knows about these five essential
technology trends
Over the last few years, I’ve become mildly obsessive about the contents of my keychain. Here’s what’s on my keychain today: In internet parlance, this is known as EDC or every-day carry. There’s an entire internet forum dedicated to the art and science of determining what
programming languages
I saw on reddit that today, January 10th, is Donald Knuth’s seventieth birthday. Knuth is arguably the most famous living computer scientist, author of the seminal Art of Computer Programming series. Here’s how serious Mr. Knuth is – his books are dedicated, not to his wife or a loved
software development
Bruce Eckel deftly identifies the root cause of all software development problems: We are in a young business. Primitive, really – we don’t know much about what works, and we keep thinking we’ve found the silver bullet that solves all problems. As a result, we go through these multi-year
software development
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
simulation
One advantage of being a geek is that our habits – as such habits go – are not terribly expensive. I’ve written before about my interest in auto racing. Instead of spending $100,000 on a sports car, I’ve built a nifty racing simulation rig that delivers many of the
programming languages
In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s that time of year again: let the wholesale buying of crap begin! As a technology enthusiast with a bad impulse purchase habit, I get a lot of complaints that I am difficult to buy for. That’s sort of intentional. I spent
browser
Two weeks ago, Apple announced a new version of WebKit, the underlying rendering technology of their Safari web browser. The feature list is impressive: * Enhanced Rich Text Editing * Faster JavaScript and DOM (~ 2x) * Faster Page Loading * SVG support * XPath support * Improved JavaScript XML technology (XSLT, DOMParser, XMLSerializer, and enhanced XMLHttpRequest
programming languages
Reginald Braithwaite writes consistently great stuff on his blog, but I think my absolute favorite thing he’s ever written is We Have Lost Control of the Apparatus. But we programmers have lost and we must be realistic about things. The fact of the matter is this: people own their
software development
In the software industry, the release of newer, better versions is part of the natural order. It’s a relentless march towards perfection that started with the first personal computers, and continues today. We expect software to get larger and more sophisticated over time, to track with the hardware improvements