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2010 – Fail Better
December 30th, 2009Power Outlet With Built in USB Ports
December 5th, 2009Our custom TruePower power outlet solution includes two Universal Serial Bus (USB) charge ports in addition to the two standard three prong power outlet ports.
From the “Why didn’t I think of that” file…
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Anycast
December 3rd, 2009For this reason, anycast is generally used as a way to provide high availability and load balancing for stateless services such as access to replicated data; for example, DNS service is a distributed service over multiple geographically dispersed servers.
via en.wikipedia.org
One of many things I need to learn more about one of these days is Internet infrastructure. For some reason, I’d never heard of ‘Anycast’ until today, as I was reading up on how Google’s new DNS service would work. Interesting stuff in there too about using Anycast as part of the transititon to IPv6.
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Derek Sivers: There’s no speed limit. (The lessons that changed my life.)
December 2nd, 2009Whether you’re a student, teacher, or parent, I think you’ll
appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and
permanently change someone’s life in only a few lessons.
Confirmed: R2-D2 Finally Discovered In Star Trek
November 16th, 2009At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2′s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.
via gizmodo.com
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The Go Programming Language
November 11th, 2009I’m glad to see this; there has been too little innovation on the system programming language front. I do like C, though I’ve become more conscious of its faults since I learned it (*mumble*) years ago.
I’m a little disappointed that Google didn’t throw its weight behind the other major contender in this category, The D Programming Language. They have to have considered it; I wonder if their decision not to use it involved technical considerations, licensing considerations, or a little of both.
The write-up on TechCrunch is light on technical details, and the comments are hilariously clueless: paranoiacs spluttering that Google is taking over the world, people who’ve never written a line of code in their lives declaring it an instant failure, and Johnny One-Note programmers insisting that this will never take the place of PHP, or C#, or JavaScript, or whatever their One True Language is, shrieking with terror at the thought of learning something new.
For myself, I like what I’ve read so far about Go. It looks not much more complex than C (and waaaay less complex than C++), with a more modern, more streamlined feel. I like the idea of trying to head off the formatting wars by including a canonical pretty-printer in the core tool set (though I wish they had standardized on spaces instead of tabs for indentation). Requiring braces around blocks is good: it heads off a common error in C/C++ coding, and there shouldn’t be any ‘friction’ in changing a one-line block into a multi-line block. I liked structural equivalence of types when I first encountered it in Modula-3, and the Go concept of interfaces is nicely reminiscent of that. I don’t miss the whole object oriented feature list (encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic binding), so long as modularity and information hiding are supported. And garbage collection is a huge win, so long as it can be done efficiently and without causing the program to stutter.
All in all, very interesting, and a worthy challenger to D as a 21st-century systems programming language.
Go vs Go!
November 11th, 2009Go! is a concurrent programming language, first publicly documented by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe in 2003 [1]. It is oriented to the needs of programming secure, production quality, agent based applications. It is multi-threaded, strongly typed and higher order (in the functional programming sense).
via en.wikipedia.org
Google’s new ‘Go’ programming language, the very day it is announced, is already embroiled in a naming controversy.
Personally, I think they should contact the makers of LabVIEW, and see if they can acquire the naming rights for the G programming language.
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Convicted Murderer To Wikipedia: Shhh!
November 11th, 2009In 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered. Two of his business associates were convicted, imprisoned for the crime, and recently paroled. Who killed Sedlmayr? Its a matter of public record, but if one of the men and his German law firm gets their way, Wikipedia (and EFF) will not be allowed to tell you. A few days ago, the online encyclopedia received a cease and desist letter from one of the convicts—represented by the aptly named German law firm Stopp and Stopp—demanding that the perpetrator’s name be taken off of the Sedlmayr article page.
via eff.org
German convicted (and paroled) murderer attempts to censor Wikipedia, to hide his crime. I suspect this will be subject to the “Streisand effect” — where trying to hide something only succeeds in drawing more attention to it.
“Oh, and by the way, the convicts were Wolfgang Werlé and his half-brother Manfred Lauber.”
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Talking Politics (or Not, Actually)
October 12th, 2009I’m intensely interested in politics, and follow current events. I have my own opinions, of course, and they are not blandly ‘moderate’. I think what happens in the world of national and international politics is important to our lives and our future, and we ignore it at our peril.
And yet, talking politics (or writing about it) is something I do less and less these days. That’s partly because my own views have little or no representation on the national stage, and so it seems futile. But mainly it’s because political conversation these days seems always to be an attempt to bludgeon one’s opponents, rather than persuade them. (And this is true of all sides of the debate: if you think the people on your side are innocent of such, or even perceptibly better than your opponents, you are a damned fool.)
I’m not saying I’m innocent of that kind of behavior myself; quite the contrary, I tend to get drawn into it far too easily. I’m trying to break myself of the habit, mostly by no longer talking or writing about politics. I’m not sure it’s right to do so — as I said, politics matters, and requires attention — but it’s what I feel like I have to do for the sake of my own self-respect.
The One Where I Say Something Nice About .NET
October 9th, 2009I’m working my way through Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, by Steven Sanderson, published by Apress. So far, I like it, for values of ‘it’ of both the book and the framework.
The book — well, the reviews on Amazon were glowing, and they’re basically right: clear prose style, ideas well expressed, and enough critique of other Microsoft technologies that you can tell it’s not a Microsoft Press title.
The framework … is interesting. It mostly abandons the ASP.NET model of server-side controls, postbacks, and viewstate in favor of plain HTML and CSS. (Though there are still advantages to using their HTML helper functions rather than coding up raw HTML yourself.) For pity’s sake, they even make jQuery available for your AJAX hacking pleasure.
What has always bothered me about “classic” ASP.NET was that it seemed to be an attempt to transplant the VB/WebForms style of development — drag-and-drop controls, a low-level event loop — onto the web. It’s a layer of abstraction over the web in an attempt to hide that fact that it is the web.
And it shows in terms of performance. Outside of low-latency intranets, the underlying architecture doesn’t support the chatty postback/viewstate implementation needed to emulate a desktop GUI event loop.
ASP.NET MVC, in contrast, feels like a web-native architecture. It’s designed around the strengths and limitations of HTTP, rather than fighting against it.
On top of that, it encourages the strong separation of concerns implied by ‘MVC’; it nudges the developer towards unit testing and test-driven development; and with the source code placed under an OSI-approved license, it represents a step by Microsoft into the world of Open Source.
All in all, I think ASP.NET MVC is quite cool.