02 Mar 2010
The Internet? Bah!

A lot has changed in 15 years, eh?

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

(link) [Newsweek]

07:51 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

28 Feb 2010
The Future of Money

I have a bit of experience in this arena, and I can tell you right now, these folks only have half the equation. Take a look at the conversion chart with it's multiplicity of online "currencies" and ask yourself how conversions between them, much less handling processing of payments, can ever possibly be free...

The short answer is they can't. The real answer is another question: free to whom?

A generation ago, when people made the choice to switch to plastic, credit cards did not just replicate cash; they fundamentally changed how we used money. The ease with which people could make purchases encouraged them to buy much more than they had in the past. Entrepreneurs suddenly had access to easy — though high-interest — loans, providing a spark to the economy. Now, while it may be hard to predict what innovations PayPal’s platform will enable, it’s safe to say that the payment industry is going to change dramatically. As money becomes completely digitized, infinitely transferable, and friction-free, it will again revolutionize how we think about our economy.

(link) [Wired]

12:20 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

21 Feb 2010
Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons

CNN ran a special tonight on a wargame held recently called cyber.shockwave. A group of hackers (state organized or not) had managed to take down the telecom and power grids in the US ... pretty ridiculous scenerio, really. I think they've completely missed the point of cyberwar. The real dangers of a war in cyberspace was covered by the New York Times last October. Read it below.

Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear.

(link) [New York Times]

02:10 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

17 Feb 2010
Gallery of Processor Cache Effects

There's more to technical brilliance than, well, technical brilliance. Clear exposition helps, and this is the clearest exposition of processor cache operations I've ever read.

Most of my readers will understand that cache is a fast but small type of memory that stores recently accessed memory locations. This description is reasonably accurate, but the "boring" details of how processor caches work can help a lot when trying to understand program performance.

(link) [Igor Ostrovsky Blogging]

via Sutter's Mill

23:41 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

16 Feb 2010
A Choice to Compute

This is a vital essay - vital to understanding why we in the West are in deep danger of losing our grip completely on the Information Economy. Read it and buy a kid a Commodore ...

Programming doesn't happen by mistake, it take people. People that know it exists, people that know they can do it, ultimately people who have managed to catch the bug. In a world where computing is ever more commodified, I take great joy in introducing schools and young students to the simple accessible wonders of programming outside the box.

(link) [GamePeople]

22:38 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

14 Feb 2010
Remembering the Frisbee Inventor

I daresay there are few left on Planet Earth who have not seen or thrown a Frisbee or one of it's many knockoffs... how many inventors can claim this kind of impact? Offhand I can think of Edison, Westinghouse, Ford, Kilby and a few others... that's pretty august company for a toymaker. RIP

Walter Fredrick Morrison, the Frisbee inventor, died this week. His simple sports innovation – a plastic, aerodynamic disc – has become one of the most popular toys in American history, uniting beachgoers, college kids, and competitive teams for half a century.

(link) [Christian Science Monitor]

20:41 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

06 Feb 2010
Lazarus

I've been a user of Delphi for quite a few years now, mostly in it's C++ Builder incarnation. Because of this (my "C-weenieness") I've not done a tremendous amount of coding in Object Pascal, But I have done some, mostly at a very low level in components and libraries as the base (the Visual Component Library or VCL) of C++ Builder is all written in Delphi Pascal.

I noted with some interest last year that Codegear was working on a cross platform product, bringing Delphi to the Mac (and back to Linux). This was pretty exciting to me, because there's an increasing pressure at work to develop Mac solutions (and I'm sure they'll catch on to Ubuntu eventually). This would be an ideal solution, as it would leverage our existing codebase to new platforms.

The problem is that Codegear is taking their sweet time. And we needed a solution now - products have to ship! And I found a solution - Lazarus.

This isn't a "write once, run anywhere" environment (like Java promised to be), nor is it a cross compiler (exactly). It's a "write once, compile anywhere" RAD IDE for Object Pascal, with a component library that mimics the VCL but ties to an underlying widget set that's platform specific. Carbon (and some Cocoa) widgets are supported on the Mac, QT and GtK on Linux platforms and Win32 (or WinCE) on Windows. Processor support includes PowerPC, Intel and ARM. And it works.

I can write a program on a Windows box that compiles on my Mac - and on Windows it looks like a Windows app, and on the Mac it looks like a Mac app. There are a few platform specific ifdef's in the code, to be sure, but remarkably few. Most of the OS dependent stuff is handled transparently under the hood, including the crazy stuff like path separators for file access. It's really quite amazing.

I'm finding myself becoming quite enamored of the language itself, too. Sometimes my fingers move faster than my brain (especially on things like the equality operator - in Pascal, it's := as opposed to just =, which is the comparison operator) but overall the syntax is strikingly similar to what I've been doing with C++ Builder. This is mostly due to the nature of the underlying framework.

The developers of Lazarus have done one heck of a job with the LCL (Lazarus Component Library) and the FCL (Freepascal Component Library). These do much more than merely mimic the VCL - they extend it in very logical and useful ways. Unicode support, graphics support, even compression support are all built in. It's actually fun to write code in this thing.

And they did a smart thing with licensing, too. While the IDE and compiler are GPL, the frameworks and libraries are all LGPL. Which means no restrictions on us in commercial programs.

In short, I'm throughly impressed. If you need a cross platform dev tool, don't let the "Old School" rap of Pascal put you off. Check out Lazarus - you'll be amazed at what's possible today.

11:48 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

02 Feb 2010
The Chess Master and the Computer

I strongly suspect that Gary Kasparov's review of the new book Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman may be better than the book itself.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

(link) [New York Review of Books]

via MyAppleMenu:Reader

08:07 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

10 Jan 2010
Using a Toy Train To Calibrate a Reactor

Hilarious. We've used a similar setup at work to test video cameras - for long runs with continuous movement, a model railroad can't be beat.

Physicists and engineers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory built tracks inside a fusion reactor and ran a toy train for three days to help them with their calibrations.

(link) [Slashdot]

22:09 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

05 Jan 2010
Jaron Lanier Rants Against The World of Web 2.0

I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Lanier, but his is still a voice to be heeded and respected.

In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons.

(link) [Slashdot]

19:33 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

28 Dec 2009
Bad glass delayed Apple tablet?

You've gotta love the way the Brits phrase things ...

While here in the States Apple-tablet rumors are churning the waters as turbulently as a pool of piranhas into which has been dumped a truckload of honey-dipped hamsters, over in Far East the iWhatever's impending release is being treated as a fait accompli.

(link) [The Register]

17:32 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Dec 2009
The weather stick tells you if it's going to snow

I gotta get one of these!

The New England weather stick is the epitome of low-tech weather forecasting.

(link) [Christian Science Monitor]

19:37 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

20 Dec 2009
Intriguing: Man marries avatar

What does this say about Japanese culture? What does this say about humanity? How long before it's here?

Japan's Internet community has witnessed relationships and marriages to avatars, though it's typically been within the confines of the virtual world. Last month, Sal decided to be the first human-to-avatar union. Clad in a white tux, Sal married Nene [a videogame character] in front of some friends and Web users watching the ceremony live online.

(link) [CNN.com]

10:55 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

17 Dec 2009
Computer Scientist Looks At ICBM Security

Fascinating look back at the Cold War, and the security measures that kept us from blowing up the planet.

If you can climb a fifteen foot ladder and fit through a two foot diameter hole, you can, with a bit of advance planning, take an extensive "top-to-bottom" tour of a Titan II ICBM launch complex, complete with missile silo and missile. Best of all, you no longer have to trespass or join the Air Force to do it.

(link) [crypto.com]

via Slashdot

10:17 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

01 Dec 2009
Microsoft Investigates Black Screen of Death

At least it's a different color.

Microsoft has confirmed that it is investigating a problem described as the 'black screen of death,' which affects Windows 7 — and reports suggest it affects Vista and XP, too. The firm said it was looking into reports that suggest its latest security update, released on Tuesday 25 November, caused the problem. The error means that users of Windows 7 and earlier operating systems see a totally black screen after logging on to the system.

(link) [Slashdot]

18:09 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

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