Monthly Archives: September 2007

Neat article on Amazon.com scalability.  Link. —- My scalability story: A late-mid-90s startup.  A lightweight broadcast application tied to real-time notification of Olympics competition results, done as a demo of our product (which was actually pretty whizzy, and still would … Continue reading →

(via reddit) Why programmers don’t like relational databases.  Link I know that every time I use SQL I want to claw my eyes out.  Linq is lots better: No more horrible “… but take back half a cubit” scoping rules … Continue reading →

Yours Truly is mentioned a couple minutes into this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fzDimBmNgg The transactional store on the Newton was pretty cool, but ultimately kind of misguided, too.  The Palm had nothing in this area — just some hardware memory protection, I … Continue reading →

Zork source code, in the original MDL.  link I remember reading the Advent sources for hours when I was in high school.  Fun stuff.

Ah, the folks in the US Navy are just too dang cheerful in pointing out people doing things wrong.  Link.  My favorite remains the Dual Action Forklift (link), a nice, recursive configuration that I’m sure the inventer of the forklift … Continue reading →

Since I’m technically in the video game business (again, after some time at Atari in the early 80s writing cartridges), I thought I’d mention what I’m playing now. 1. Slogging through World of Warcraft.  Frankly it’s tiresome.  It’s a lot … Continue reading →

More interesting things about random-looking numbers (and the IRS, it turns out).  link. (And, as always, this scary paper by Gregory Chaitin: link).  

Why is it that the “owners” of labs (e.g., areas filled with machine resources for groups to use, as in test farms, etc.) tend to believe that the purpose of the lab is to have the machines be kept in … Continue reading →

We’re listening.  To be more specific, SETI is listening.  And I fully expect the first decoded interstellar message to be from spectral, glowing dudes on a planet orbiting Procyon, starting: MY NAME IS FZTBX GYRRG’W THE PRE-SPAWN OF THE AMBASSADOR … Continue reading →

… the more the same things keep bouncing back to life.  Smalltalk and LISP are like that. I hadn’t heard of the DLR until last week.  Smalltalk’s in it here.