All my blog posts and articles
I am not dead set against software patents, although I’ve been on both sides of the issue. I am the proud inventor listed on 3 or 4 patents. Some are more worthy in my opinion that others. I was also leading a development team that had to stand on its head to avoid conflicting with a patent that ev...
Read more →A catchy headline, but is it true? “Facebook Trapped in MySql ‘a fate worse than death’.This is a quote of what Michael Stonebreaker supposedly said in this interview article: > “The widely accepted problem with MySQL is ...
Read more →Not my usual topic, but I came across a rather interesting article about the history of the famous (infamous) AK-47 machine gun. > “The AK-47 has succeeded so wildly because it is almost an ideal realization of the personal f...
Read more →Out of left (star) field. Here’s a succinct tutorial on buying a telescope that my friend Ben Gomes Casseresemailed me which I thought might be of general interest. You can see [Ben...
Read more →What I don’t get is the price. First I had to have bought the music (from Apple or someone else) and now I have to pay again ($24.95 per year) in order to make it all available over iCloud. I think I will stick with my new favorite, Spotify. I am sure I don’t fully understand the details, but it s...
Read more →I was excited to hear about the Kindle Fire. But I was waiting to read some impartial reviews of one before running off and buying one. After all I am a big fan of the Kindle (gen 2) and enjoy reading books on Kindl...
Read more →An interesting commentary on a couple of patents that issued from the US Patent Office: > “The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines, but has recently granted at least two patents on a mathematically impossible process: compressio...
Read more →Here’s a tiny social conundrum. When someone writes you, calls you and leave a message, calls and doesn’t, or even texts you, what is your obligation to respond? If the question is “are you free for lunch today” and you know you are not, is it OK to just not answer? If the question is “have you seen...
Read more →Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group has a great post bemoaning how entrepreneurs are driven to invest their time and energy and (other peoples’ money) on more and more vacuous projects: > “Indeed, the collective attention of young entrepreneurs seem...
Read more →I’ve spent the last few weeks in dribs and drabs building a new game for Android. Lately I got deeper on what it means to have a ’tiled’ game space display where you construct the appearance of the game space by arranging a series of graphic images based on what’s needed for a certain level of the g...
Read more →I am a big fan of Facebook. They are doing so many things well. They have become so pervasive that if anyone is doing anything that involves a group of people online the first and biggest question should be, why should we not put this on Facebook? Because it works on so many levels. ![Screen Shot 2...
Read more →So after some trouble porting the content I am now running my blog on Squarespace. My main motivation is to get out of the server management business and also clean up my messier and messier self-hosted WordPress. Jury is still out whether this will be a keeper but for the moment I am happy and really like the fresher look of the blog compared to the previous incarnation. I will certainly keep you posted!
Interesting article with a provocative title: “The Designer’s Notebook: Passion Versus Professionalism“. This is a topic that interests me. He says: > “Passion” is an excuse used by employers to mistreat thei...
Read more →That’s a great quote. And no, it’s not AT ALL autobiographical. It’s just something that I’ve thought about for a long time and I loved seeing the nicely put pithy quote. I googled it and this was the first hit I got.
This link lets you see all the passages in Steve Jobs’ new biography that were underlinedby Kindle readers. All of them. Pretty interesting don’t you think?
An interesting article about this impending crisis. Although it’s impending, I had never heard about before, despite the claim that “This impending “flash crisis” is well known in system circles. It’s almost like a mini Y2K.” Ok, tell me more… The core does make a great point: > “What happens when you blow up the “slow disk” assumption is that your entire software stack begins to crumble. When the cushion provided by those 10 ms of seek time goes away, CPU becomes your bottleneck. You have to start rethinking a lot of design choices.” (from Impending Flash Crisis) Interesting…
If you haven’t heard about Khan Academy, let me be the first one to introduce you to its wonders. There is [a huge library of 10-12 minute educational videos on high-school and college level topics from matrix math to trigonometry to how mortgages work](http://www.khana...
Read more →I finally got my new blog on WordPress.com working. That should have been the simplest but their automatic spam detector encountered a single post referencing some free iPhone upgrade service I once mentioned. I had no idea that they were not legitimate at the time but an...
Read more →Running my own Linux server has lost it’s sex appeal. Now I am going for simplicity and so I am exploring simply not having my own server but using one of the several cloud services. It turns out that there are lots of little bumps in the road to move from one to the other: - I like [Tumblr](http:/...
Read more →Can you compose crappy music? I had a field day today ‘designing’ a bit of music for my “Game Of Life” Android game. In the old old days, when computers for the first time allowed you to choose a font for your text. we all became bad amateur typographers and book designers. Do you remember the “rans...
Read more →