• The World Outside

    I went over to the BayCHI presentation on Mobile Media Metadata last week. Fantastic stuff. Marc Davis from Garage Cinema Research spoke about the research they have going on. The presentation he gave focused mostly on mobile metadata. For now lets just talk about images. One of the points he... [Read More]
  • CTIA and Mobility in General

    I was over at CTIA for a while the other day. I already wrote about the BAMF meeting that we had afterward, that kicked ass. But I really should write something of my own about CTIA. I was personally pretty disappointed. I forget who exactly said it, but someone at... [Read More]
  • View/Controller Separation in Web Apps

    A recent article (Migrating to Page Controllers) does an excellent job of combining theory with some concrete examples and immediate benefits. The article provides a simple technique for factoring the controller out of the view processing when writing PHP code. Although not necessary for everything, architecture along this direction can... [Read More]
  • Software Engineering as Risk Management

    During the Q&A; at the Niklaus Wirth talk last night someone mentioned formal methods from the Hoare school of work. Such as Hoare Logic. In particular they were asking why the work there had fallen out of favor, and wasn’t used more widely. Which got me thinking about the cost... [Read More]
  • Niklaus Wirth 2

    The success of Pascal came many years after it was done, due to the availability of microcomputers. Now there were lots of people available to program who didn’t have to unlearn Fortran. It was driven forward by Borland making the compiler available for only 50 dollars, when other compilers cost... [Read More]
  • Niklaus Wirth

    Here’s some quick notes from the talk that Niklaus Wirth gave at the Computer History Museum on Oct 20th. The topic was “How I Became Interested In Computer Languages”. [Read More]
  • Niklaus Wirth Speaking

    Niklaus Wirth is speaking at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on the topic “How I Became Interested in Programming Languages”. Wirth is one of those names that pops up over and over again in computer science, like Knuth. I’ve never heard him speak before, and I’m certainly not... [Read More]
  • Semantic XHTML

    Brian Cantoni has a good writeup of a talk about Semantic XHTML given by Kevin Marks and Tantek Celik. The slides are available online as well. There’s some good stuff in there. Lately I’ve been working a bunch with the idea of mixing in additional information with web content. The... [Read More]