Cindy and Geoff did a great job and produced Caedmon Geoffrey, a wonderful, healthy baby boy at 7:12pm on May 20. He’s 9 lbs 1 oz, 21 inches tall. His plumbing works so well that he peed on the doctor during delivery. I take that as a great omen!
Programming Feeds the Mad Scientist
I have been writing a new program, having a ball doing it, and it has brought to consciousness something which I have not thought about for years: There is a bit of Dr. Henry Frankenstein in me. I love to create things which do stuff autonomously and, when I create these things, bigger is definitely […]
Checking In, Avoiding Hidden Dependencies
I woke up in a good mood this morning and then… Sometimes one piece of technology makes another, seemingly unrelated, piece of technology misbehave. It happened this morning at 12:15am CDT when an automated program that I run in Amazon EC2 failed to do its thing. The EC2 instances (that’s geek speak for “virtual machines” […]
Step 2: Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux
Do you remember when I predicted that Google Chrome would take over the world replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux? Here is the next step, to be released for CES which begins January 8, 2009. If all you want from your computer is to read your email (Gmail) and surf the web and use […]
What if the Matrix Ran on Windows?
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
Bye Bye Windows 3.x
The headline The end of an era – Windows 3.x startled me this morning. My first thought was to look at the dateline; it had to be in the distant past and I wanted to see how distant. I will save you the tension and anticipation; the dateline is November 1, 2008, just four days […]
Boom or Bust for Open Source Software?
You might have noticed a bit of “uncertainty” in the economy these days. I was fascinated to see these two articles show up within 24 hours of each other: Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping by Andrew Keen <snip> So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will […]
+1 for Open Source Genealogy Software
GRAMPS (my genealogy software) version 3.0.2 just came out and I upgraded. It has lots of bug fixes and tweaks, including to several things which had annoyed me about 3.0.1. Unfortunately, they did not fix one of the things which bothered me: the pages of living individuals still do not include the persons’ pictures. Those […]
Use Google Chrome but Read the EULA
As reported this morning in Slashdot, you should read and carefully consider Google Chrome’s end user license agreement (EULA) before using Chrome. It’s hard to read in the teeny tiny box that Google provides so I am reproducing the entire text below the break. I am certainly not a lawyer but I am a paranoid, […]
Google Chrome to Replace Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux
Google released Chrome today and you will see “Google Chrome is a browser” if you visit the Chrome web page. Do not be deceived, though. Chrome is not designed to replace Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari. Chrome is designed to replace your operating system and virtually all of the software that you use every […]
Caching Free LibraryThing Book Covers
LibraryThing did something amazing last Thursday: it made images of the covers of a million books available for anyone to use for free. This is way better than using Amazon.com’s book covers because you can display them without linking to Amazon. If you are a library or an independent book store, having links on your […]
Yes, Linux is “Ready for the Desktop”
It’s nice to read that Jeremy LaCroix at Linux.com agrees with me, though our phraseology differs a bit. Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is “ready for the desktop.” I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it’s time we […]
Assuming
Technology is challenging enough when we really know what is going on. The situation deteriorates rapidly as we progress through only thinking we know what is going on to being completely clueless. My step-mother just started using a computer, the first computer that has been solely hers, the first one where she can do whatever […]
Linux is Ready for Prime-Time
Is Linux ready to replace Microsoft Windows? You have almost certainly heard the question and you have probably wondered about it. You might even have tried Linux yourself and given some serious thought to switching. Most people avoid switching, though, not because they particularly care about the operating system but because switching would force them […]
Coming Soon: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Support for Microsoft Office 2007 Files
I run my company using OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. It does everything we need and costs a whopping $0.00; not a bad deal for a small business. To be more specific, OpenOffice.org Gives us word processor and spreadsheet programs that more than handle our documentation needs, Allows us to open Word and Excel documents […]
The Best Programmers’ Editor
I learned vi back in the bad ol’ days of 1980 when I was fresh out of college and working on a PDP 11/70 running UNIX version 6 with DEC VT100 terminals on a dozen users’ desks. Life was good. I even wrote a short book, How to Use Vi in 10 Easy Lessons, which […]
Free On-line Ubuntu Linux Desktop Training
Seven months ago, I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux on my primary (work and home) computer. Life has not been perfect with Ubuntu Linux (it wasn’t perfect with Windows, either) but I certainly judge the experience to be an overwhelming success. If you are considering trying Linux, and I strongly encourage you to […]
Software Release Guide
This is not funny. Not one bit! 😉 Once you start playing with software you quickly become aware that each software package has a revision code attached to it. It is obvious that this revision code gives the sequence of changes to the product, but in reality there’s substantially more information available through the rev-code […]
The Value of Documentation on Quick Decisions
When I say, “Documentation,” how do you react? Probably with one of these: Bleh. A drag. Who reads it? The code is self documenting. Or my favorite: It’s intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. This morning, I ran across Slashdot’s article, Five AJAX Frameworks Reviewed Dr. Dobb’s Journal reviews 5 AJAX frameworks:… [the] reviewers… […]
Building Machines Which Learn Like A Human
Ever since I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s, I have wondered how we think. Modern digital computers are marvelous machines but they don’t hold a candle to what a very young child can do. For instance, it is absolutely trivial for you to recognize a bicycle when you […]
