diego's weblog
there and back again
guess the world doesn’t want to be eaten…
Posted by on January 11, 2012
My favorite quote from Cory Doctorow’s excellent Lockdown: The coming war on general purpose computing. This stuff matters because we’ve spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it’s just been an end-level guardian. Must [...]
e-readers are doomed! doomed I tellsya!
Posted by on January 6, 2012
Matt Alexander, at The Loop, resurfaces the by-now well-known idea that e-readers (specifically eInk devices like the Kindle) are doomed to quick extinction. The reasoning is based on the following, quoting from the article (many of the points are repeated two or three times, “technology” in particular): Technology. The technology is “[...] inherently stunted. E-ink is [...]
mini-ode to “hello, world”
Posted by on January 2, 2012
“FORTRAN begat ALGOL, which begat CPL, which begat BCPL, from whence B, and then C, arose…” I hadn’t looked at Scala in a while, so I head over to www.scala-lang.org and start looking through docs. First the tutorial, and sure enough the first thing they do is show a Hello, World example. It suddenly struck [...]
hacker cooties
Posted by on December 24, 2011
I am definitely enjoying this, the tail end of 2011, living largely in disconnected mode, barely looking at news, catching up on books and movies. Come January, there will be time for frenetic engagement with the electronic world. Something I wanted to share though, was a fragment on Charlie Stross’s “how I got here in [...]
steve’s last theorem
Posted by on December 11, 2011
“I finally cracked it.” is what Steve Jobs told to Walter Isaacson when talking about a way to revolutionize TV. Given the usual insanity, wild extrapolation and rumor-mongering that goes on regarding upcoming Apple products, it’s no surprise that this got a lot of people excited. Aside from the typical unfounded speculation, see for example [...]
I for one welcome our new algorithmic overlords
Posted by on December 6, 2011
In recent weeks, “markets” (more specifically, bond markets, but that’s less important for this particular argument) have been directly responsible for the change in leadership in two countries (Greece and Italy) and at least indirectly responsible for the change in another (Spain — in the form of all sorts of perceived pressure on the electorate). [...]
dreaming it all up again
Posted by on December 3, 2011
“It’s no big deal, it’s just — we have to go away and … and dream it all up again.” U2 at the Point Depot, Dublin, December 30, 1989 Today was my last day at Ning. Seven years ago, almost to the day, I wrote on my weblog about looking for the next big thing, after [...]
too bad phone number records don’t have a TTL
Posted by on January 22, 2011
It’s been almost a day since I ported my phone number from AT&T to Google Voice, and I still can’t receive SMS or international calls. Mind you, the porting process explicitly stated that SMS could take up to three days to transfer over, but while I was doing it I didn’t pay much attention to [...]
“because your computer is too fast”
Posted by on January 22, 2011
La Brea: a really interesting tool that uses “AOP-style” cross-cutting wrappers for OS-level calls. I am generally obsessed with the idea that we trust too much the underlying systems that we run software on, and this shows in many subtle ways in code as we are writing it, particularly around error detection, correction, and reporting. “Try [...]
