diego's weblog
there and back again
Category Archives: software
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 [...]
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). [...]
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 [...]
bye bye, AT&T
Posted by on January 21, 2011
On Wednesday the story broke that Google was testing number porting for Voice, but I got there too late: the option was already gone by the time I checked. Then yesterday it occurred to me to check again, and lo and behold, there it was. It just so happened that I was angrier at AT&T [...]
two articles
Posted by on January 21, 2011
and two quotes. 1) “How much time do you spend verbalizing? Every time you talk, you destroy the memory of what you’re talking about.” from Science Proves You’re Stupid 2) “Is [the software we use] it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software [...]
the end of the mechanical age
Posted by on July 16, 2010
Anyone that knows me also knows that I am tablet fan. My first job out of college was at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center creating a user interface for a tablet that never shipped (this was 1998!) even though we got it working in prototype form. I have used tablets of various kinds since then [...]
the web is an app
Posted by on July 14, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what apps mean for web development, and how they intersect, and my conclusion so far is that very soon web apps will always be built… as apps. What do I mean by this? Apps are user interfaces optimized for a particular device or screen, and they communicate with [...]
the web is not the browser (redux)
Posted by on March 31, 2009
A few years back one discussion that was all the rage was whether mobile phones could or couldn’t supplant PCs as web browsing devices. In 2009, that is taken as a given. Mobile browsers (Safari Mobile, Opera Mini, Skyfire, even, ahem, IE on WinMo) have become pretty good at what they do. The web experience [...]
