From Stephen E. Arnold’s The Google Legacy: How Google’s Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (Infonortics: September 2005):
The figure Google’s Fusion: Hardware and Software Engineering shows that Google’s technology framework has two areas of activity. There is the software engineering effort that focuses on PageRank and other applications. Software engineering, as used here, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, history, science, security, technology | No Comments »
From John Wharton’s “The Origins of DOS” (Microprocessor Report: 3 October 1994):
In August of 1981, soon after Microsoft had acquired full rights to 86-DOS, Bill Gates visited Santa Clara in an effort to persuade Intel to abandon a joint development project with DRI and endorse MS-DOS instead. It was I - the Intel applications engineer [...]
Posted on November 23rd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | No Comments »
On the CWE-LUG mailing list, someone asked a question about creating a program that can be extended with plugins. I thought the answer was so useful that I wanted to save it and make it available to others.
On 2/17/07, Mark wrote:
I’m a young programmer (just finishing high school) who has done a fair [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Problems in the Environment of Unix” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):
Macintosh programmers are all about the user experience. They’re architects and decorators. They design from the outside in, asking first “What kind of interaction do we want to support?†and then building the application logic behind it to [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, history, technology | Comments Off
From Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.’s “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” (Computer: Vol. 20, No. 4 [April 1987] pp. 10-19):
The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | Comments Off
From Nate Mook’s “Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace” (Beta News: 13 October 2005):
One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, technology | Comments Off
From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:
From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.
It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, history, science | Comments Off
From “Beauty Is Our Business: A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra“:
David Gelernter said in “Machine Beauty - Elegance and the Heart of Technology“:
Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
Related posts
The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
Web design contrasted [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, business, commonplace book, technology | Comments Off
From “Good Architecture“:
In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:
‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).
These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, commonplace book, history, technology | Comments Off
From danah boyd’s “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide“:
Culture is the set of values, norms and artifacts that influence people’s lives and worldview. Culture is embedded in material objects and in conceptual frameworks about how the world works. …
People are a part of multiple cultures - the most obvious of which are constructed [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Brian Hayes’ “The Post-OOP Paradigm“:
The architects of the earliest computer systems gave little thought to software. (The very word was still a decade in the future.) Building the machine itself was the serious intellectual challenge; converting mathematical formulas into program statements looked like a routine clerical task. The awful truth came out soon [...]
Posted on April 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, technology | Comments Off
From “Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability“:
In this article four fundamental principles are presented: relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness and undecidability. They were studied by, respectively, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. …
Relativity says that there is no privileged, “objective” viewpoint for certain observations. … Now, if things move relative to each other, then obviously [...]
Posted on March 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From dive into mark:
First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):
< > ! * ' ' #
^ ” ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , system halted
In English, this reads:
waka waka bang splat tick tick [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature, weird | Comments Off
Linux kernel hacker H. Peter Anvin, quoted in MIT Technology Review’s “Linus’s World“:
“When the BitKeeper fiasco broke, it turned what had previously been a political problem into a technical problem,” he says. “We’re a lot better at solving technical problems.”
Related posts
Unix vs Windows: NYC vs Celebration
Unix specs vs. Windows specs
Tim O’Reilly’s definition of open source
Google [...]
Posted on November 15th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | Comments Off