Software As She’s Developed

Software can be Blinked too. Blink: Malcolm Gladwell’s book about the underestimated importance of intuition and first appearances relative to rational analysis and decision-making. Hugely successful in the blogosphere (relevant there too) and slammed on yesterday’s Slashdot Review for essentially being blatantly obvious. I’ve just begun to read it this week. As a developer with a big […]

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Google’s Movie portal is an early version of an application area which will expand rapidly in the next few years: portals which extract meaning from the web. I’m going to be the 2000th blogger today to mention a new Google feature. This time, the “movie:” search which links to a bunch of movie reviews. This is less […]

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Simon Harris (chapeau Dion) discusses CharSequence, the interface String and StringBuffer decided to conform to since J2SE 1.4. CharSequence gives you an okay interface with which to enjoy the goodness of mock onjects and the like. However, it’s nothing to rave about as it lacks most of the methods in String, and as Simon points […]

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I just caught Des Paroz, Acer Australia CTO, on a recent G’day World podcast. Overall, it gives a good insight into the issues a large vendor like Acer deals with. They touched on Dell (37:30 in). Cameron: The big … E-Business case study for the last 5 or 6 years has always been Dell and their whole […]

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Did you know that Todd from GeekNewsCentral has been running a Tech Podcasts alliance for a while now? I posted his open announcement a while ago, signed up, and since then, the techpodcasts.com site has been evolving. There is now an aggregated podcast feed page: http://techpodcasts.com/dp/?q=aggregator. I understand a corresponding RSS feed is on its […]

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Dion asks “What do you think of the O’Reilly Head First series?” In a word, brilliant. I scanned through Head First EJB about a year ago and was extremely impressed by their fresh approach. They categorically state there will be plenty of redundancy, and redundancy is exactly what people need to learn tough concepts. So, within […]

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How do you name Maps? Maps of the key-value pair variety rather than the hip Google-enabled map of the USA. There seems to be no convention. Even for individual programming languages, there seems to be no convention enshrined in the culture, although some languages naturally favour shorter names than others. Let’s say I’m mapping each captain to […]

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And while I’m on calculators, Chris Stevenson has been writing about the inconsistencies of calculators. The inconsistency in different PC-based calculators is interesting, but I find it even more interesting that all these calculators exist at all. They are 1975 devices simulated in their 2-dimensional glory on 2005 monitors. I assume the main reason they are […]

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Russel Beattie points to the emergence of ubiquitous search and asks if it’s a trend towards the AI dream of asking the computer any question you like. It’s a powerful idea and it would seem to be the way google has generally been heading … for instance: [Google Calculator] Type in “6 * 9″ into google […]

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Java can be dynamic too. Somewhat, anyway. Some blogs have recently looked at static versus dynamic mindsets, and it’s all part of a mindset dichotomy throughout the industry. Bruce Eckel recently noted that Java is evolving towards semi-static, semi-dynamic : Java attempts to straddle the gap between statically-typed languages like C++ and dynamic languages like Python, Smalltalk, […]

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