Halfbaked Ideas

I want to give props to the fine folks at VMWare. Their products helped me to solve a nagging and difficult problem, quickly and cheaply.
This was the problem. I work at a small java development shop which started with a Windows infrastructure. Back in around 1999 or 2000 someone set up a box to act [...]

Kevin Smith of Hypothetical Labs has let the cat out of the bag.

I’m currently writing a Erlang book for the Pragmatic Bookshelf. The book’s focus will be practical development using Erlang. It will cover OTP, mnesia, web programming (Yaws, Mochiweb, Erlyweb), and a few miscellaneous topics such as XML parsing and unit testing.

I [...]

I have been trying out Django on my mac, working through the Djanjo Book tutorial. One thing that puzzled me is that I was not seeing the promised “pretty error pages”. Django is supposed to show very informative, nicely formatted error messages. Not happening for me.
I eventually discovered that the problem has something to do [...]

This post is the second in a series. The first is here. Recap: I promised a tour of some interesting features of the Mathematica programming language (which I’ll call mma). The first post was by way of introduction. The plan for this post is to introduce just enough notation to define some functions in mma, [...]

Functional languages are experiencing something of a renaissance, or so I gather from reading reddit and the blogs. I have been known to dabble in lisp, erlang, and haskell. Each is beautiful language in its own way. But when I actually want to get something done, not just play, I turn to either python or [...]

If you are into crypto and/or computer security, then you will likely find the Bruce Schneier Facts site hilarious.

I read this quote on the blog of Isaiah Perumalla, in the post called My Journey to Smalltalk:

“OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which [...]

The more I work with computers, the more I appreciate working entirely in text. You know, in that old dinosaur, the shell, the terminal, the console, the command line. Every console fan already knows about GNU Screen. I just tried another great tool, dvtm, and am totally impressed. What is dvtm? Here is [...]

A blast from the past: the building of the Atari ST. I had one, and still fondly remember its monochrome bit mapped screen. The ST character set included an Easter egg of sorts, four characters that (properly combined) depicted the smiling face of J. R. Bob Dobbs.

As I write this my hosting company, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, is down. They are experiencing some severe problems, and working to fix them.
Things sometimes go wrong, and I have no doubt NSF.net will fix the problems. What they are doing right is keeping users informed, via a status site which runs on separate hardware. I know it [...]