In the beginning was the Cons

2008-12-28T07:32:00.003-05:00

Posterous, another YC company, has a wonderfully simple approach to blogging using email. It's as simple as it can get and very easy to use with the added benefit that one gets an archive of posts in their sent box. You can also text from your cell phone.

Is the World Really Flat?

2007-09-07T04:54:00.000-05:00

Tom Friedman surely thinks so. A great book that puts together several trends since the fall of the Berlin wall.

In Hong Kong you can watch acres of containers being loaded onto ships bound for points west, the output of the huge factory China has become. But in the middle of downtown Hong Kong, at 6:00 am you can still find quiet places where stillness hangs in the air and only the elderly are out and about, playing Tai-Chi, walking, or just chatting with their friends about their grand children. You can see it on the net but you can't feel it and you can't smell it, without being there. Hong Kong in chinese means fragrant harbor.

I think it's not flat. The internet lets us see it all, all the time, but sooner or later we must pay closer attention to that which is right next to us.

The House and Maybe the Senate?

2006-11-08T07:17:00.000-05:00

The people spoke yesterday, time for a change. The tasks ahead are enormous, how to make a peace in the mideast, how to bring our troops home and care for them, heal their wounds and get them back into schools or into the workforce, how to reinstate our civil rights and freedoms as Americans.

It's encouraging to see people pulling together, to see guys like Webb and Clinton shaking hands. I think we're largely one party now, a corporate party, but we were heading down a path that wasn't pretty and I'm encouraged to see us make this change.

"We can always change and change again." -- a famous New England poet

They want your attention!

2006-11-03T06:32:00.000-05:00

It's amazing the quality of pictures one can take with a camera phone. This was shot with a Motorola Razor. The phone was free, the price paid by a phone company to keep my business. I worked on this attention thing for a bit but I guess the idea is too early. Our attention is valuable. I paid quite a bit of attention to Reddit for a while, as did enough other people for them to sell themselves to Conde Nast, well done! They gave me something of value, something that still provides some value though perhaps less so. But at the end of the day the money is flowing from the folks who advertise to reach out to us to sell us stuff we don't really always need. Most of what we do need comes from what's shown in this picture. We seemed to have forgotten how all that stuff works.

A room in your house I never visited

2006-11-03T06:14:00.000-05:00

I recently learned that music is a language, in the formal mathematical sense, complete with syntax, semantics and theories. Of course it's far superior to mathematics as a language because everyone can hear it and appreciate it. Creating music however, playing it well, is an entirely different matter. Like mathematics it requires years of hard work, it's cumulative, and one's life experiences weigh heavily on the creative process.

Poetry is also like music in this sense of being a language, though perhaps a little more formal as it requires the use of a natural language.

2006-10-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

As the sun sets the view from the upper field looking out toward the Whites over in NH is peaceful.

2006-08-28T09:43:00.000-05:00

2006-08-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

"There are three stones there, how shall we divide them up?", says the elephant. "I'm not sure", says the owl, "let's wait for the monkey and then we can split them".

2006-08-01T19:09:00.000-05:00

Canadians and other aliens

2006-07-21T12:05:00.000-05:00

He didn't seem to get the hang of plowing yet. Ecuador was where he said he was from. It was a beautiful rig, clearly new and well maintained. Must have a pretty good size mortgage on it I thought. He also worked days in the local deli, probably long days.

But he came when I called and together with his uncle figured out how best to maneuver the plow around the tight spots. I went out and coached a bit. He also knew the going rate. For years I did it myself but one needs to know when to stop that kind of hard physical labor. The question in my mind was whether he'd do a few for free at older folks places. Then he'll be a real Yankee.

It's the folks who work hard in the lowest of jobs that make this country great, one coffee at a time. Leave them be

Stumped

2006-06-23T10:09:00.000-05:00

A former colleague has gotten to the hard part of tree removal. In ancient times we'd use an old car bumper jack to pop the central root. Otherwise you'd spend hours undermining it. Recently I heard one can put used charcoals from the grill onto the stump and slowly burn it out. Of course not many folks use charcoal these days.

2005-11-01T11:05:00.000-05:00

How old is this maple?

2005-11-01T11:03:00.000-05:00

Even the small birches lay down

Google, GWA, GET versus POST, Good versus Evil

2005-10-25T06:29:00.000-05:00

Two interesting threads over at 37 Signals today on Google and the web accelerator and privacy. On the GWA I agree with some of the commentary that there are two issues here:

Google's prefetching of pages
how web apps interpret the specs.

It seems to me that prefetching is somewhat old fashioned. Regardless of how good bandwidth is we shouldn't allow clients to become bandwidth pigs just to have a snappy experience. One could argue that it's important for online shopping, point taken, but it seems to me that the user should be the driver. Moreover there's a lot to be said for lazy evaluation.

With respect to the issue of get/post and the spec, I have to agree with this comment:

GWA is the one not following standards since it assumes GETs are always non-destructive. You’re right, Google not following the standards makes this a big problem. More of a problem than anything Microsoft ever did; one can even go so far as to classify GWA as virus-like.

Words like "should" and "must" do seem like legalese when put in specs, but they are there usually for good reasons. On the one hand they can provide slack for vendors who are implementing platforms and can't incur the larger costs of the full spec. On the other side they are a flag to programmers that the behavior is one that is ambiguous and should be coded around carefully. Think of boundary point cases; a driver "must" stop at a stop sign but we all know as defensive drivers that "should" and "might" are better assumptions to make. If you drive in Boston well good luck to you :^)

Flock preview available

2005-10-23T07:12:00.000-05:00

Our code couldn't wait any longer to be free!But! This preview ain't for the faint of heart! If you're the bleeding-edge type and don't mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.We've got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we've done right how we could improve. And we've got a lot of work ahead of us!

Flock

Built on the same base of Mozilla as Firefox ( I don't think Flock is an extension ), Flock is a browser that integrates bloging/tagging/bookmarking services like delicious and flickr. There are many definitions of Web2.0 out there but collaboration and participation of the long tail are a part of all of them. To me that makes Flock look like a serious Web2.0 app. So far so cool, I like being able to select some text like that above, click right and "blog this". If the general public can start writing on the web as it can now read, and keep control of it's attention it will be real empowering, or at least sell more server machines :)

JBs Bagels

2005-10-21T11:05:00.000-05:00

JBs is where many of the surfers hang out waiting for the waves to come in. Great coffee, bagels, and breakfast sandwiches at great prices. It's got an atmosphere you would expect in a college town coffee shop. A wonderful place to sit and chat, and with free wireless coming soon also a good spot to do some hacking.

2005-09-14T17:47:00.000-05:00

A pretty street in Qongqing

2005-08-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

Lots of hay left to mow

2005-07-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

You can now see out to the road!

2005-06-28T04:35:00.000-05:00

The Hop in Bath, NH. Good ice cream, good prices

Methinks Thou Doth Protest Too Much

2005-06-28T03:27:00.000-05:00

Ken Arnold's recent piece about generics being harmful somewhat overstates the case. With all due respect I understand the difficulties in trying to present new ideas in ways that make them accessible to wide audiences. However I completely agree with Paul Snively's comment that some exposure to ML or Haskell is a good idea. Circular definitions are everywhere, even a dictionary is inherently circular. Any given word is defined in terms of other words, which themselves are defined interms of other words, etc..
Recursion is a basic concept in computer science and all programmers should understand it, even working programmers. One doesn't necessarily need to know the gory details of higher order logics or categories with natural number objects, but a basic familiarity with types can go a long way towards understanding why OOP has a lot of rough edges and has not fostered as much code reuse as we'd like. As Opinali points out in the comments generics make code more readable and create a better separation between algorithms and data sructures. Perhaps the implementation and syntax need some work but I think if one sticks to the simple use cases they can make for better code. Besides, for we older programmers with creaky hands, generics make for a lot less typing when coupled with the enhanced for loop.

YMMV

2005-06-01T08:20:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the marsh completely floods

Should broadband be a public utility?

2005-05-30T06:27:00.000-05:00

In Boston, a few blocks from NEC on Huntington, is a starbucks, where one can use wireless from T-mobile. It's $6 just to connect for the first hour, and then .10/minute thereafter, or some such thing. Considering the costs this strikes me as highway robbery, sort of like when a tow truck driver has your car impounded and can charge what they want to give it back.

A short walk in the other direction from NEC is the Cafe Expresso Royale, a wonderful little cafe, clearly geared toward the college crowd and musicians. Coffee is easily half the price and oh, wireless is free, that's right free and very responsive.

I'm not arguing the economics of coffee shops or disparaging Starbucks or T-Mobile in any way. What I am thinking about is acess to the internet and the digital divide. I'm lucky to have been born on the right side of it and I have to imagine that $40-50 /month for cable or DSL is a lot of money to most pepole. Yet increasingly access to the net is critical, like acesss to the public library. It's the difference between getting a good education, earning a living, and not.

Out cities and states are currently having major discussions about this, and industry lobbyists are working hard to pass laws maintaining their territories and toll booths. There clearly has been a market failure, so perhaps our state/local governments should be more involved.

2005-05-29T05:07:00.000-05:00

Time for the morning frost

There are no Objects, only Functions

2004-07-16T05:00:00.000-05:00

This cute piece over on Lambda The Ultimate on Church numerals is a great example of the interplay between lambda calculus and functional programming.

Is Lisp a functional programming language?

The Lambda Calculus

2004-07-14T05:30:00.000-05:00

Lisp is just sugared lambda calculus. As the Java world discovers meta object protocols and aspect oriented programming, one can't help but sense that ideas from lisp are just being revisited. These two great pieces by Henk Barendregt commented on over at Lambda the Ultimate discuss the role of reflection in general, as well as in lambda calculus. The interplay between the lambda calulus and it's models in combinatory logic and category theory has been a very useful tool in compiler theory over the years. I'm reminded also of the somewhat related "The Why of Y"

Lisp usage growing?

2004-07-10T06:59:00.000-05:00

Many people have noticed and capitalized on the similarity between S-expressions and XML and the use of continuations for capturing client/response state. It would be wonderful to see Lisp and Scheme capture more mindshare. I hope it's not the case that Lisp is only useful for smart programmers and not intended for the unwashed masses