July 2009

History of the C family of languages.

It feels like ages since my last post, even though I've tried to keep it up with some links to some good dorkery. Today is spent in the bus, driving the 735 miles from Denver to Columbia, MO. We left at 9 this morning and have made a small dent in Kansas, but we'll most likely be rolling in around midnight or so tonight. So here goes...

Yesterday was spent at the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, one of our hometowns. It was kind of a strange lineup - us, Ani, Ben Harper, Tool, Panic, Black Keys, India Arie. Sort of like a festival we do all the time, but not exactly.

Phase Two - Love

The day that I knew I'd found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I'd updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn't really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn't already there.

Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the battery perusing the app store.

I've been killing time the past couple of weeks with Digg and Reddit. Yes, I just recently discovered them. The Digg experience is more polished, but Reddit feels a little bit more real. They're both essentially services where people submit links to interesting articles that are then voted on by the crowd - up or down - and the ones that the crowd finds more interesting naturally float to the top. Reddit's edge for me though is that users can submit their own essays for display/storage on the site - sorta like the rants and raves section on Craigslist. The health care debate has been raging (literally) for the the past couple of weeks, and I find the discussion on articles and essays to be as good as the articles themselves.

Here's a nice rant on the Blue Cross. I can certainly identify.

Here's a link to a techCrunch article that links to yet another cute little video that someone put up on YouTube. The gist is that designers and programmers hate the stupid quirks and security holes that are present in IE6 and have mounted a vigorous campaign to get corporate IT departments to finally get on with the upgrade.

But, I actually work a bit in corporate IT, at a call center full of computers running IE6. They're running that way by necessity, because many of the computers in that place are so old that they won't run an OS newer than Windows 2000. How about that techCrunch?

This is very smart.

Twitter 101 for Business — A Special Guide.

In case you don't follow the tech press as closely as I do, Apple will be releasing a small, supposedly cheaper tablet computer intended to compete in the "netbook" market. Those are small, cheap computers that can't really do anything but access the internet. I see them in airports a lot lately. They look annoying to use, but that's just me. So Apple's version will (according to rumor) look like a really large iPhone - a 9 inch or so touchscreen and no keyboard.

"This line-of-credit, the stop-gap measure that was supposed to solve the problem that hadn’t really existed in the first place had done nothing but worsen it. When we started the week, we had no liquidity issues. But because people had said that we did have problems with our capital, it became true, even though it wasn’t true when people started saying it. . . . So we were forced to find capital to offset the losses we’d sustained because somebody decided we didn’t have capital when we really did.

"The lesson for any artist here has to be to sign a contract with any session musicians you use to ensure that you have set out any arrangement on copyright and royalties in the product. The vast majority of modern artists will be well aware of the risks, but we could see a great number of similar cases. An ounce of protection could be worth nearly 40 years of cure."

- from a British law blog, Ralli Solicitors. You know that tune "Whiter Shade of Pale", that I always thought was a Steve Winwood tune?