Recently, on a whim, I bought Hypertext and Hypermedia (1990), by Jakob Nielsen, the author of a number of books on user interface and web design. The contents are just what the title indicates, but what interested me is that this is a book about hypertext published before the web existed. It does not even […]
Hackers & English Majors
Like many software developers, I occasionally take a peek at Hacker News and look for the odd headline that catches my eye. Like many people my age, I spent a lot of time playing text-based and point-and-click adventure games on a PC in the 90’s. Recently, there was a serendipitous collision between these interests when […]
Don’t Panic!
I occasionally like to dip my toes into the world of productivity techniques, something I think worth doing while keeping in mind that you can spend all day researching productivity while getting nothing done. I’ve found that there is a very useful productivity program that comes as part of my favorite programming text editor, that […]
On Using ChatGPT For a Few Minutes
They say that one of the reasons to write is to find out what you think, and looking over my previous blog posts it seems I spend more time thinking about Artificial Intelligence than I knew. I am a spectator to that world, someone who finds it fascinating as technology and as cultural phenomenon, as […]
Thoughts on “The Lawnmower Man”
The future, as a concept, is one of the most compelling ideas we have: the past can be reflected on, the present is before our eyes, but the future is where our hopes and dreams, as well as our fears and nightmares, reside. As it is imagined in science fiction, it is a world of […]
On Being Curious
Those of us who have decided to enter the rewarding—and occasionally frustrating and exhausting—profession of software development know that learning is a daily requirement, a subject I have written about before. If you include yourself in that description, you also know how quickly you see the limits of your knowledge of the field recede before […]
Book Review: Codex Metallum
I’ve always had a certain fascination with the dark and morbid, and as a teenager my taste in music, reading and other media reflected my interest in the grotesque. It was Napalm Death and Carcass, Lovecraft and Poe–for that matter, my favorite wrestler was The Undertaker. I’m old enough so that this was back in […]
Thoughts on “Tron”
Artificial intelligence is both a science and a dream: a set of algorithms and methods for developing systems, along with a set of ideas about the nature of intelligence to guide that development, and at the same time a vision of our future, in which our technology will no longer be limited to adding machines […]
Thoughts on “The Net”
Recently while looking through Netflix for something to watch I came across the 1995 action thriller The Net, starring Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, a Software Analyst (an appellation that seems meant to convey technical competence without being too specific) who becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving the Federal Government, malware and floppy disks. While […]
On Text Editors
There is an interesting dichotomy in the tech world: innovation is constant, yet there are widely used technologies that bear a strong resemblance to what developers were working with thirty or forty years ago. We still have sed and awk. Fortran is still used for some purposes. We still use terminal emulators based on the […]