Ashton’s Law: Whenever someone tries to do something for you, they usually end up doing it to you. — Alan Ashton (co-founder of WordPerfect), 1974 Alan made that statement in the first computer science course I ever took (CS 131 in the fall of 1974, at Brigham Young University); it remains one of the most […]
![Weighing in on Project Orca [updated]](http://andstillipersist.com/wp-content/themes/wp-prosper204/images/def-thumb2.jpg "Weighing in on Project Orca [updated]")
[Final version — flights are done and I’m on the ground in Florida] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s technological effort to track in near-real-time actual voting in precincts all over the United States, with […]
Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find […]
Over at bfwa.com, I’ve started a new series of posts that will present brief reviews of and excerpts from my library of software engineering and IT project management texts. Here’s the introduction to the series; and here’s the first post, covering Jerry Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming. ..bruce..
The second personal computer I ever owned[1] was an Apple II, with no floppy drive. I bought it, along with a small color TV, from my close friend Robert Trammel while we were both living in Houston sometime around 1980.We had already spent hours together programming on it, then carefully (though not always successfully) saving […]
CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs The Onion, as usual, nails it. Once you’ve watched it, watch it again in full-screen mode to read the headlines and factoid crawls (starting around 1:45). ..bruce w..
Back on May 22nd, I ordered an Apple iPad (3GS, 64GB) in the full expectation of being able to use AT&T $30/month unlimited data access plan. It was scheduled to ship on June 9th and arrive here in Colorado around the 15th. However, today AT&T announced that this plan would go away on June 7th, […]
Now that American Airlines has in-flight WiFi, it has become de rigueur to write at least one blog post while in flight. Well, here’s mine, at 35000 feet over, well, some state on the route from Denver to Dallas. That’s it. ..bruce w..
In the first part of this three-part series, I briefly outlined the parallels between developing software and crafting legislation, while pointing out the great risks and issues in the latter. I also indicated what I felt were some of the general structural flaws in HR 3200, the House bill on health care reform — not […]
ITEM: My co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, has a post over at the New Ledger about the proposed legislation to give the President “emergency control of the Internet”: S773 makes no attempt to outline and describe what form of emergency would trigger the use of these broad new powers to limit communication, nor any means by which […]
