Published at: 06:02 pm - Thursday February 07 2013
“The most important thing a crook needs is an impeccable reputation.” (Attributed to Agatha Christie.) Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I can’t help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to […]
Published at: 04:10 pm - Thursday October 11 2012
“The enlightened, disciplined mind is the holiest of holies, a wonder among wonders. Upon the Earth – a grain of sand in the Universe, man is on the order of one-billionth of the smallest magnitude… And yet this particle in your mind’s eye, that lives but for sixty or so trips of the Earth around […]
Published at: 12:08 pm - Wednesday August 15 2012
Three years ago, I predicted that publishers will inevitably declare war on book-lending: “Let’s pretend that a Nook book (or any similar DRM’d ebook) could be lent in exactly the same manner as a physical book: to whomever you like, whenever you like, for as long as you like – with the added benefit of […]
Published at: 06:05 pm - Wednesday May 23 2012
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is “an instrument whose music is ideas.” This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let’s imagine that you were a child who […]
Published at: 05:05 pm - Tuesday May 08 2012
At present, I have taken a break from the hardware aspects of Loper – to work on “Jupiter,” a Linux-based emulator of the system’s essential aspects. (Think QEMU.) Jupiter is unlikely to be of any practical use to anyone but myself. However, at some point, I will make it public, so that interested persons who […]
Published at: 01:03 pm - Friday March 16 2012
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” – “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) Yesterday, I heard a lecture […]
Published at: 01:03 pm - Tuesday March 13 2012
Loper’s I2C controller is working. The SPD ROM on the DDR2 RAM stick attached to the Xilinx ML-501 board is read correctly. The video controller is working (though not feature-complete.) The DDR2 SDRAM controller is still under testing, as is the cache SRAM controller. The gigabit Ethernet controller is not yet complete. I should probably […]
Published at: 09:03 pm - Saturday March 10 2012
Edit: The moral of the story, for those who didn’t get it, is that a serious programming environment ought to be an intimately-personalized affair, like eyeglasses or a hearing aid. And that existing solutions fall laughably short of this goal. Emacs, the supposed counter-example, is conceptually heavy and unbearably complex for everyday “civilian” use – […]
Published at: 08:02 pm - Friday February 24 2012
Rumor has it that a well-known industrial giant will soon attempt to bring head-mounted displays back into fashion. One ought to remember that, for a number of reasons, they were never really “in” fashion to begin with. To my knowledge, every single one ever marketed fell into one of the following categories: Military toy, priced […]
Published at: 10:11 pm - Tuesday November 29 2011
Update: Click here if you would like to try HyperCard yourself. I was a Hypercard child – though our friendship was brief. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas. The day’s lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might […]