Great Software

Phil Windley makes his own amendments to a list of great software.

As Phil believes, I also have to include Smalltalk on the list. I don't agree with the original author's rationale re: Java and some others on that list.

Other systems I'd consider for my top ten...

• Lisp (esp. Lisp 1.5, Common Lisp, and Scheme)
• Smalltalk
• Erlang
• Hypercard
• Emacs (in various incarnations)
• The Xerox Alto (incl. BitBlt, Ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG, etc.)
• Englebart's Augment, nee NLS
• Unix
• The Web
• The Orbit compiler for Scheme

Live Motion 3D Video Camera

Via O'Reilly Radar, Live Motion 3D Video Camera

pdx.st -- Portland Smalltalk September Meeting

Dane Jensen, et al. have scheduled the second monthly Portland Smalltalk meeting...

The next meeting's lined up, it will be at 7PM on September 12th (second tuesday of the month) at the McMenamins on NE Broadway (1504 NE Broadway, http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=32)

The email list is at http://lists.pdx.st/listinfo.cgi/general-pdx.st

Dane also says about an IRC...

I'm setting up #pdx.st on irc.freenode.net for us now, but there's certainly no reason to wait until it's official.

The Twenty

Today is the 20th wedding anniversary for my wife and myself.

I'm just sayin'...

I love my wife very much. And my two boys.

I think that's worth a blog entry, at the very least.

Large Scale Change

Ward Cunningham in a recent interview...

I do have something new that is bugging me. Tom Love told me last week that he has found a free hand in staff change to be a necessity when doing large scale and fast paced agile conversions. This doesn't surprise me even though I remain committed to helping people adapt. The scary part Tom told me though was that the person most likely to go was often the person the team felt was most indispensable. I feigned a knowing smile as I agreed that I understood how that happens. But now I am not at all sure I know how experts fall into this trap of obstructionism. I want to figure it out though. There could be some small changes we could make that would make life much better for experts and the people around them.

org.tiling.s3map.S3Map implements java.util.Map

Tom White does some tinkering...

It struck me that you could treat S3 as a big hashtable, so I tried writing an implementation of java.util.Map (built on the Amazon S3 Library for REST in Java) that uses S3 as its backing store...

So, what is it useful for? Well, I haven't actually had a use for it yet, but S3Map is really a non-transactional persistent datastore, so it could be used in many scenarios...

Ordinary Teachers

From dailyzen...

It is most urgent that you seek real, true perception,
So you can be free in the world
And not confused by ordinary teachers.

- Linji (d. 867)

JFK

JFK was a troubled man from a shady and troubled family. He had enough strength though to do some good work when it was needed.

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

His nephew, Robert Jr., is doing many good things.

I started an interesting book on vacation this week, "Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK". I've not previously read anything about the JFK assassination. This is a recent book that appears to have a great deal of credibility from "insiders", popular (4.5 stars from 95 reviewers on Amazon), and uncovers relatively newly released information on a coup planned for Cuba subsequent to the Bay of Pigs, and which ultimately led to the assassination (by the Mafia) and cover-up.

Moral Clarity Or What?

Harry Shearer observes that the recent arrests in Britain do not jive with the Bush Administration's policies on "enemy combatants" in a "time of war"...

This is a group of people who allegedly conspired, according to British officials like Home Secretary John Reid, to commit acts of mass murder that would have dwarfed 911. If we were at war with them, according to the Administration's own well-documented legal arguments, we would have killed them or detained them and thrown them in Gitmo. Instead, where did we--or our allies in the "war", the Brits--put them? Right where we're told by those same arguments we cannot put enemy combatants--in the criminal justice system.