"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Friday, June 13, 2008

Y2K+8

Douglas Purdy of MSFT...

"One of the reasons this topic comes up in Microsoft circles is the
fact that so few Microsoft desktop applications use the CLR. As you
may be aware, there is a performance cost associated with running code
in the CLR and garbage collection often gets painted as the chief
offender."

http://douglaspurdy.com/2008/06/12/objective-c-20-garbage-collection/

Thursday, June 12, 2008

All of a sudden...

...the evening is perfect, the city is shiny, the Timbers are winning. May has arrived, and it's only June!

Web Too Oh

Douglas Crockford writes...

"In the long term, we need to completely replace JavaScript and the
DOM with something designed to be safe from the ground up."

...noting that Firefox, and any browser generally, is a horrible
platform for applications.

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-TBPekxc1dLNy5DOloPfzVvFIVOWMB0li?p=865

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I think...

...it's about to snow.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Mornin'

Back in the 70s Jimmy Carter put a solar water heater on the roof of the White House, mostly as a symbol for a new direction of conservation and energy independence. Reagan promptly tore it down as a symbol of, well, he ran on the notion of bringing us "Morning in America", implying we have no reason to feel bad: we should feel "good" again.

We're Americans. We should not have bad news, and we should not "sacrifice" anything, well, at least not any comforts. Besides that the energy industry hated the idea of conservation and energy independence.

Carter also set the objective that America not become more dependent on foreign oil than we were at that time, 30 years ago now. Reagan convinced us we didn't need a pessimist like that.

Mornin'.

gosh, try goosh

(via Stefan Tilkov)

http://goosh.org/

e.g. type "place portland oregon (enter)"

Dumbest Name Ever From Apple

"Mobile Me" --- are you f'ing kidding me???

Bah. http://www.apple.com/mobileme/

You can also get there from http://www.me.com/

Joy. So now I can say to my wife, upload those photos from your camera to "Mobile Me" then bring them down to your "My Documents".

Oh, wait. Could you please bring them down to *my* "My Documents"?

Gawd. "Live Mesh" seems perfectly sexy compared to "Mobile Me".

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Toward a New Fast Squeak VM: Eliot Miranda's Blog

Eliot Miranda is one of those really smart VM implementors. He's been working on Smalltalk VMs for a long time, including one of the best: VisualWorks. After a brief sidetrack with the (fairly uninteresting IMO) Newspeak project, he's now at work on a better VM for Squeak. He's got a blog about that.

Does the history of computing matter?

(via Bill de hÓra)

If I were the author of a significant IDE product I would take a fair bit of time to understand the history of my marketplace. Apparently Dmitry Jemerov does not follow that philosophy. I guess that has not hurt his success any. So I have to wonder how much the history of our field matters to its future.

Consider the following image of a Symbolics hypertext system from the mid-late 1980s. Who noticed at the time? Who would've believed such a thing was possible then or even now using a "dynamic language"? 150 years from now what does anyone need to remember? A couple of blips maybe: Netscape and Excel?

Dmitry writes...

Groovy is interesting, but it's a dynamic language and has all the problems of dynamic languages. It's OK for small pieces of code. But building something the size of IntelliJ IDEA [in a dynamic language] would be a complete nightmare.
So let's consider history's demonstration that this is false. As Patrick Mueller writes...
Since Smalltalk I've generally been using Eclipse for work stuff, but the effort in extending the environment has just been too much work for me to invest in, though I've tried a few times. I settle for writing ant scripts; that's how bad things have gotten - I'm programming in XML.

What's on the horizon? Eclipse has E4. Which seems like it's largely a cleanup/sanitization of Eclipse, vs a complete re-think. I suspect I will write as many extensions for E4 as I have for the previous versions of Eclipse. Perhaps I'll sit that out and wait for Steve Northover's E5. Frankly, I think it's time we started fresh; let's call it F1.

And Joe Gregorio writes...
Poor old disrespected Smalltalk, all those years of work, all that cutting edge research, and nary a bit of credit, which is particularly galling if you think about the fact that, to date, the language that has benefited the most from Smalltalk is Java.

Mike's Gotta Job For You Mebbe

Mike Herrick's posted an opening at CSI doing the open source incl. Rails and JRuby. Good folks to work with.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.