The future of user interfaces

Smashingmagazine offers a good summary of future user interfaces.

Blog-o-pictures

I found this blog thanks to this entry about Russian retro-futuristic art. But truth be told, I prefer some older posts even better. Also, one about Buran, the ill-fated russian space shuttle...

Funny science quote of the day

I found this piece funny, in particular: [Funding a particle accelerator is] not a trivial sum of money for a lot of people, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the $1,500 per head price tag of the Iraq war to date. And building a particle accelerator doesn't require waterboarding anybody. (Well, strictly …

Concept Programming Redux

Based on feedback from many people (most notably Daveed Vandevoorde and Lionel Schaffhauser), I posted a new presentation about Concept Programming. This should make the ideas much easier to grasp. During the discussion, Daveed Vandevoorde pointed me to a very interesting paper about memory transactional models, which he used as an argument in favor of …

Airbus construction

You may recently have heard that an Airbus A340 was recently damaged during ground testing. Well, it's surprising this does not happen more often. Below is a video showing just how complex the construction of an A340 is:

E8 theory…

Garett Lisi recently posted An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything on ArXiv. Don't expect the article to really be "exceptionally simple", the title is really a pun on the fact that E8 is the largest exceptional simple Lie group. There's nothing really simple about all this, except that it's a beautiful form of symmetry. This …

The other side

Funny that I should, twice in the same day, read a story about what the other side has to say about one of Richard Stallman's many gripes: The first one is Rob Pike's recollection of a protest against one of his software patents. The other is Dan Weinreb's rebuttal of Stallman's story on Symbolics and …

Selling: From complex to simple

An interesting thought from a friend of mine over lunch a couple of days ago (that's my rewrite, so errors are mine). Hi-tech companies start with the complex, high value add, because it means high differentiation. That's where engineers shine. But as their market expands, marketing becomes more and more important. And marketing hates complexity, …

Growing a language

I recently re-discovered an excellent paper I had not read in a long time, Growing a languag by Guy Steele. Highly recommended.

Concept Programming presentation posted

I finally posted a slideset about concept programming that had been rotting on my hard disk for way too long... (also posted here.) This gave me an opportunity to re-read older articles on these topics, one I had written for Dr Dobb's Journal, and another one written by Martin Heller (Mr. Computer Language Person) for …