Ruby NYC talks available online
Last week I attended the Ruby NYC get-together (Doug blogged about it) – the talks from that night including Luke Melia on Ruby.NET and Tatum’s talk on Erlang are up at MotionBox. Worth a watch if...
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Documents, Operating Systems and the PoSH Provider Model
A few years ago in the course of writing the XSLT Cookbook (shameless plug) I was naturally working with XML quite heavily. When you work with a particular technology heavily you begin to look at other...
View ArticleOn Being Easy To Work With
Here at Lab49 the founders take pride in the fact that as a company we are very easy to work with. Being easy to work with is an important dimension for measuring potential technology vendors that is...
View ArticleDeclarative programming – have we gone too far?
For some time I’ve been planning to write a blog entry highlighting the problems that can occur when declarative programming is taken to an extreme (I’m thinking about Spring here). What prompted me to...
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VS49
If you can’t work with us, work like us. Details inside … This Microsoft Visual Studio plugin implements an editor for Scheme scripts, and a dockable REPL tool window, for testing scripts. The Scheme...
View ArticleBeautiful Code
I just finished reading this book, a collection of essays by developers. It’s a mixed bag; some of the essays are a lot better than others, and some of the code is, to my eye, not that beautiful at...
View ArticleGo Erlang!
Here is a gushing post on the future of Erlang by one of the GOF, Ralph Johnson.
View ArticleTest your Information Graphics IQ
Take this 10 question quiz (via Sean’s Idea Kitchen). Note that although Perceptual Edge refers to this as a Graphic Design IQ test, it’s more properly considered an Information Graphics or Data...
View ArticleMeasuring Visual Clutter
Visual clutter is a huge problem in GUI design, in which the architect needs to balance the desire to have all information immediately available to the the user, with the need to enable the user to...
View ArticleWM_UNDO vs EM_UNDO
I was wondering – what’s the reason for some messages being prefixed with WM_ and others with EM_ ? The logic is opaque to me (especially looking at things like EM_UNDO vs. WM_UNDO). Asked (over two...
View Articlecode.lab49.com
Lab49 has created a public repository for open source software projects. I have a few projects up that I’d like to tell you about. I’ve put off writing a post about this for two months now. In that...
View ArticleTop 5 Predictions for 2008 – Network World podcast
Network World recently interviewed me for their "Prediction Week" podcast series: As part of our Prediction Week of podcasts, we talk with Daniel Chait from Lab49 (pictured) about the top trends in Web...
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A Pocket Scene Editor
I’ve made some updates to this project since I last wrote about it. I added basic perspective-correct texture mapping (the image to the left shows the Lab49 logo mapped onto two Bézier patches, a...
View ArticleWhat’s the opposite of Functional Programming?
… Dysfunctional Programming? Alright it’s just a joke, no mailbombs please. I do think that it’s fair to say that our industry has gradually grown more and more impatient with side-effect-driven...
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CUDA: GPU architecture for NVidia cards
This morning fellow 49′er Doug and I spoke with a colleague in Citibank who spent friday at an absolutely free boot camp for NVidias GPU development architecture. Wish we’d known about it beforehand,...
View ArticleNot-So-Hidden Latency
I had a meeting this morning with Al Moore, one of the founders of Fixnetix, a provider of ultra low latency market data and connectivity. It immediately brought to mind a conversation I had with Tom...
View ArticleFinancial and Holiday Calendars
Anyone working in the financial industry building applications should know about FinancialCalendar.com. In addition to providing a useful set of data, they understand that holidays are real-time data...
View ArticleCreating tech marvels out of a $40 Wii Remote
Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a...
View ArticleThe Plank
Christer Ericson in Design patterns are from hell says: The “Design Patterns” book is one of the worst programming books ever. Yes, really. I’m 100% dead serious when I say that I think it has set (and...
View ArticlePureMVC
Cross-language implementation of the MVC meta-pattern – PureMVC. Supported languages: ActionScript 2 ActionScript 3 C# ColdFusion haXe Java Perl PHP Python Ruby
View ArticleThe F# overload-o-phone
By now, you’ve probably heard the standard line. Functional programming is all sweetness and light; if we merely cast off the detritus of bad habits we’ve learned from C, C++ and Java we’ll find...
View Article!Exploitable
I just ran across Microsoft Security Engineering Team’s newly released code-security/crash analyzer !Exploitable, this could be a really huge boost to developers if it’s done well. Anybody taken this...
View ArticleThe Algebra of Data, and the Calculus of Mutation
With the spreading popularity of languages like F# and Haskell, many people are encountering the concept of an algebraic data type for the first time. When that term is produced without explanation,...
View ArticleBest practice for branching and merging? Depends on your SCM.
I ran across a nice blog entry discussing the different use case assumptions made by Perforce vs ClearCase regarding when developers will branch and merge. After using Perforce for the last two years...
View ArticleDDD-NYC Exercise Part 3
On Wednesday, I attended part 3 of the DDD Exercise that we’re doing at the local DDD meetup, DDD-NYC. We had a great discussion about whether to diverge from the UBIQUITOUS LANGUAGE when it would make...
View ArticleIFL 2009: First Impressions
Last week, my colleague Ken Overton and I attended the IFL 2009 conference in South Orange, New Jersey. The event was partially funded by Jane St Capital, and consisted of research on the...
View ArticleSpring Integration in Action available now
Jonas Partner has just announced that Spring Integration in Action is now available via the Manning early access program on his blog
View ArticleIn defense of elite, irrelevant curricula
I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky’s writing, but I take issue with his latest posting. Universities shouldn’t be focused on teaching students the technologies and practices of the day. Anything you can...
View ArticleIts Scrum (But)
So I ran a retrospective for a team a couple of weeks ago Nothing exciting in that per se but I thought but the most interesting thing happened at check in! For those of you unfamiliar with this...
View ArticleCasual invocations of Curry-Howard
The Curry-Howard isomorphism is an important discovery that seems (to me) to be underappreciated in the “working world” of most programming groups I’ve encountered. Recently, on a client project, I...
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