What does it mean to be keeper to a conservative tradition? On the same day, worlds apart, we find two examples. I may disagree, but I can respect people who stand for principle in the face of political pressure to the contrary. [Read More!]

This article about the discovery, debugging, and patch of a timing glitch on the Mars Pathfinder caught my fancy.

Its system architecture reminded me of the three-bus architecture of Masscomp "real time unix(TM)" machines, which I came to know intimately "back in the day" (84-86) as a side effect of writing the damn 'theory of operations' manuals for it. And anyway, as any of y'all as have read the first page of my Acts of the Apostles knows, I think the discovery-and-debugging of timing glitches is inherently interesting.

Outer space and spacecraft and actual hardware are Gary's beat around Wetmachine, so here's my respects, gov'nuh.

By the way, Google came up with an article on the Masscomp architecture but you need an ACM membership to read it so I'm not bothering with it, as my account has expired. If anybody has a Masscomp architecture diagram lying about, kindly post a link.

Dear Wife tells me that our veternarian finally came out and told her she was offended by the name of our dog, whom she's had as a patient for ten years. Our dog's name is Rosa Barks. She's a black lab, and her name is obviously an allusion to Rosa Parks the great American patriot and legendary prime mover in the Civil Rights movement. We named our little puppy Rosa Barks twelve years ago, saying, "she's a very dignified black lady, and she can sit wherever she wants."

Obviously we knew this name was a little provocative when we chose it. Some people find it offensive. Our vet is sure that Ms. Parks herself would be offended, and perhaps she would be, given her recent lawsuit against the musical group Outkast over their use of her name in a song title.

Rosa Parks is a great hero of me and my wife; in fact, a copy of the very photo of her that adorns the Wikipedia page has also adorned our living room wall for years. But that does not mean I think she's a god whose name cannot be taken in vain. And I think "Rosa Barks" is a great name for our pet. [Read More!]

How do we integrate Croquet with the Web? How do we integrate with legacy applications in general?

We interact with computers now in a document model developed by Alan Kay’s Xerox PARC team a long time ago. (Xerox: The Document Company.) It is as is if we have our head bent over our desktop, looking at a piece of paper. We slide other pieces of paper in and out below the face of our bowed head. In Croquet, Kay’s team today lets us lift our head up off the desk and look up at the world around us, including our coworkers. But just as the 3D world has paper within it, shouldn’t the Croquet world have document-based software within it? Yes!
[Read More!]

The company I work for, Laszlo Systems, has an opening for a software engineer to work on our Rich Internet Application (open source) platform.

I've been at Laszlo for two years and I like it a lot. Not only that, and call me a crack-head dreamer if you want to (go ahead! call me that!), but I really think Laszlo is going to transform the web. If you're a hot-shot programmer you might want to check this out.

My boss has the details on the job.

For them what follow media ownership at the local level, the recent doings in Hartford offer an interesting opportunity for some tea-leaf reading about how the FCC will address these issues. I'll preface by saying I haven't actually talked to anyone at the FCC about the case, so all this is just my educated guesses. But what's life without speculation in an ignorance of actual facts . . . [Read More!]

Well, not mine exclusively, but I did write a good deal of it. Connecting the Public: The Truth About Municipal Broadband Takes on the telco/cable noise machine and explains why municipal broadband systems are a good thing and why states should not buy into the anti-muni argument.

It's one of three papers a bunch of us released today. Ben Scott and Frannie Welling at Free Press also did a paper directly taking on the telco “fact sheets” that claim muni systems failed. And the Florida Municipal Electric Association released a study showing that municipal broadband systems really do increase economic development as compared to similarly situated towns in Florida (remember, Florida is one of the states considering an anti-muni bill). You can read all those reports here. And, if you feel like writing something to your state or federal legislator about this, you can print out the letter we did back in February, put your own name on it, and mail it off.

Stay tuned . . .

Marshall McLuhan said that the interesting thing about a medium is what it makes the user become in order to use it.

What does Croquet make people become? Rick McGear, a Croquet advocate at HP, says that using Croquet makes us become programmers.

What is programming? The classic definition is of computational processes, but object-oriented programming seems to take a different view. And Croquet's TeaTime architecture describes objects in terms of a mapping between message histories. I'm not finding process to be satisfying. [Read More!]

The component model I'm working on tries to make everything you deal with visibly concrete so that it can be directly and uniformly manipulated — even behaviors. It was inspired by my wife's fascination with a game on her PDA. [Read More!]

Any conclusions from the following?

* Since 9/11, the portion of DARPA's computer science budget going to universities has dropped drastically from $214M to $123M. (Pretty paltry, in my biased opinion.)

* Universities (at least the one's I'm familiar with) are typically prohibited from doing classified research on campus.

* The total DARPA computer science budget over the same period has actually increased slightly, from $546M to $583M.

* DARPA's Total Information Awareness project, initially unclassified, has officially been ended by Congress.

* The last year in which Ashcroft had requested unclassified funding for TIA was 2004. He had asked for something north of $100M.

Say, what is Ashcroft doing since going back into "private" life? What is Poindexter up to?