My heart broke the day Julian left the University of Wisconsin: 11/1/05. We were struggling to get anything out the door. An amazing technology entrepreneur (and Lisp guy!) named Greg Nuyens was trying to hold startup Qwaq together with both hands. I knew it was going to be a tough time for Croquet.

Fast forward.

I have left the University of Wisconsin Division of Information Technology to work at Qwaq, Inc. Sweet!
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In this article, Linux entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth says, “We've started to use [Croquet] for planning and building Ubuntu.”

Linux works well. One of the hard parts with delivering on “Linux” (generically) is that there are a lot of variations. Croquet works on some combinations of kernel, libraries and device drivers, but not on others. I don't have a Linux box myself, so I haven't spent any time on it. (The Croquet Collaborative runs on FreeBSD, and does so as a graphicsless server.) It's tough to be trying to accomplish something while wrestling with configuration issues.

But Plopp offers a consumer-market product on many flavors of Linux (as well as Windows/Mac), but it doesn't (yet?) make use of the full collaborative Croquet SDK. Once it runs, it runs. I guess the Ubunto folks have got real Croquet running with their developer and business configurations, and are now starting to explore its use for doing real work.

A student of Ralph Johnson is being sponsored by Google for a summer Croquet project. Cool.

I just saw the delightful high-quality site on core computer algorithms Hacker's Delight. I was startled by the following notice about the corresponding book:

“After the first printing, an errata file was started. The publisher did not incorporate this into the second printing. For the third printing, he made all the corrections known up to that point in time. For the fourth and fifth printings, the publisher subcontracted the production work, and accidentally gave the subcontractor the files for the first printing. The sixth printing corrects all the errors known up to when it was printed (November 2006). Therefore, the best copy to obtain is the sixth printing, and the second best is the third printing.”

Good grief. This is the kind of thing that makes airplanes fall out of the sky — or my bank say “oops.” As an engineer, I have long been aware of how much stuff out there is truly not designed, transcribed, or built correctly, but this little example gives a nice compact summary to my unvoiced horrified sputtering. I wonder if more direct and immediate Internet technology (like Wikipedia and maybe Sophie) will help.

Something went horribly right...

Daniel Lanovaz has sent a message to the squeak-dev mailing list. I've reproduced it verbatim below the fold. Fun stuff. [Read More!]

This funny video features a scribe who is used to dealing with scrolls. He contacts the help desk to deal with the new “book” technology.

My colleagues at the office see it as a send-up of users. I'm thinking it's making fun of programmers...

Last week, Qwaq announced Forums, its enterprise conferencing product.

Yesterday, the Croquet Consortium announced its own formation, and the availability of the open SDK 1.0.

And yesterday, Impara announced an English language and free trial version of Plopp, its kid's sketching product.

The blogosphere is busy: croquet, Qwaq, Plopp.

There has been private, academic, commercial and non-profit Croquet development for a while now. Much has been internal and proprietary (and even military) and so the general public has not had a chance to see it. Less than two months ago, we cobbled up an open sample application.

Meanwhile, the folks at Qwaq have been working hard in stealth mode, building a sophisticated application and aiming to be the first clearly commercial Croquet play. Read more.

How do you coordinate activity across a network? People are doing this all the time, with varying degrees of success. But how is it supposed to work? What is the model to be followed? When I graduated mid-eighties, “Distributed Systems” was still a graduate specialty subject, not a pervasive guiding principle. Today, people like myself don't seem to have a common ontology of approaches. Well, it's about time. [Read More!]

I've admitted that I didn't immediately get the point of the One Laptop Per Child project, but now I'm now very excited about the ideas behind this non-profit effort to build a $100 mesh-network computer to be owned by children in the developing world. This essay captures a lot of what I feel and wonder about it, including some fears of dystopian unexpected consequences. [Read More!]