Beautiful Code and a Beautiful Bug

I am teaching a technical course on the popular and ubiquitous version control system, Subversion, this Monday. I thought it might be fun to give my class a little “extra credit” reading from the O’Reilly book, Beautiful Code. In it, one of the original authors of Subversion, Karl Fogel, shares what he considers to be … Continue reading Beautiful Code and a Beautiful Bug

Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed

The following post has been sitting in my “drafts” section of WordPress for a good while. I don’t know why I never posted it — it’s been there for more than a year. I think I just thought the article deserved such careful attention that I never sat down to really edit it and prepare … Continue reading Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed

Solving “accidents” and “essences” of programming with better languages

Note: this post was written in January 2007, but it has stood the test of time. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, … Continue reading Solving “accidents” and “essences” of programming with better languages

Met Runar, Discussed Software

I met with Runar (he’ll have a blog soon, I swear) today, and we discussed open source, Python, and all related goodness over coffee and vegetarian lunch free-riding on the ‘sNice wireless network. We spent about 3 hours there, just talking about Runar’s project, “sqlstring”, my ideas about inferred typing and static source code analysis … Continue reading Met Runar, Discussed Software

User interfaces with GTK+ and Glade

I’ve been hacking up a user interface for my motion capture/computer vision project called “Hand2Hand,” found here. At first I was gonna do the user interface in Python and have the image processing done in C, but then I decided that the user interface was simple enough that I should just give GTK+ in “pure … Continue reading User interfaces with GTK+ and Glade

Outfoxed and trust networks, revisted

I think everyone should revisit Outfoxed, if you’re interested in a truly interesting new approach to bookmarking and web browsing that actually takes advantage of all this “Web 2.0” hype and nonsense. I just mentioned this to Free Coders on the mailing list yesterday. The application of “trust-based networks” is very wide. I think it’s … Continue reading Outfoxed and trust networks, revisted