Different technologies have different kinds of aesthetics, and they affect us in various ways, whether we are particularly fascinated with technology or not. The easiest technologies to understand on an intuitive-emotional basis seem to be those that involve physical processes. Objects rotating, moving, being lifted and displaced, compressed, crushed. Gases and liquids being sent around […]
Many software developers, while making a tool to solve a specific problem, heed the siren call of generality. By making a few specific changes, they can turn the tool into a general framework for solving a larger class of problems. And then, with a few more changes, an even larger class of problems, and so […]
In research and academia, one of the fundamental activities is the invention and subsequent examination of new concepts. For concepts, we need names. One way of making a name is stringing words together until the meaning is sufficiently specific. E.g. “morphism averse co-dependent functor substitutions in virtual machine transmigration systems”. Thus the abstruse academic research […]
The Gregorian calendar has been in use since 1582. Among its features is a moderately complicated rule for leap years: if n mod 4 is 0, then n is a leap year. However, if n mod 100 is 0, then n is not a leap year, unless n is a multiple of 400. In addition, […]
Academics and practitioners, having rather different goals in life, tend to approach software development in quite different ways. No doubt there are many things each side of the fence can learn from the other, but I think academics in particular could often benefit quite a lot by adopting some of the practices used in industrial […]