Tea Leaves

In my lifetime I have spent my time using three software platforms that actually mattered in the outside world. The first was Berkeley Unix on a Vax in college (yeah yeah, you might not think this matters, but without BSD there is no Linux and more importantly, no Mach and no modern MacOS). The second was Windows. The third was, and continues to be MacOS X. I’ve also used Linux but in user land it’s similar enough to other Unix to not really matter to me as its own platform.

Occasionally one finds oneself needing to migrate between major platforms. I’ve had a lot of friends who had to go from using Unix in graduate school to Windows in the real world, for example. My advice to them was always simple: make a clean break. Don’t use emulation environments like Cygnus. The reason is simple: there is nothing worse than an emulator that almost works.
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Every once in a while someone who I don’t know will find out that I work with computers. Often when this happens they get a look on their face like they have just found a great free source of technical support. I try to quickly end any such misconceptions. I just program the things, after all, I don’t really know how to use them. At times though I do find myself daydreaming about the true nature of the computer as a device. We know that at the surface the computer is a tool that helps us get things done that we didn’t used to be able to do as easily or as efficiently. Things like get directions, or process our photographs, or compose long pieces of text for total strangers around the world to read. That’s not the level of inquiry that I’m interested in here.

I’m more interested in the following question: if you had to describe in a single sentence what computers do or how they work, what would you say?
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I was duped. Tricked. Conned. I was not going to join the zombie Facebook hordes, but it happened anyway. But I am not here to whine about the fact that I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the 2000s from the dark ages of the late 1990s. Facebook is actually kind of cool. It’s like Twitter, except everyone is using it instead of just the dorkiest people you know. My main problem with the system is that they have designed it so I never see the same thing when I load the main page, even when nothing has changed.
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One of the many ways in which I’ve had a lucky life is that I grew up with Moore’s law. I became aware of computing hardware just about the time the integrated circuit came on the scene. From high school to college to graduate school and into my work life I have for the most part ridden the curve that the hardware people have so generously provided for those of us who work in software.
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I am not given to declarations of consumer affiliation (subliminal: buy !) But last year I waxed rhapsodic about Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro external drives, and tonight, well, I’m going to do it again. I needed more storage, and I couldn’t quite convince myself to shell out the cash for a Drobo storage robot (mostly because I was afraid it would be loud) so instead I just bought another FreeAgent. Specifically, I picked up the 1 Terabyte model (more…)

I’ve had some bad luck with hardware this year. For the first time ever I had a disk fail in one of my computers. And then after getting my laptop rebuilt my iMac’s power supply went south and I had to get that machine rebuilt as well. When the laptop came back, I had to install all my old tools one by one, something I haven’t had to do for three or four years thanks to the wonderful Apple magic brain transfer function which makes imaging old machines into new machines easy and painless. For some reason, in doing all this work I didn’t reinstall Photoshop… until this weekend when I wanted to do some panoramas. Therein lies my story.
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As regular readers know, I’m not only a gamer, but I’m a gamer who lives primarily on the Mac OS X platform. For years, this has been an insufferable position, akin to being seated at a restaurant where all the other customers were being served but where you couldn’t flag down a waiter. There have always been unique games for the Mac platform, and the occasional game like Diablo 2 that was on both PC and Mac. But for the most part, the hot new games would come out on Windows, and we’d have to wait until it was ported, 2 or 3 years later. If we were lucky.

I think 2008 is the turning point. When we look back, we’ll recognize this as the year it all changed. (more…)

Previously on this channel we discussed the role of abstraction in the context of constructing software. Abstraction enables laziness by hiding details that are unimportant or irrelevant to the problem at hand. This is a powerful and beautiful idea because it gives the appearance of providing programmers with a great deal of leverage against complexity. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. The problem is that at some point if you are going to ship anything someone has to worry about all those hidden details. And this is typically when people get into trouble.
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Abstraction is the activity that lies at the core of much of computer science, and computer hardware and software engineering. Understanding what the word means is thus at the core of understanding both how and why computing systems are are put together and evolve the way they do. It is also a large part of the key to understanding the mind of the engineer, because more than anything an enthusiasm for clever and aesthetically pleasing abstractions is what drives people to become engineers in the first place.

So what is abstraction anyway? In my mind the you can boil it down to the following overly simple definition: Abstraction is the act of giving a short and easy to remember name to something that is long and complicated. By doing this, you absolve yourself of needing to remember the long and complicated stuff.
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Allow me to take a moment to pimp this eBay auction wherein I am selling an Amiga 500, various accessories, and pieces of software. Help get this stuff out of my basement by getting it into yours.

Most importantly I should note that among the items I’m including in the package is an original cloth map from Ultima V. I suspect that to some people, that cloth map is worth more than the Amiga.