Hardware is hard, whereas software is soft; the people who named these things knew what they were talking about.
A while ago, I volunteered to help a friend upgrade the disk drive of an Apple iBook. My first clue that this was going to be a fun project was learning that we needed a special […]

As I was saying, I’ve been trying to get up to speed with Adobe Flash and ActionScript. I’ve also been looking into Processing, another programming language designed for creating interactive animations and visualizations that can be shared on the web. Processing was invented by Casey Reas and Ben Fry when they were at the MIT […]

The last time I was ranting about spam, I inquired of Pfizer, the makers of Viagra, how they filter spam from their own incoming mail stream. They can hardly block all messages that mention their own product. They never got back to me with an answer. Now perhaps I know why. Wired News reports that […]

Reminiscing about Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs led me to pull the book off the shelf, and I was taken in once more by the epigraph from the late Alan J. Perlis:
I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful […]

My love affair with the Scheme programming language began in the front seat of a 1976 Ford Mustang. I had just bought a copy of Abelson and Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which uses Scheme as the vehicle for a course in computer science. On the way home from the bookstore I grabbed […]

We learn so early in life about +, −, × and ÷ that we tend to see these operations as the unique foundation stones of arithmetic, on which everything else must be built. But there are other operators we can apply to pairs of numbers. In a paper recently posted on the arXiv, Shinji Tanimoto […]