Tagged "technology"

Twenty years ago, months before the scorching (and deadly) summer of 2003, I bought the transparent Harman Kardon SoundSticks that I still have above (and below) my desk today.

The other day I had friends in Bolivia asking me if they could install Windows on a laptop they got through an NGO that initially came bundled with Linux.

Developers working for a particular vendor tend to develop a bizarre version of Stockholm syndrome. It’s something I’ve witnessed at least twice in my career.

The D programming language lacked a “killer app” to break through. Another brilliant language suffered from this situation, objectively deserving a much better fate than the one it had; Smalltalk.

Many programming languages have been sold to unsuspecting software developers with enticing descriptions, promising “transformative experiences” that “irrevocably alter their way of thinking” and other ethereal descriptions, seemingly belonging to other categories of products, such as yoga classes, religions, drugs, progressive rock albums, or role playing games.

I got my first personal computer 30 years ago this month. It was during the summer of 1992; I had just finished my first year of studies at the Collège Sismondi, and it was the first summer after we arrived from Argentina that looked like a real holiday.

For the past 20 years there’s been this trend to give names to a particular set of operating system, programming language, database tech, and something else.

There’s been plenty of technology wars in the software industry. Here’s a list of those that I got to witness in the past 25 years.

Looking at the software industry, it appears that most big companies usually share more traits than they would like to admit.

I love reading, and I love books; and in the 21st century, reading books means, to a large degree, electronic books.

For those interested in buying a computer with Linux built-in, here’s a list of options.

Testing applications that use LDAP for user authentication can be complicated.

Note taking is very important to me. I keep everything in my notes, from ideas for blog posts like this one, to code snippets, to web pages, to plans of never started businesses, and so much more.

After eight months of playing with this pure HTML website, the only thing I can say is: why didn’t I do this sooner?

The Agile Manifesto was probably the first, but certainly not the last attempt at creating a web page that provides a whole platform to a certain ideology.

Adding a search engine to this website was a nice little weekend project.

Markdown is a great thing; but nothing beats Asciidoc for complex documentation projects.

Looking backwards, the migration from Objective-C to Swift as main programming language for the Apple galaxy was quite an event.

This is the story of how, after being a loyal macOS user for 15 years, I decided to start using Linux full-time.

This is the presentation I gave at the third App Builders Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, April 17th, 2018.

It is 7:30 AM. I grab my iPhone and I place my thumb on the home button.

The Swiss are the best at many, many different domains. Which is a rather surprising and seriously fantastic feat for such a small country with merely eight million people, divided in four quite distinct linguistic groups.

This is the talk I gave at App Builders Switzerland on April 25th, 2016.

Presentation about iBeacons, given on May 26th, 2014 in Zürich (CH), August 13th in Leeds (UK) and August 14th in London (UK), and in October 2014 in Durban (ZA).

Quick update about my “one language per year” lifelong initiative:

FlipBoard, Reeder, iA Writer, 1Password, Echofon, iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), The Economist, OmniGraffle, InkPad, Adobe Ideas, iBooks, Kindle, Instagram, Instapaper, swissinfo, digital 2.

After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here.

This is something I’ve been looking forward to do for some time.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has written about prototypes, saying that they are not only useful but strictly fundamental pieces of the overall software process, as in many other engineering activities.

Published in 1975, “The Mythical Man-Month” is considered an all-time classic in the software engineering field.

While several other professions have a long, established and standard procedure of certification, the title “software engineer” is applied to both self-made developers, turned into experts of some technique, or to people with PhD degrees, and a long history of both academic and professional achievements.

A watch might be one of the most common types of objects, but it remains also one of the earliest pieces of human craftmanship to show an extreme level of complexity, all contained in a small amount of space.

Available right now:

I find many similarities between an event like WWDC and a similar one I’ve attended at Redmond long ago; both are big (huge!

Twitter’s down, but not my blog! I’m in the main Moscone conference room waiting for the start fo the keynote; there are thousands of people here!

Back in 2004 I drafted a content management system based on PHP and AJAX, featuring ideas borrowed from everywhere and that, all in all, formed a rather coherent set.

As I said before, I like to learn a new programming language every year.

The explosion of the Columbia Space Shuttle uncovered several internal problems in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Modern operating systems provide a clear separation of the kernel processes from those running in user space, which prompts the question of how to access I/O devices from user processes, without breaking the above mentioned architectural separation, which guarantees stability, security and performance.

Today I have done a tongue-in-cheek presentation of AJAX to my colleagues, including the historic background, the technology and the buzzwords.

Scripting.com is today 10 years old. It is the oldest running weblog on the web, an incredible source of information through the years.

“P2P” or “peer-to-peer networking” is maybe one of the most controversial and interesting trends in the dawn of the new century; its complete decentralization challenges all definitions of private intellectual property and creates new technological, commercial and juridic challenges.

Five years ago I worked as a Software Engineer for a startup, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which had the goal of creating a web-based systems management console, to control and monitor the status of large computer installations, much like Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) does.

It all started with the search engine. I think it was sometime back in 2000, while I was working in Argentina.

TCP congestion control tries to bring solutions to the problem of packet loss, which happens in networks for several reasons:

This is a rant: I am tired of seeing virtual methods implemented in child classes that, at some point or another, call the method of the same name in the base class.

In this article I give an overview of the Scrum Software Development Process.

I’ve just downloaded and installed Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Mac, both in PowerPC and Intel versions, and there’s just one thing to say: Impressive!

Posting from Google Docs & Spreadsheets … This is a test posting from what used to be Writely, the online word processing tool; it turns out that you can use it to publish in your blog, just using the API that is exposed by Wordpress!

Last year I’ve written about Koders.com, a search engine that crawled open source code repositories and allowed developers to search for code; an extremely interesting and valuable tool indeed.

Software Example In the February 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.

Does OOP reflect a “natural” way of thinking? Is it a better choice than the procedural programming paradigm?

Cuando AOL (America On Line) alla a fines de los 80, le puso a su sistema de correo electronico una voz de chabon que decia “You’ve got Mail!

Since data and instructions are stored in RAM in pretty much the same way, a priori the CPU cannot distinguish each other, but by the cycle in which the binary chunk is fetched from memory.

This is a tricky question; after all, Bill Gates himself published a book in 1995, “The Road Ahead”, where he only slightly talks about the World Wide Web:

Today I was looking at the list of speakers in the Enterprise Architect Summit 2005 to be held in November in Barcelona… and found out that David Chappell was one of them.

The Reuters’ project I’ve previously written about is finally coming to an end, at least version 1.

This article is a copy of a research work I did today, to draw a map of today’s development technologies.

The rainy, later snowy, Swiss weather of this weekend has made me just stay at home, and take the chance to try out a few things: that’s how I made my first steps in Ruby and WebObjects.

Looking for information on the topic of Software Architecture, I came accross the IEEE 1471 Standard, the “IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of a Software-Intensive System”.

Al principio fue la hoja A4, que digo, la hoja oficio, que digo, el papiro.