Sunday, February 03, 2002

[Hack the Planet] Paul Graham: On Lisp.  Hey, I was just thinking about this book the other day.  In my lisp days, I thought this was a great book on the practice of programming in lisp.  Now available for free! because it's out of print. 11:04:47 PM

[Slashdot] Designing Multiplayer Game Engines?  11:02:49 PM

An IDE raid roundup at anadtech... 10:59:09 PM

[Slashdot] Bazaars in the Government Cathedral -  Open Source intelligence gather... haven't read it, but it sounds interesting.. 10:57:28 PM

[The New York Times: Science] The Increase in Chip Speed Is Accelerating, Not Slowing. At the world's premier chip design conference, there is evidence that PC performance increases of the last two years will not slow in the near future, but actually accelerate.   10:54:18 PM

[Slashdot] Perl Mongers Perl Magazine 10:52:36 PM

Costanoa looks like a nice place to get away... 10:50:32 PM

San Francisco Chronicle features the Top 100 Restaurants in the Bay Area. 10:46:42 PM

[BBC World]Shock win for the Patriots. New England win Super Bowl XXXVI with the last kick of the game to upset St Louis in New Orleans.  Great game! 10:41:27 PM

[Slashdot] Is Evolution Over In Humans? Oh brother.   I hate it when people imply that we're "highest" on the evolutionary "ladder".    This is actually worse, since it says we've run out of ladder.   Evolution is a fundamentally unguided process, always groping in all directions.   With no selection pressure, it drifts randomly.   Just because we cannot imagine a basis for selection or see any change we'd call meaningful, doesn't mean its not happening.   At best, we're at a point of relative equilibrium.   Even that's a little optimistic since our population size continues to grow and our rate of consumption seems to be increasing.   As a species, we've been around such a ridiculously short period of time.  Time will tell if we are  an evolutionarily stable solution.    I could go on...  but I think this just proves that, in every field, there are people that are amazingly good and people that aren't.   Just because someone's a scientist (or a docter.. or a lawyer.. etc) doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. 10:18:00 AM

A Microsoft SOAP architect,  Keith Ballinger,  has a weblog. 9:35:27 AM

Gnome to be based on .Net.  I don't share this guys world view.  I don't see why this would desirable or how it can be attainable.  You will not steal market from MS by following them a year behind.   Drucker says Creative Imitation is a better buinses model than "First with the Most" - higher probability of success.  But you can't forget the "creative" part - and, in this case, it'd have to be something awefully good.   I guess it's good that somebody is going to try - just to prove it couldn't be done. 9:31:23 AM

[Slashdot] Why Coding Is Insecure - This is a pointer to an article at SecurityFocus.com.   This article exhibits the classic problem with the security community, IMO - it views the world through a fisheye lens focused on security, inflating the relative importance of security out of its proper proportions relative to other system qualities.    The "costs" of insecure software are all costs you can end up paying if you over engineer the security of your system too.   I'll go out on a limb and say I am aware of exactly one market where for-profit companies have made money on the security of their product - firewalls.    Maybe web servers (e.g stronghold).   Absolute security is unattainable; setting that as your design point is very expensive.  You have to find a level security to shoot for that satisfies your customers and protects you against the possibility of downstream lawsuits.  Those are the design points, not "perfection".   Security may be holding MS back in the Enterprise market (though I think performance and reliability are the real issues), but, poor security or not, they are still the number one software company in the world. 9:16:41 AM

[Slashdot] Google Prefers DRAM to Hard Disks - In the article at CNN.com, Schmidt says DRAM is cheaper than hard drives.  But I think he means in the specific case of storing search indexes - their performance bottleneck - where engineering equivalent performance out of drives would be much more expensive (to engineer, to buy, to maintain, etc).   Other than that, they talk about how Google makes money and stays competitive. 8:52:04 AM

[Slashdot] Stephenson's Quicksilver Slated For March 7th  1:01:04 AM