John Hodgman on The Flight of the Conchords

John Hodgman makes a guest appearance on one of my favorite new shows, The Flight of the Conchords. If you like John Hodgman's brand of comedy you'll love this show. It was absolutely no surprise to me when he showed up in this scene as a greeting card company executive who's going to produce a musical greeting card from one of the band's songs. At up to 500,000 cards and royalties of $.01 a card, they're talking about "big money."

Check out Mel's blog.

See some of the "band's" live performances on youtube.

Modern language choice (and Ruby love)

Martin Fowler waxes on about language choice these days--with some Ruby love thrown in for good measure. In particular, how SmallTalk has finally arrived:

In the intervening years I've come to the view that Tom was right after all. After several years in curly brace land, Ruby reminded me of what I was missing. There's a clarity to reading Ruby code that just makes it an easier medium to work with, despite the inferior tooling. I'm way more sympathetic to the Smalltalk holdouts than I felt then, even though I haven't felt inclined to open an image in anger for a long time

..and how we are going to see lots of languages slug it out (or maybe coexist):

So are we returning to the language cacophony of the late 80's and early 90's? I think we will see multiple languages blathering away, but there will be an important difference. In the late 80's it was hard to get languages to inter-operate closely. These days there's a lot of attention to making environments that allow different language to co-exist closely. Scripting languages have traditionally had an intimate relationship with C. There's much effort to inter-operation on the JVM and CLR platforms. Too much has been invested in libraries for a language to ignore them.

Exploring

The boys and I went on a long trek I've wanted to make for some time. According to the map, one can travel north from McKenzie Ridge off of highway 180 through to the Kings River via Davis Road. Yesterday afternoon the boys and I took off.

The road was well maintained and easily navigated, but rocky enough in places to slow us down. It's incredibly dry--Mill Creek is completely dry. Still lots of great views and lovely terrain.

I wanted to try the Rancheria spur from the Crabtree area, but missed the turn. That was okay because the boys were getting tired of riding and ready to jump in the river.

We got to the River and the boys had a great time. I discovered a forest service cabin at camp 4 1/2 available for rent. Since this was the best place for swimming in the area, we will definitely come back.

Well, there it is. End of debate.

Han shot first

Phone the way it should be

Via Digg, the iPhone the way it should be. :)

Dabble DB

Since Emil's too humble to have a blog, I figure I'll pass along this email:

I've been looking at http://dabbledb.com/ It's a Web 2.0 MS-Access like critter. Bunch of competitors growing like weeds http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/EI/21563 and I wondered what they built DabbleDB in...

http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/01/19/a-conversation-with-avi-bryant-and-andrew-catton-about-dabble-db/

Not only is it written in THAT language!? but is uses the Seaside framework from Alan Kay's Squeek platform! http://www.squeak.org/ !?

Unbelievable... this is cooler than Orbitz on Lisp.

:)

Nothing wrong with SmallTalk..

More Steve love

Because he needs it. Really. Show him some love. Like this:.

...for not only giving us the beautiful iPhone but also driving up the values of our 401(k) plans and making us all a little bit richer. Steve Jobs, we'd like you to have a Nobel Prize for this.

Intention

Jared has a short sweet example of an "intention revealing interface" and why it's good.

To understand more about the concept, see Domain Driven Design. Basically, Evans says that "All tricky mechanism should be encapsulated behind abstract interfaces that speak in terms of intentions, rather than means." This is a core habit that enables people to write objects rather than just a bunch more procedural code.

It's so easy to write, but it's not always easy to reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeead!

There really is more than one way. :)

I still have my NCSA Mosaic T-shirt

My wife tries to throw it out every once in a while. I explain that it's soon to be a valuable antique. It's hard to believe this was only 13 years ago. Seems like a lifetime.

Finally, I can program again

Being the busy manager type I am, I spend most of my time talking about doing work rather than actually doing work. I haven't programmed anything significant in a long time.

Finally, through the miracle of Vista's voice recognition, this demo shows that I can go back to Perl programming, without lowering myself to touching the keyboard.

Or a shredder..

I was very proud of my guys when, upon the arrival of the new industrial strength paper shredder in their area, they immediately commenced to shred the paper shredder's manual. This was immediately followed by a shredding of some printed circuit boards..

Anyway, there's a good idea here.

Oops, sorry Google

So you already know I'm a Google fanboy. But this post confused me because I couldn't see any ads. After a few minutes I get the clue.. The other day I was at a particularly obnoxious web site littered with ads and I used Adblock to blacklist some new sites. One of which was "googlesyndication.com." Viola, Google's ads have disappeared from my daily life.

I've never been particularly insulted by Google's ads--which must be why it's taken me a few years to blacklist them. Sorry Google, but the banner ads are too obnoxious to look at.

Segway Polo

Go ahead and check out Woz playing Segway Polo. I don't know why..

Google Searchology

Everything you ever wanted to know about how Google does search so well (in three parts):

iPhone Love

One of many iPhone love posts.. This one from Mr SmugMug, Don MacAskill. But Don makes an interesting point:

This phone is an earth-shaking game-changer, and exactly what everyone has wanted for a long long time. Not a single person I’ve ever met has actually liked their cell phone company, and this is the first step towards a device-centric world rather than a network-centric world. You and I win, because every device maker on the planet will get to build better phones because of this one, not just Apple. Competition rules.

I hope so. Even if it's not about Apple, it will be nice to be in a device centric world and make the carriers follow that lead instead of the other way around.

I had a few minutes to play with a coworker's iPhone this week. And Don's right, it's impossible to not be amazed by this device. I still don't know about the keyboard though..