The Mole found that the writers of the soon-to-be-released movie Larry Crowne displayed a perfectly tuned sense of poor UX design in this clip showing how to set basic preferences on the mythical Map Genie GPS.
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The Mole returns
The Mole is emerging from a long sojourn, a period of inactivity rooted in multiple causes.
The problem of slide 19
The Mole recently attended an SDForum Software Architecture and Modeling SIG talk on Cassandra, a “distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size across many commodity servers”. Cassandra was developed at Facebook to speed up certain searches; to the Mole’s understanding, it was built to support indexing of user-to-user messages by the… Continue reading The problem of slide 19
melancholy anecdotes
Last night The Mole went to the Computer History Museum to hear David Alan Grier’s talk “Too Soon to Tell: Essays for the End of the Computer Revolution” (drawn largely from his new book of the same title). The Mole usually emerges from such talks energized and enthusiastic, with a reinvigorated commitment to moving back to doing substantial software work… Continue reading melancholy anecdotes
A device of rare miracle
Last night The Mole went to an event at the Computer History Museum where Doron Swade and Nathan Myhrvold spoke about the Difference Engine #2 that has just arrived at the museum. The machine itself astonishes, the vindication of Charles Babbage is a monumental achievement, Babbage’s insights and vision are amazing. (Myhrvold’s expenditures on the effort, though not revealed in detail, must have been jaw-dropping.)… Continue reading A device of rare miracle
112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
The Mole once again had professional reason to refer colleagues to Perlis’s Epigrams. And once again as usual the Mole took a moment to skim through the list (having pulled it up in a browser to verify the link). The epigram that caught his eye on this occasion — which was not the one where… Continue reading 112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
visibility restored!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A key difference in the Mole’s opinion is that magic is impenetrable, impervious to reason; technology is not. In the case at hand, the Mole is certain he could learn the intricacies of b2evolution (and, if necessary, php). As he has not, however, the white screen of… Continue reading visibility restored!
OO / RDBMS impedance mismatch
So last week the Mole attended the SDForum SAM SIG meeting to hear Ted Neward speak on “State Management: Shape and Storage:object/relational (O/R) impedance mismatches for persistingobjects between transient & persistent states.” This is a topic that has long fascinated the Mole, which, he discovered, is another way of saying that the Mole was not the target audience. Most of… Continue reading OO / RDBMS impedance mismatch
Big Ball of Mud
After many years in the academy, on both sides of the blackboard, the Mole made the leap into the so-called real world, i.e., for-profit corporate employment. Many of the Mole’s cherished preconceptions were quickly tossed aside; some were more easily replaced than others. This article helped to explain the massive gulf between everything the Mole… Continue reading Big Ball of Mud
Worse is Better
This is an essay that the Mole rereads fairly regularly. The experience is always unnerving: some parts are obviously right, some are obviously wrong, but which category any particular part falls into is seldom the same from one reading to the next. Regardless of which side of the debate you choose (or, if you are… Continue reading Worse is Better