Mole End

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.

The Mole is emerging from a long sojourn, a period of inactivity rooted in multiple causes.

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

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

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

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!

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

The Mole has started a list of Recommended Reading. The first few entries are books so wise, so famous, so well respected, and so widely accepted that the Mole cannot add anything useful by way of a new review. If you need more words on why to read any of them, use your favorite search… Continue reading The Mole’s Reading List

After many years of having no visible presense on the web, I have decided it is time to get with the program. Frankly, though, the image that comes to mind is that of the poet Avrillia in The Garden of the Plynck: …[Sara] leaned over the balustrade and looked down into Nothing. It was very gray.… Continue reading I’m here! Is anybody out there?