Thimbles & Care

Survey: consumers want iPads for getting work done on the go

I wonder if anyone will write a tn3270 client for the iPad. I also wonder if it will support X11.

Since not much is going on here due to spring break, here’s a few interesting tidbits.

.com celebrates 25th birthday

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first .com domain name registration, for Symbolics.com.

Now a No-Evil Zone

Tim Bray announced he was leaving Sun (now Oracle) a week or two ago; today he announced he’s working for Google, as a “Developer Advocate” focused on Android.

I must say I don’t see the way Apple locks down the iPhone (and soon the iPad) as quite as evil as he does. Not to imply that I agree completely with what Apple does here—in particular I think the rules for accepting applications for the App Store should be more objective, clearer and less ambiguous—but I do think the motivation is to make using these devices as simple as using a car or a toaster for non-technical people. That’s a good thing for the vast majority of the human race, even if it makes things worse for us programmer/geek types.

Puzzles, Abuse, and average users

My bottom line on dealing with users blaming themselves, however, is that their behavior shows the classic hallmarks of long term psychological abuse. Their collective guilt, self-abasement in the face of the overwhelming arrogance of “support”, and promises to do better unfounded in any understanding of what’s wrong, would, if exhibited by school children or prison inmates, trigger immediate investigation – but there’s nothing I can to help beyond telling them the obvious: it’s not their fault – all the while, of course, wishing vaguely that I had Bill Gate’s money, because then I could buy them all Macs.

Charles P. Thacker of Microsoft won the ACM’s 2009 Turing Award.

Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker is a pioneering architect, inventor, designer, and builder of many of today’s key personal computing and network technologies. During the 70s and early 80s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Chuck was a central systems designer and main pragmatic engineering force behind many of PARC’s technologies, including: Alto, the first modern personal computer with a bit-map screen to run graphical user interfaces with WYSIWYG fidelity and interaction. All of today’s personal computers with bit-map screens and graphical user interfaces descend directly from the Alto.

In addition, he invented the snooping cache coherence protocols used in nearly all small-scale shared-memory multiprocessors, pioneered the design of high-performance, high-availability packet- or cell-switched local area networks in the AN1 and AN2, and designed the Firefly, the first multiprocessor workstation. Almost 30 years after the Alto Chuck designed and built the prototype for the most used tablet PCs today.

(via The Register)

On A List Apart: Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

Technologies aren’t inherently bad or good. They’re only appropriate or inappropriate for certain circumstances. They’re a means to an end, not solutions within themselves. Each one is powerful in its own right to accomplish a certain goal. The responsibility to use an appropriate technology lies with the one who made the choice. Unfortunately, we’ve misinterpreted irresponsible development as inadequate technology.

There’s also the issue of the culture that grows up around technology. Besides the performance problems Flash has on Mac OS X, I’ve always felt that most Flash developers were using it to show off or to control their audience, both of which I really don’t like. (Not to mention all the stupid advertisements that use Flash to attract attention.) I don’t know what I’d do without Flashblock on Firefox or ClickToFlash on Safari. I haven’t yet seen HTML5 features abused in this way, so if the absence of Flash on the iPhone and iPad can end the abuse of Flash that’s a good thing in my book.

MS and Oracle’s big dev tools – who needs ’em?

There’s general agreement on the productivity benefits of the modern IDE: more structured code editing and navigation, import and dependency management, and real time syntax checking. Code quality improves with semantic analysis, which can detect uninitialized and unused variable errors. Code readability improves with richer syntax highlighting that helps differentiate between static, instance, and local variables.

But lighter-weight tools offer a more rapid edit/test cycle with less waiting time. The command line remains one of the most powerful and fastest ways to interact with your system.

Emacs, Vim, and other editors have basic syntax highlighting and code navigation for an even broader set of formats despite the fact that they lag behind IDEs in features. Though IDEs offer impressive plug-in capabilities, traditional script and config files seem easier to learn and use and ultimately more flexible.

Count me firmly in the “text editor plus command line” camp.