Monthly Archives: July 2006
WriteRoom – Long Live the Console
Christian Neukirchen (A.K.A. Anarchaia) pointed out a Mac OS X app called WriteRoom (there’s a Windows twin called Dark Room). It’s a full-screen text editor with absolutely no word processing features. No bold, no italic, no paragraph formatting, just text. … Continue reading
Tagged User Interfaces
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GOTO Considered Harmful … in English
A small pet peeve: the use of goto in written English instead of go to. Is this the legacy of BASIC?
Zeroth Post!
A Usenet posting sent me to a short article by Edsger W. Dijkstra titled Why numbering should start at zero. Now, I have never used a programming language that wasn’t zero-indexed (like Fortran), but neither have I adopted the habit … Continue reading
When Everything Is Software
I’m currently enjoying Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. I’m only about half-way through it, and despite some inital scepticism I find his data more than a little convincing. In the future Kurzweil sets out, everything will be a form … Continue reading
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Voted Off the Planet
So I have been dropped from Planet Lisp, scarcely two months after being added. I wonder if that’s a record of some kind? Apparently, the maintainer found my tone too didactic and my knowledge too lacking. Fair criticisms both, but … Continue reading
Perl in Lisp 0.1
Hello, Lisp world! This is my first released Common Lisp code. Perl in Lisp is a Common Lisp interface to the Perl 5 API. It allows you to run a Perl interpreter embedded inside Lisp and evaluate Perl code. It … Continue reading
Consistently Inconsistent
Apple’s new Dashboard Widgets bother me. Not in a usability sense — they look quite useful, especially if they can be brought in and out of view quickly. What bothers me is that every widget looks completely different. Reading about … Continue reading
Tagged User Interfaces
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The Naming of Namespaces
Or, How the Lisp-n Shall Inherit the Earth Humans like to name things. Like ourselves, Homo sapiens, Latin for “Primate that has taken leave of its senses.” Then there are engineers. Engineers like to name things too. Like SCSI, pronounced … Continue reading
The Three Types of Computer User
I think nearly all computer users can be divided into three broad categories based on way they think about computers. The vast majority of computer users are application-oriented. They have training and experience exclusively with commercial software. They understand concepts … Continue reading