I feel like posting the picture below.

It's from a very rainy Friday in September 2000. I had a meeting around noon that day. Directly afterwards, I went for a weekend in the mountains with two friends, and I felt just like that.

About an hour after the picture was taken, over dinner, I explained my mood. Unless things change, I expect I'll leave in a few months. A good forecast: I gave notice four months later, ten minutes after another depressing meeting.

I didn't forecast Nokia's recent rampage, though.

I am reminded of the Inmos Transputer.

That, as my older readers may still vaguely remember, was a freak processor in the eighties. It was designed for parallelism: Its fundamental design was for a computer with many transputers, not one with a single humongous blob. Each CPU was small, simple (the wikipedia page includes the complete instruction set) and linked to four other CPUs using bidirectional message-passing connections, and the design allowed vast CPU meshes with message routing and forwarding.

The thing that reminds me of the transputer is the way those links worked. When a Transputer received a message that had to be forwarded, it would prioritise communication over its own computation.

I am reminded of this because my mail is down. A great big failure happened during Christmas vacation. Then a routing mishap left me unable to take part in a video conference this morning. I am forced to prioritise my own programming over message passing, and it feels so good. Yesterday was great.

Tomorrow I shall apologise to borud about my unresponsiveness. But today, I plan to wallow in solitary hacking.

Actually I'll wait a few hours with publishing this. There's a chance someone might see it.

Information wants to be free has turned into one of those soundbites that are believed by virtue of being so often repeated, like a cross breeding of of Drink Coca-Cola and blah considered harmful.

At least Drink Coca-Cola is an accurate summary of what the Coca-Cola Corporation said. Information wants to be free is a misleading, disgraceful misquote.

Here is Stewart Brand's entire clueful paragraph, quoted from page 202 of my copy of The Media Lab: Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free, because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

So just now, as I was writing up the advent calendar a door-to-door salesman came asking whether I might want to purchase lovely phone and internet connectivity from Telekom.

Now I need to vent.

I was a Telekom customer for years. Not very happy, but also not unhappy and changes seemed risky. So when I needed more bandwidth, early in July 2009, I ordered an upgrade. (more…)

The text we've all learned to read is arranged in lines: Horizontal baseline, regularly sized letters, regular line height, lines neither too narrow nor too wide.

Anyone who breaks those rules disturbs the mind's reading and distracts from the content. Minor violations cause minor disturbance.

Which is fine, I suppose. Ask any advertising agency. If you violate the right norm you can make the brain sit up and take notice of a message it would otherwise skip. Drink Coca-Cola. But it's not something a GUI program should do. GUI programs should form the thinnest possible barrier between user and data. (more…)

This week, another thousand bloggers explain that patents are bad because they're used to harass, etc.

Noone seems to understand that for software patents to be meet their stated aims, it must be possible for programmers to learn something by searching for, finding and reading the relevant patent.

Wikipedia defines patents as a set of exclusive rights granted [...] to an inventor [...] in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention. That public disclosure isn't happening now: software patents aren't understandable to software developers, so the rights are granted in exchange for effectively nothing.

Wikipedia goes on to say the same thing again in different words: The word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means to lay open (i.e., to make available for public inspection).

Avoiding harassment is a start, but it's not enough. Patere necesse est.

Update: Two corollaries, obvious IMO, but... There must be something in each patent that's worth learning. Restating textbooks isn't enough. And each patent must be such that it's practically possible to work without infringing/licensing it.

Lawnmowers may be classified according to noise, speed, price, reliability, durability and so on. I don't have a lawn, so all I really care about is how loud the superintendents near me are, and for how long. (more…)

Some Java book I read long ago, I think it was Thinking in Java, explains that one of the benefits of Java exceptions is that you can shift error handling away from the normal path, leaving the implementation of the common case clearer and better.

Fine. There's just one catch: You have to catch the exceptions and handle the error somewhere. (more…)