For some reason the concept of Genetic Programming got stuck in my head the other evening. At midnight, after spending about four hours reading up on the topic around the web, I came away disappointed. The concept of evolving code the way genes do is fascinating but the results in the field seem to be [...]
Author Archive
iBooks and an HTML Experiment
With all of the hoopla last week about the innovative features in the new iBooks 2 I thought it would be instructive to see what could be done with pure HTML 5. I put together a little demo which adapts to screen sizes and has simple interactive content. Here’s what it looks like: View the live [...]
Back in the Saddle
Vacation and travel is over and I’m happy to say things are moving again. I’m feeling refreshed and I have a lot to share with you in 2012; starting with the new book I’m writing for O’Reilly! Read on, MacDuff.
Blogging Year In Review
It would be an understatement to say that the last year has been busy. With having a baby, launching and then ‘unlaunching’ the HP TouchPad, lots of conferences, and pushing out several open source project releases it’s just been one heck of a crazy time. Throughout it all I’ve tried to continue blogging, though not [...]
Would you pay for Facebook?
or: “Why I won’t work for a social network.” I’ve had a lot of ideas involving social networking floating around in my head for the past few months. They were finally crystalized into a solid conclusion this week: I don’t want to work for a social networking company. There are really two distinct but related problems [...]
HP to Open Source webOS
Today the other shoe dropped. Fortunately it was a soft slipper, not the steel toed boot to the head I had feared. HP is open sourcing webOS. What does this mean? Well, I honestly don’t know yet. There is a huge amount of planning to be done, but it could be the start of something [...]
Book Report: World of Ptavvs
World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven, 188pp, 1966 If you are a scifi reader but don’t know Larry Niven then you aren’t reading this blog because you don’t exist. However, in the off chance that you slipped in from an alternate dimension where Larry Niven never took up writing, then allow me to explain. Larry Niven [...]
Your Design Homework This Weekend
First, watch this amazing video created by a newspaper industry research group. It depicts the digital newspaper of the future. The surprising part? The video was created in 1994! And yet the newspaper industry didn’t listen to their own research. Your homework over the holiday weekend isn’t to learn the lessons of the video, but [...]
Book Report: Princess of Mars
I’ve always meant to go back and read some of the really old scifi that people have always talked about but I’ve never read. Now is finally that time. As a fan of mainly 50s through 70s (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven), I’ve rarely read anything earlier than the late forties. (Jules Verne being a notable [...]
Flash is Dead. Long Live Adobe
The twit-o-sphere came alive last week with the news that Adobe is canceling their Flash for Mobile products. I even briefly joined in. Many see this as evidence that the open web has won (it has), or a justified comeuppance for Adobe’s historical slights to Apple (it might be), or perhaps vindication of Steve Jobs’ [...]