Kyle Cordes

This evening at XPSTL, Michael Feathers (blog) (book) was in from out of town (and from around the world) and gave a talk on API design. He’s been thinking a lot about API design recently, driven by issues that come up with working with legacy code, which talks to lots of APIs, to cajole […]

I’ve seen lots of links to Herb Sutter’s talk at PARC on concurrency. This is a great talk - I found it a little tough to make it through his paper on the topic, while the talk is a joy to experience, information-dense yet approachable. Some thoughts and notes:

There weren’t very many people in […]

Lots of people are linking to this excellent video (presentation and screencast) by Sean Kelly at JPL (380 megabyte, 30+ minutes, worth it):
http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov
Watch it all the way through. Wow.
It’s a little over-the-top in its J2EE example; but the disparity is still stark… and near to my heart as we have a time tracking web […]

Weiqi Gao reminded me that today is “PI Day”; that along wouldn’t warrant a post here, but the Java snippet for estimating the value of PI rather inefficiently, did:
[weiqi@gao] $ cat PI.java
public class PI {
public static void main(String[] args) {
double sum = 0.0d;
for (int i = 1; i < 64000; i++) {
sum += 6.0/(i*i);
}
System.out.println(Math.sqrt(sum));
}
}
[weiqi@gao] $ […]

At Oasis Digital we are working on an application that will run on a touch-screen computer, and which will be used to (among other things) control an audio amplification system. There are some design considerations for touch-screen applications which are rather stark once you use the touch-screen for a few minutes:

A finger is rather […]

According to this article from Richard Grimes, it appears that .NET has not gained as much traction inside Microsoft as anticipated:
http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/dotnet/vistaAndDotnet.htm
“My conclusion is that Microsoft has lost its confidence in .NET. They implement very little of their own code using .NET. The framework is provided as part of the operating system, but this […]