Software, Business, and Life
Oct 16 2007
This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998. It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about what makes a good language, was also key in designing Java. Java has been extremely slow to grow in the [...]
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Jul 12 2007
Cuong Do of YouTube / Google recently gave a Google Tech Talk on scalability. I found it interesting in light of my own comments on YouTube’s 45 TB a while back. Here are my notes from his talk, a mix of what he said and my commentary: In the summer of 2006, they grew from [...]
Jul 05 2007
A while back I asked on the ffmpeg mailing list how to pipe RGB data in to ffmpeg. I described it as follows: in my code I am building video frames, 720x480x24bit. I have in mind generating a large number of these, as long as a full DVD worth at 30fps, then using ffmpeg (followed [...]
May 26 2007
TED is an annual conference at which a bunch of (hopefully?) remarkable people say remarkable things. I’m using the word in a Seth Godin sort of way: remarkable things are those which inspire people to literally remark about them. It appears to be “A-list” event, meaning that I’m not likely to make the cut anytime [...]
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May 17 2007
On several occasions over the last year, I’ve pointed out that distributed source control tools are dramatically better than centralized tools. It’s quite hard for me to explain why. This is probably because of sloppy and incomplete thinking on my part, but it doesn’t help that most of the audiences / people I’ve said this [...]
May 03 2007
Over at Yahoo Video you can watch an excellent talk by Doug Crockford on JavaScript (part 1). (part 2, part 3, part 4) This is likely the best introduction to JavaScript I have seen, and worthwhile even if you’ve been using JS for years. Why does JavaScript matter? 1) It is ubiquitous now (in nearly [...]
