“Apple, Customer Service; Customer Service…”

Apple’s MobileMe services, including the various web hosting services associated with homepage.[mac|me].com were shutdown at the start of this month. Apple, a company that has built data centers the size of small towns to support its iCloud Internet services, appears not to have been able to find any resources to keep its existing Internet services going (even after spending years integrating

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Wolfram|Alpha: How it Came to Be, What it Does, How it’s Done, How it Grows

I’ve been sending this link to people for a year or more. I think I’m overdue to make it available to everyone:Making the World’s Data ComputablePersonally, I found it fascinating and illuminating after being left clueless about what Alpha was by the industry press.Need some specific examples to understand how to use Alpha? See their examples page.And if you try Alpha and it doesn’t meet your

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The “Glass Teletype”

From TOG on Interface by Bruce “TOG” Tognazzini, pg. 131:Early computers used printers as their sole output. When programmers at various large traditional computer companies were first given monitors, they immediately duplicated the printer interface on their green, glowing screens, giving rise to the term “glass Teletype.” With this lavish investment of more than 20 minutes of design time behind

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Consultants

What’s great about hiring consultants is supposed to be that your organization has no committment to them. What isn’t much mentioned is that, by the same token, consultants have no committment to your organization.

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Human Face Recognition, a Presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta

The Austin Forum, on the evening of January 4, 2011, hosted an interesting presentation by Dr. Shalini Gupta entitled “Digital Human Face Recognition,” which I attended because I find digital face recognition a fascinating technical challenge, an increasingly important social issue, and because I have an interest in a lesser, related problem: automatic face isolation (without regard to identity)

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’Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center

I forgot to post this last year, which was when I discovered it during my effort to locate and preserve the rapidly disappearing history of The University of Texas at Austin Computation Center, but this year I shall not forget. So, without further ado, for the computational old-timers amongst us, I offer “Twas the Night Before Christmas — In the Computation Center” by Kathy Atkins, from the

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Stephen Wolfram discusses “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition”

As found on the Wolfram Blog, Stephen Wolfram provides a transcript of his talk “Computation and the Future of the Human Condition” delivered at the H+ Summit @ Harvard on June 12, 2010. I found it interesting. Unfortunately for me, just as when I read his book A New Kind of Science (NKS), I think I can grasp the general ideas, but I can’t make the intellectual leap necessary to understand how to

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Network Neutrality

The following is the slightly corrected text of a comment I submitted to whichever part of the government was studying network neutrality, and requesting comments from the public, back in mid-January. I submitted this comment as a private citizen, but, of historical necessity, it references my employer. Let me be perfectly clear about this: I in no way speak for, or represent, my employer.

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Gatekeeper Released 21 Years Ago Today

Twenty one years ago today, on January 2nd, 1989, I released version 1.0 of the freeware Gatekeeper anti-virus system for Macintosh. It would have been better to note its twentieth anniversary a year ago, what with twenty being a big round number and all, but, frankly, I forgot.

Anyway, it was 21 years ago today. For reasons now obscure, it wouldn't appear in "comp.binaries.mac" until the 13th

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Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b2 Released

Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b2 has been released. The closest thing to a functional change is the addition a partial work-around for a Firefox 3.5.x SVG rendering bug that made the eyeball on the game’s first web page render incorrectly. No code changes, other than the deletion of some old, commented-out material. No changes in game play.

Also, the beginnings of a web site for the game can now be

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Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b1 Released

Early this morning, Maze Wars SVG version 1.0b1 was released. This retro multi-player first-person shooter had a couple of the inevitable bugs that always seem to be discovered only after a product is announced to the world. But they were exceedingly minor bugs. And they're gone now.

Enjoy.

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