Five Years Ago In Language-Oriented Programming

Five years ago I called attention to Language-Oriented Programming, which is now coming to fruition in the form of products such as JetBrains' MPS and Intentional Software's Intentional Workbench: http://www.knowing.net/index.php/2004/11/22/language-oriented-programming/

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Pirating Reputation in the Consulting Market

A cautionary tale from the iPhone market in which a successful app developer discovered that an unscrupulous development house included his product in their portfolio.

I can attest that this happens. I have had direct experience with a component that, in retrospect, was almost certainly stolen and reverse-engineered. When confronted …

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Astrophotography: Registax and Vado HD

Registax needs a VFW H264 compressor in order to process video from the Vado HD camera. After installing DTS x264 Vfw 01.22.2007 things seem to work.

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Mortgage Meltdown Financial Instrument is NP-Complete

Complex derivatives are "intractable" -- you can't tell if they're being tampered with - Boing Boing.

Determining if a "Collateralized Debt Obligation" was tampered with is a "densest subgraph" problem, which is NP-Complete. Which is a fine thing to depend a global economy on.

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Stellarvue Refractor Telescopes: Stellar Service (See What I Did There?)

I had put off buying a telescope my entire adult life because I knew that you had to spend a good amount of money for quality and that, when it comes to a hobby that revolves around fleeting glimpses of faint and fuzzy objects, you must have confidence in your …

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Posting Ink to My Blog

::: {#scid:31C7882A-CF45-4fcc-A614-7A5A52E598FF:4c46b732-6efe-4c73-b747-0824d3a14bd3 .wlWriterEditableSmartContent style="padding-bottom: 0px; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: inline; float: none; padding-top: 0px"} :::

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Coding style in tag-based languages

HTML is typically formatted to show structural containment:

<h1>Topic</h1>
   <p>Some paragraph.</p>
   <p>Next para.</p>
   <ul>
      <li>item 1</li>
      <li>item 2</li>
   </ul>

Code is typically formatted to show flow-of-control:

node = tree.append "Topic 1"
node.append "Some paragraph."
node.append "Next para."
list …
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Looking for an excellent developer who believes that quality is the best route to productivity?

I have recently finished an engagement with a client and am footloose and fancy free.

If anyone is looking for an excellent developer with an object-oriented bias and a deep belief that to improve productivity teams should concentrate on quality, please drop me a line at lobrien "at" knowing "dot …

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Google Releases Their "Closure" JavaScript Library

Google Code Blog: Introducing Closure Tools.

Given Google's resources, goals, and products, this automatically becomes a leading candidate as a "standard library" for developers doing JavaScript work (i.e., anyone working with the Web). Not sure of its overlap / incompatibility with other major libraries, but this will definitely reward study …

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MonoTouch / MonoDevelop Gets Debugging Support

Introducing Debugging for MonoTouch - Miguel de Icaza.

I've been very impressed by MonoTouch and MonoDevelop for iPhone programming: it's a great combination of the CocoaTouch APIs (which are very nice) and the C# programming language (which is my favorite mainstream language if you don't think that Ruby has crossed the …

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