I read with interest, but disagree with, this take on why the software tools industry dwindled in the early 90s. Like most historical accounts, it tries to achieve a linear account of a historical rise and fall: there were a lot of compiler vendors because writing a commercial compiler was …

Between the high-revving manual transmission, the shave-the-door lanes, and the staccato "Turn left" instructions issuing from my iPhone GPS, driving here has a very XBox-ian feel to it. If you pretend the randomly located speed bumps are power-ups, the illusion is nearly perfect.

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There are an astonishing number of taxis …

The long-term success of every operating system is tied to the progress of hardware, which has taken a 90-degree turn from "faster every generation" to "more parallel every generation." For the better part of a decade, the chips in new machines have run no faster, but there have been more …

As the sun falls, the seagulls, which have been the only birds I've seen, are joined by some swifts darting into the facade of nearby buildings and a trio of hawks or maybe kites: rather drab, but with that athletic sharp-banked twisting flight.

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The wide beach has a cold-looking tumbling …

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dynamite, the most compellingly complete "world" I've read in I-can't-remember. The world is brilliant, a gritty and "realistic" medieval-ish place with slowly-introduced fantastical elements -- summers and winters last for years (and even decades), there were …

On my recent trip to Chile, I used the following iPhone apps:

Word Lens: Realtime translation. You point the iPhone at a sign or menu and you see live video, but the Spanish words are translated into English. It not only provides a "Wow!" experience, it's actually by far the …

The Ice Limit by Douglas Preston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun thriller concerned with the recovery of a meteorite on the frozen islands off Cape Horn. There's a good deal of nonsense: engineering that would take months or years is done in a matter of days (to …

My first in-water shark encounter was in San Diego, in La Jolla Cove. I was snorkeling in the cove, out near “Alligator Rock” when I saw a Gray Smoothhound, an entirely harmless shark maybe 3’ long. But, hey, it’s a shark that looks like a shark and I wanted …

Damon Tucker, probably the Big Island's most prominent blogger, was given a pretty solid roughing-up by Big Island police on Friday night, while videotaping police arresting people after a concert in Pahoa. The photos on Tucker's site clearly indicate that excessive force was used against Tucker, who probably weighs 150 …

Project Daytona: Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure - Microsoft Research.