Fran Allen's Turing Award made me ponder future recipients. Most of the action in the software development world today rotates around business, not science. The Turing Award is supposed to honor technical contributions, not marketshare or business models. The problem with that is that "everything happened in the Golden Age …

The ACM honored Frances Allen with the Turing Award today. Allen started her career teaching FORTRAN to scientists in the late 50s, wrote a classic paper called Program Optimization in the mid-60s, and did major foundational work on optimizing transformations. She is the first woman to receive the Turing Award …

Mono now has native support for Visual Basic. Linux already supports a "console" approach to your hardware: pop in a CD/DVD and boot into a specialized environment. While I think general-purpose computers are more appropriate for intermediate-and-better users, the console approach is very appealing when it comes to training …

A few commentors have taken me to task for drooling over the "multitouch" UI demo. My gut reaction is two-fold: I want a huge display (covering 150 degrees or so, with high-density pixels, of course) and I want direct manipulation. Although I'm pretty sure I'm right about the former, I …

This is a much more impressive video than the one from (Siggraph?) last year. The UI that Tom Cruise's character uses in Minority Report blew me away and this video, which demonstrates "multitouch" on a big screen (rear projection, I imagine), is amazingly similar. Of course, what they're showing may …

CodeGear has unveiled the first of their new development environments since their not-quite-spin-off from Borland. First is Delphi 2007 for Win32, which actually supports Vista Aero development and Ajax (as well as Win32 development). Second is their first new language in years -- Delphi for PHP. No one from CodeGear saw …

First John Lam and now John Montgomery have dropped broad hints that they will be making announcements at Mix, Microsoft's April-May show in Las Vegas targeted primarily at Web developers. Obviously, if one were planning on discussing something substantively at the PDC in early October, one might announce it in …

Brief and funny.

A company's developed a hamster ball in which you run while wearing VR goggles. My initial reaction was scorn, but adopting Mom's best "who cares what others think of how you look?" attitude, I have to admit it's kind of... well, I can't bring myself to say that I …

Okay, this is pure gloating, but I get paid (or, at least, can justify time spent on...) to think about things as diverse as quantum computing, Ruby IDEs, and trustworthy Trackbacks. Even better, when Tina heard the humpback songstream she invoked a 'We live in Hawaii' break and we went …