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Pretty good Paul Graham coding essay: Holding a Program in One's Head. Nothing earth shattering, but it seems right to me.
A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.
Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 introduces H.264 video playback. I'm not a huge Flash fan, but in general this should be a very good thing. Also, it should now play .m4a audio, and the bug with mp3 playback at certain sampling rates has been eliminated. These last two are good news for the music project. Now if only I could find someone to build my dream AIR audio player.
Finally I convinced someone to buy an iPhone. W00t! Going this afternoon to pick it up. Overly detailed report to follow.
Detailed retracing of a linux server crack.
I saw the play Frost Nixon last night. Frank Langella won a Tony for his portrayal of Nixon and it's not hard to believe after seeing him. Of course Nixon gives an actor a lot to work with. The play was one act with no intermission which, to me at least, seems like the right way to do it. Of course it's hard to watch and not think of parallels to our own political times. But the thing that stood out to me the most is just how stupid Bush seems compared to Nixon. They both did (and in Bush's case continue to do) some bad things, but it's just not conceivable to me that someone in the future will write a play about Bush. Or that someone will win a Tony for playing his character. There just isn't anything of substance there. A screwball comedy maybe, but not drama. I'm no fan of Nixon, of course, but at least there was some substance there.
Apparently they are going to make it into a movie. I think it might translate well.
My digitalmediatree email is not working at the moment. Trying to sort it out. Please use my datamantic or gmail addresses if you want to reach me.
Walt Mossberg (Wall St. Journal) and David Pogue (NYTimes) both like the iPhone. They and a few other journalists have had test units for some time. They were freed tonight to publish their thoughts. It's going to be interesting to see how the virtual touch screen keyboard plays out. This is the area that "real" smartphone users (blackberry, treo, etc...) have expressed a lot of skepticism about. Both Mossberg and Pogue say you need about a week to adjust to the iPhone's keyboard, with Pogue still not being very happy even then, while Mossberg seems to have had the "I get it" conversion moment. Anyway, expect a lot of press this week.
Steve Jobs is giving his keynote at Apple's World Wide Developers conference now. Very interesting how they are positioning themselves with respect to 3rd party app development for the iPhone. We'll have to see the details, but Steve says"...you can write amazing Web 2.0 apps that work exactly like apps on the iPhone...." So that just means javascript and HTML being presented by the Safari engine. I can imagine some people scoffing at this, but the approach might work. It all depends on the slickness of the integration (will they really look like native apps, or will it just feel like a webpage?) Supposedly you can "make calls, send e-mails, google maps, etc" from inside your web app. So there are at least some special hooks you can access from javascript. Hopefully there are enough cool things you can access to really make some useful programs. My guess is that there will be a lot of complaining, but then this will actually work out very well in the end.
I'm not sure if it's just me, or if other people are feeling this too, but javascript used to just be an annoyance. Now it's one of the most important tools.
Apparently Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz just let slip that Apple is going to ship ZFS as "the filesystem" in Leopard. Not sure why he wouldn't say "default filesystem" if that was what he meant, but on the other hand, it's hard to imagine "the filesystem" meaning anything other than "default filesystem." If true maybe this has something to do with Lepard's delay? And I wonder if the idea of pooling in ZFS might help out with mouting and connecting (and then sometimes disconnecting) a lot of disparate media storage devices (macs, ipods, apple tvs, iphones) into one home storage cloud? Anyway, I've been following ZFS for a while, but I'm truely surprised by the speed of this development. Can't wait to check it out.
Apple announced new MacBook Pros (with 15 and 17 inch screens) this morning. Based around Intel's Santa Rosa platform and powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processors at 2.16 and 2.33 GHz. The 15 inch sports a brand new LED powered screen. Base configurations come with 2 GB of RAM, upgradeable to 4 GB. This is my next computer as soon as I earn enough money to afford it.