How the pantheon has lasted 2000 years without steel in its concrete
This famous building stands in the business district of Rome--much as it was built some 18 centuries ago. Amazingly, it has withstood the ravages of both the elements and war permitting a firsthand view of a unique product constructed by Roman hands. Now, it is exposed to acid rain and fumes from passing automobiles…
How to find start-up ideas
Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potent…
How CRE made SEOmoz $1 million
Our CRE Methodology™ increased SEOmoz’s revenue by $1 million a year. This case study reveals how we did it. What can our methodology do for your business?
Stuck in Code
An ex colleague let's call him.. uhh .. Vivek, who was my peer at MegaCorp many years ago who is presently VP of R&D at [very well known c...
Update on Deolalikar’s Proof that P≠NP
An update on the P not equal to NP proof Timothy Gowers, Gil Kalai, Ken Regan, Terence Tao, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian are some of the top people who are trying to unravel what is up with the cl…
A crazy Ruby quine: a spinning globe.
RubyConf に参加するためには、やっぱり 山手 quine みたいに東京限定ネタは通じにくいですよね。これからは Quine もグローバルでないといけないと感じました。 でも世界的に有名な環状線とか知らないので、世界的に有名な回るものを書いてみました。 v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8, _@7gj*LJ=c5nM)Tp1g0%Xv.,S[<>YoP 4ZojjV)O>qIH1/n[|2yE[>:ieC "%.#% :::##" 97N-A&Kj_K_><wS5rtWk@*a+Y5 yH?b[F^e7C/56j|pmRe+:)B "##% ::#########…
Proving P!=NP: "...Ryan has taken the first real baby step in decades."
On October 8th, when in my graduate complexity course as we discussed the 1987 Razborov-Smolensky result that one can't compute the Mod p b...
Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business
There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, …
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
Cash Cow Disease: The Cognitive Decline of Microsoft and Google
Watching the recent product retraction of Google Wave convinced me that Google is fully infected with the same protracted, end-stage wasting...
Your Version Control and Build Systems Don't Scale
Let's spend a minute and talk about the performance of a tool you use every day: your build system. For this purpose, they're all the same, so let's assume you use GNU Make. For a no-op build, what is Make's running time? You know, that O(N) stuff.
Is Good Code Impossible?
I'm a Staff iOS Developer living in Denver, Colorado, who's been building mobile apps for 17 years!
Thoughts on OnLive
Today OnLive officially launched. If you haven't heard of it, OnLive is an ambitious new gaming service with a unique proposition: instead…
I have to think (and experiment) every single time
I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?