Products
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. NOTE: First draft. Up until now I’ve been talking about a “product” …
The Role of The Company
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. NOTE: I’m hopping around, and will continue to do so through the …
Introduction: Overview
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. NOTICE: usual disclaimer applies. First draft. Structure of this book …
Introduction: Who Should Read This Book
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. So that’s where I’m coming from. Let’s talk about where you’re coming …
Introduction: Why I'm Writing This Book
This post was an early draft of material for my book The New Programmer’s Survival Manual, now published by Pragmatic Programmers. NOTICE: this is a first draft for PragProgWriMo. It’s not polished. …
PragProWriMo: My Book
The guys at Pragmatic Bookshelf are issuing a challenge: write the first draft of a tech book in a month. I’m taking them up on it. Every weekday in November I’ll be posting a couple pages worth of my …
Motorola Envoy
Operating System: Magic Cap 1.0, later 1.5. Pros: ARDIS radio modem, sturdy clamshell design, two PC Card slots. Cons: Price of ARDIS radio service, non-backlit screen, slow-mo user experience. …
ARRL Field Day 2008
What do you say to two guys in a public park with two huge antennas and an improvised hut in the middle? “Are you trying to talk to the aliens?” We got that one about three times. The most common …
Understanding Ham Radio Speak
If you’ve ever hung around an amateur radio operator (a/k/a ham), you may have heard something like this: I was hoping for some 20m PSK31 DX yesterday evening but I only got some local QSOs on …
Boulder/Denver Ruby Group: MapReduce
Here are slides from my presentation at the Boulder/Denver Ruby Group on “Simple MapReduce with Ruby and Rinda.” This is much of the same material as my article on the topic, but it focuses on the …
Simple MapReduce in Ruby
Here’s a simple version of the MapReduce framework presented in the now-famous Google paper by Dean and Ghemawat. My version of MapReduce is not intended as a usable high-performance framework, but …
Boulder/Denver Ruby Group Presentation
Here are slides from my presentation at the Boulder/Denver Ruby Group last night. It’s Ruby-focused “Lessons Learned” based on the project I’ve been leading this year, the software for Spectra …
Why I'm Not a [Insert Language Here] Programmer
I have over a decade of professional C++ experience, but I don’t call myself a “C++ Programmer.” Am I competent with programming in C++? Yes, very much so. But I refuse to let my skills be …
DataRover 840F ROM Flashing Card
JET very kindly unearthed a treasure chest containing the One True ROM Image for DataRover 840s, a PC Card that will flash a 840’s ROM to Magic Cap 3.1.2j. This card can be used to re-flash a ‘rover …
Mouse Haiku
cordless mouse skitters no cursor movement on screen batteries are dead
Boulder-Denver Ruby User's Group
Last night I attended the inaugural meeting of the Boulder-Denver Ruby User’s Group. “Meeting” was a term used in the loose sense–it was more a gaggle of Ruby enthusiasts sitting around tables with …
How to Paint Your Keyboard
I’ve done a heck of a lot of typing over the past ten years, and my keyboards show it. They look grimy and beaten down, but continue to work flawlessly. After doing a rubik’s cube paint job on my …
Magic Cap Developer Documentation
These are documents from the Magic Cap SDK which may be of interest to the community, particularly those into software development and usability. Warning to developers digging for ideas: some topics …
The Kinesis Contoured Keyboard and Dvorak Layout
When I first moved to Silicon Valley I worked crazy hours. I loved my job and I needed to prove myself, so I was coding like crazy. That translates to typing like crazy, and it wasn’t long before that …
The Future of Magic Cap
Question: Whatever became of Magic Cap? Will it ever be released into the public domain? Is OpenMagic happening behind closed doors somewhere? Answer: Unfortunately, no. Here’s the story according to …
Byte-O-Honey
CujoChat: IRC for Magic Cap!
CujoChat is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Magic Cap communicators. IRC is a multi-user, real-time conferencing/chat system running on the Internet. Users talk on topic-oriented channels, …
Sony HIX-300: "Bamboo"
Operating System: Magic Cap pre-1.0. Pros: Slim form factor, cool looks (perhaps the coolest). Cons: Awful screen, custom battery, difficult left-handed operation. History Bamboo was a mystery to me: …
MagicHTTP: The Portable Web Server
As I was digging through some backup CDs I stumbled onto this little gem from my General Magic days. MagicHTTP was a web server I built in early 1996 that ran on Magic Cap personal communicators. Not …