Is science fiction driving science reality? I recently watched the TED talk in which John Underkoffler demonstrated the three-dimensional operating system inteface designed for the movie Minority Report. I find it fascinating that Hollywood now has such high production standards, necessitated by ever-increasing audience sophistication, that it becomes easier for them to commission real research than to fake it. Video…

Distributed issue tracking I was checking out one of Zed Shaw’s latest projects, MulletDB when I realized that the project used Fossil , a source control system that I had never heard of before. As I checked around the Fossil site, I realized that this is just what I needed for a lot of my projects. I want to keep…

Developers as toolsmiths I was thinking the other day about software development when it occurred to me that as developers, we are primarily creating tools. Using tools to create tools, more specifically. There is a huge continuum of tools that we might be involved with – tools for ourselves, tools for our users, tools for generating other tools – you…

Embedding IronJS Update : This post covers an obsolete version of IronJS. For details on embedding the new stuff I have a new article here . I’m looking at alternatives to JScript for my latest project, Node.net . I cut the initial code using JScript because the level of integration with the .NET framework made it possible to keep the…

Node.net – Node.js implemented in Javascript on the .NET runtime – Update: This has gotten more attention after I posted this and I haven’t gotten around to doing another post. I started working on a v8 port of this after the initial JScript version just to see if it was feasible after I got some comments suggesting using v8 instead…

Jath – A JSON template language for XML processing On Saturday, I released a project called Jath that implements a technique for processing XML data that I have been playing with. The idea is to be able to write a concise declarative template in JSON that describes the desired Javascript object and apply the template to the source XML data.…

Getting unstuck by trusting your process Image by wallyg via Flickr Everyone has that looming project that either seems huge and foreboding or maybe it seems small and is progressing at an embarrassingly slow pace. Either way, it is easy to get stuck by over thinking things. One thing that a musician mentor of mine used to say was to…

Javascript zen: the class is the object I was reading Douglas Crockford’s book `Javascript: the Good Parts’ when I came across an example involving a parser that was seemingly unrelated to the section that it appeared in (Section 5.3, p51). I re-read the section and then looked at the example again, wondering how such an oversight could have occurred in…

The value of free coding Image via Wikipedia In a time where nearly every mainstream development environment has the benefit of IDE support including source-level debugging, auto completion and even incremental compilation as we type, I think that there is still value in stripping things down to just a text editor and a compiler. I have met developers who have…

How not to write an email opt-out page Periodically, I take a hard look at what shows up in my email inbox. Invariably a few emails are sitting there because I either opted in to something unwittingly or perhaps I opted in knowingly but now the emails have worn out their welcome. Either way, it is time for a purge.…