I’m at UH’s Software Engineering Conference again. Notes on some of the speakers:- Ben Galbraith – ajaxian.comThe conference organizers gave out incentives for the audience to ask questions: free books! In response to my one question (toward the end of the day), I received two books: Grady Booch’s classic on Object-Oriented Design (already had it), and another book I’ve never heard of: What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. It’s been a very fun read so far: introducing personalities in our industry that I’m already familiar with (Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, etc.), but in a whole new light: sex, drugs, and rock & roll! Lots of acid trips here. To note: Bill Gates completely missed out on this aspect of the personal computer industry 🙂
Month: October 2007
SEC – Software Engineering Conference
I’m at the SEC. Conference at the University of Houston right now. This looks to be a very interesting event. Unfortunately, one of the major speakers, Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of the C++ language, had to cancel his talk. I’ll report on other speakers, if they excite me.
iPhone
I purposely keep a bit behind on the technology gadget curve; otherwise, I’d buy every new technology as soon as I could play with it! Instead, I wait until I truly “need” it. Well, I had been planning for quite a while to replace my current phone with something a bit more advanced, like keep my calender and contacts at my fingertips. But, verizon has crippled their Bluetooth phones , making such features highly unlikely. But, I was locked in a contract! I’ve had “October 2007” earmarked in my calender quite some time now! Coincidently, along came the iPhone. At first I ignored the hype. But after I got one of these babies in my hands, all I could say was “wow!”
This is a remarkably amazing interface. Apple has always been leaders in user interface/human factors design, and this device takes them to new heights. Awesome – are there any better superlatives I can use?
I’m hooked.
— from my iPhone
OpMom
Yesterday evening, I dropped in on the OpMom launch party. This is a new social networking site, devoted to busy moms. This is another interesting Houston-based software company, founded by — of course, a busy mom.
Check out the site — it’s pretty cool.
KPFT @ NetSquared
Ernesto Aguilar, Program Director for KPFT, spoke at NetSquared last night. It was an interesting discussion. One thing he brought up was the issue of copyrights for content they have started to archive. They’re interested in the Creative Commons license model, but also want to be able to make money off their material too.
Recently, I had wrote Ernesto, asking him advice on performance rights, so it’s interesting to see this issue is relevant to KPFT too. I encouraged him to adopt a Creative Commons license, one of the non-commercial licenses, and then come up with an easy mechanism to license their content for performance, reproduction, or film synchronization.
Now, to find an “easy mechanism” – that’s the hard part 🙂 It’s something, though, I’ve been thinking about doing …
Web 2.0 and Tea
Since we like tea so much, I was tickled to see this “Earl Tea” product: http://urltea.com/
Cute. Very cute.
Measuring Web Illiteracy
Here’s a little game to play: google a common word. Make a note of the count on the upper right side of the search results page. Call that y. Now, google for a misspelling of that same word. Call it’s result count x.
The ratio
x/y
can be called the World Wide “Web Misspelling Ratio”. We can express it as a percentage, and call it wemiss for short, pronounced like maybe how Marlon Brandon might say, “You are wemiss in not using a spelling checker on your web pages.”
What words have the highest wemiss measure? Searching for a few of my pet peeves, I’ve found: