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iPad Mini: the Goldilocks iPad for kids
With the growing swell of articles about the still-hypothetical iPad Mini — see, for example, this thoughtful analysis over at Vodkapundit — I find it interesting that I see very little written about one of the hottest consumer niches for the iPad: kids. Which is surprising, since kids desperately want to get their hands on […]
Really poor web programming at AA.com
I travel a fair amount on business, though it can really vary from year to year and even during a given year. As it happened, I traveled a lot last year, requalifying for Platinum status on American Airlines. My wife traveled with me a lot as well, and she actually ended up with Gold status, […]
A possible game-changer in industrial robots
Via Slashdot come a link to this MIT video (sorry, can’t find a way to embed it) about the work that Rodney Baxter (founder of iRobot) is doing to develop a new kind of industrial robot: cheap (~$22K), safe, and programmable by factory workers. What rings true in Brooks’ commentary is that people will find […]
“Ground-truth documents”
A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its […]
New series of posts (at bfwa.com): Readings in Software Engineering
Over at bfwa.com, I’ve started a new series of posts that will present brief reviews of and excerpts from my library of software engineering and IT project management texts. Here’s the introduction to the series; and here’s the first post, covering Jerry Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming. ..bruce..