[Smalltalk]

Using a Wiki for Software Documentation

While working on my C++ Portable Components library and thinking about its documentation I got the idea to use a Wiki to enhance the documentation of the whole thing.

The idea is as follows: I have a tool that generates HTML documentation for the complete class library from the inline documentation in the C++ header files. Basically, a HTML page is generated for every C++ class (the same way that JavaDoc works). The generator now simply adds a link to a Wiki page for every C++ class and method. On the Wiki page, additional example code, tips and tricks, as well as user comments and questions will be collected, thus augmenting the automatically generated documentation.

With this concept, it is quite easy for users of the software to find all the relevant documentation. No need to search separate "knowledge bases" or browse through endless lists of Frequently Asked Questions.

Of course it would also be nice to make the actual reference page for a class itself a Wiki page. But since this documentation will be frequently re-generated, this would make the implementation of the whole thing quite different, so the automatically generated page will be separate from the Wiki page for now.

Next thing is to decide on which Wiki software to use...

13 Ways to use a Mac Mini

Michelle Delio of the MIT technology Review presents 13 new ways to use a Mac Mini. Regarding item #5, there is already a project underway to turn the Mini into a media center.

How Nerdy Are You?

IT and Sand Castles

... IT is like children building sand castles on the beach and watching the tide roll in. Just great.

On Simplicity

A great talk by Adam Bosworth, given at ICSOC04.

Ah, them 80's

Finally, today I could no longer resist that odd urge that's been creeping inside of me for quite some time now, and so I went to the iTunes music store to grab me some pop music from the 1980's. For some reason, the music that one's been exposed to in his or her childhood gets a special place in one's brain, and every time one listens to such a song there comes such a strange warm and fuzzy feeling that can't be accurately described... Okay, so I got myself some Mr. Mister, Cutting Crew, Starship and Foreigner, and it just sounds sooo great.

And while we're talking of music. I have the feeling that the new iPod shuffle, despite its technical limitations (or more so, just because of its limitations due to the super-easy user interface), will be a huge success for Apple again. I think I'll buy myself one. I need an USB memory stick anyway.

Microsoft Guy Explains WS-*

Omri Gazitt (interviewed by Scoble explains the Web Services protocol stack. The key statement was basically: You, as a developer, won't have to know how all this stuff works... Only about a dozen people in the world will have to know how all this works. Now, this only helps to enforce my bad feelings about all this stuff. Imagine Tim Berners Lee, 14 years ago, saying the same thing about HTTP. The reason so many people currently just use pure XML over HTTP is because they understand how it works.

Microsoft Shows Us The Future

As everybody knows by now, Bill Gates gave us the laugh of the month during his yesterday's CES keynote. The Microsoft CES keynote web page, which also has streaming video of the keynote (currently unavailable...) promises us to "see the future. today." Ironically, the future, according to Microsoft, does not differ much from today.

Well, to spare you the viewing of the lengthy, and, apart from Conan O'Brien's jokes, rather boring event, below is the most interesting part of it (about 1:13:35 into the video, during the Forza Motorsport demo):

As one can see, this is an apparently new strain of the well known species of the "bluescreen". This one presents itself as an "Assertion Failure" caused by a low memory condition and seems to come from the game application rather than from the kernel. On the other hand, this might also be the Xbox variant of a bluescreen, I do not know. And, honestly, I do not care either...

Why Online Music Subscription Services Won't Work

Despite the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers songs for $ 0.99 a piece (and $ 9.99 for most albums), the exec's of Napster and Yahoo still believe that subscription-based music downloads are the future.

So these guys want me to pay 10 bucks a month just for the right to listen to music I have downloaded from them? And 5 bucks extra if I want to listen to that music on an iPod (oh, wait, it won't even work with an iPod, I'd have to buy one of these shitty Microsoft DRM infected music players...). And I can't event burn that music to a CD, to listen to it in my car, or to back it up, for example.

That guy from Napster argues that it would cost me $ 10.000 to fill my iPod with music. As if I did not already have hundreds of CDs to start with. And given all that shit that record labels put out these days, it's very unlikely that I even buy one CD a month, so paying $ 15 a month definitely is too much. And the worst thing of all: once I cancel my membership (or the subscription service goes out of business, which isn't all that unlikely given their butthead execs), all that music I downloaded will be gone forever.

So let's do some math here. Say I buy 10 albums a year, plus a few individual songs. At the iTunes Music Store this would cost me about $ 150. I can burn the music to CDs and listen to it for the rest of my life. On Napster (to pick one example), the subscription is $ 15 monthly ($ 10 + $ 5 for the right to load the music to a portable player). Say, I want to listen to that music for the next 15 years, this would cost me $ 2700 (= 15*12*15). Whereas iTunes would be $ 2250 (= 150x15). But the catch is, if I do not buy any music again from the iTunes store, I can still listen to the (for example $ 150 worth of) music I already have for the rest of my life. Once I stop giving money to Napster, all the music I already got from them is gone. Poof. Sounds like a convincing business model to me: f*ck your customers and see how much they can take.

IDEs, circa 1986

Being bored while waiting for Visual Studio .NET 2003 to install, I got the idea to try out whether Turbo Pascal 3.0, a state-of-the-art integrated development environment from 1986, would run on my XP system. Fortunately, Borland made the antique software available to the public free of charge, so I downloaded it (a whopping 170209 bytes), unpacked it, and, much to my surprise, it ran on my Windows XP system - at lightning speed. Imagine a complete IDE running from the CPU cache. Like one would expect, compiling even the largest sample programs takes just fractions of a second (what would take minutes back then).

The IDE actually came in three versions - one using software floating point operations, one for the 8087, and one using BCD arithmetics for financial applications.

Click the above image to see all files included on the original diskette.

The 39 K TURBO.COM executable includes the editor, compiler and runtime system. Note the question whether to include the error messages. One could gain a few additional KBytes for source code editing and compiling by leaving the error messages out (numerical error codes would be displayed instead). Those were the days...

Steve Wozniak Talk

ITConversations has a podcast of a talk given by Steve Wozniak, held at Gnomedex 4.0. Steve mostly talks about his youth (school, college), up to the days of founding Apple and building the Apple ][. Great show!