July 28, 2005
A Visit to Adobe
Someone from PhotoshopNews.com got a tour of the Adobe headquarters in San Jose and took some photos there. Wow.
July 22, 2005
Wil Shipley Interview
DrunkenBlog has an interview with Wil Shipley, founder of The Omni Group and Delicious Monster.
My favorite quote from the interview:
Frameworks are the substance of programming. You build on top of a good one, your program is solid and fast and comes together beautifully. You build on top of a bad one, your life is miserable, brutish, and short.
My words, my words...
July 21, 2005
Driven by Mac OS X
A research team from UC Irvine has built a fully autonomous VW Touareg for participation in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The Touareg, nick-named Dora, is controlled by five Mac minis, running Mac OS X and a bunch of commercial and proprietary software. Gives a whole new meaning to "Powered by Mac OS X".
July 18, 2005
New Office
Last week I finally moved my office out of my apartment and into a nice office building only about two kilometers from home. Although the new office is really nice, it will only be a temporary home for Applied Informatics. In a few months my company will move again, into a spacious office space upstairs in the same building.
Another view of the office:
The office building:
July 06, 2005
No Software Patents for Europe!
Today the EU Parliament voted down the bill on software patents. Heise Online (in German), Yahoo and others carry the news. Great!
Programming — Art or Science
ONLamp has an essay by John Littler discussing the relationship between computer programming and art. Included in the essay are quotes on that topic from various luminaries. My favorite quotes are from Fred Brooks:
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
and Bjarne Stroustrup:
When done right, art and craft blends seamlessly. That's the view of several schools of design, though of course not the view of people into "art as provocation".
Define "craft"; define "art". The crafts and arts that I appreciate blend seamlessly into each other so that there is no dilemma.
Also, Paul Graham has lots to say about that topic.
Paul's words make me remember the time when I went to college, in the late 1980's. In the introductory courses on computer programming, I was taught the concept of "desktop testing". You would first write your program on a piece of paper. Then, using pencil, eraser and another piece of paper, you would run through the program line by line and write down the value of each variable as it changed. All to verify that the program did what it was intended to do, before coming even near a computer. Well, that were the old days when computer time was far more valuable than programmer time. But I digress.
In my opinion, programming is definitely a craft, but an excellently crafted piece of software, same as an exceptional piece of architecture or industrial design, qualifies as art. On the other hand, a lot of software is so badly designed and implemented that it certainly falls under "art as provocation" ;-)