Technology Commentary

Welcome to Technology Short Take #183! Fall is in the air; the nights and mornings are cooler and the leaves are turning (or have already turned in some areas!). I’ve got a slightly smaller collection of links for you this time around, but I do hope that you’ll find something shared here useful. Enjoy!

If you read my previous article on DOS memory models, you may have dismissed everything I wrote as “legacy cruft from the 1990s that nobody cares about any longer”.  It's time to see how any of that carried over through the 16-bit to 64-bit evolution.

Most of the time, when we develop software or even use software, we play within the safe boundaries of the operating system. We might not know how the network interface welcomes that IP packet, nor ho

Consider the ROI

NoSQL struggles at scale, distributed SQL offers a stronger solution.

Microtext for the Commodore might have been lost forever if not for the sleuthing of Christian Simpson's Retro Recipes.

A key advantage of AI in SDK generation is its ability to handle mundane tasks. But a hybrid model is best, with the dev firmly in charge.

Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al …

A cool way to emulate functional programming syntax

I like to home roll abstractions, but commoditize implementations. What I mean by that is a fairly simple rule that has a very powerful effect, but can be tricky to find the right balance.

Helene was Western North Carolina’s Katrina—especially for the counties surrounding Asheville: Buncombe, Mitchell, Henderson, McDowell, Rutherford, Haywood, Yancey, Burke, and some adjacent o…

Back in March I wrote about the Jonathan, a computer Apple worked on in the 1980s that was designed around modularity: In that post, I wrote: My understanding is that the project never made it past the “conversations and mockups” stage. I get why the Jonathan never made it beyond the concept phase, but part [...]

I try to be a friendly citizen of the web. I try to keep my site in good shape. It should load quickly, track nothing beyond your basic server logs, not hassle you about cookies, GDPR or my newsletter. I do have a newsletter but it won't pop up in your face here. I try to stay firmly on the side of friendly and a good experience in how I run this site.

After many, many years of great service, I’m looking to replace Fastlane with plain Shell script files, which I hope will result in faster builds and…less Ruby.

Choosing the right policy agent to handle your authorization is not a simple task - each offers its benefits and has its drawbacks. How to choose? Read here.

I’m hunting for the woman whose use of an early chatbot turned the inventor against his creation.

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Learn how code review anxiety impacts developers and organizations, hindering collaboration and productivity and discover actionable insights to foster a positive code review culture.

Malkovich. Malkovich. Malkovich?

First a small detour # I program in Objective-C and Swift daily, because those are the languages that Apple requires developers to use to build software for their platform. It’s not a strict requirement to use any of these two languages if you go cross-platform, but for good integration you would eventually have to write platform code in them. After using Swift for more than 5 years I can confidently say that it’s getting worse with each addition, very similar to how C++ ended up being the monster it is.

The automotive industry’s switch from carburetion to fuel injection was one of the most effective advancements of the 20th century. Electronic fuel injection allows for precise control over an internal combustion engine’s air-fuel mixture, which dramatically improves fuel efficiency and performance. But that requires computer oversight, which is why Kenyan engineer Peter Mbiria developed his own […]

By Philip Moscovitch This item originally appeared as VIEWS in Morning File, September 17, 2024 By now, it feels like we have heard most of the arguments and theories about the decline of journalism: The industry was too slow to respond to the new ways of doing business ushered in by the internet; the people […]

Stop treating it like one

AWS is now 18 years old and Google’s first cloud compute service, App Engine, was released 16 years old. One might think that cloud…

We had some performance issues last week. Entirely of our own making but not in the usual way. We nearly DDOS ourselves by sending out emails. We do a lot of analysis in Energy Sparks and, to be ho…