Frank Borman Interview

An excellent interview with Frank Borman.

Frankenstein

Rick sent me this video of The Edgar Winter Group performing Frankenstein!

JavaGami

From this post by Mark Guzdial, JavaGami looks interesting.

Installing Your Own Apps on Android

Question: How do I install my own apps, that I've written, onto my Android phone?

Answer: http://code.google.com/android/intro/develop-and-debug.html

Ubuntu Releases, Versions, and Names

I can never remember the various Ubuntu release names, their version numbers, and the correlations. It's all at this site:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/

Here's a partial list:

• Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS (Dapper Drake)
  
• Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
  
• Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
  
• Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)
  
• Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS (Hardy Heron)
  
• Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
  

Even older releases are at this site:

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/

The releases themselves are.

• Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog)
  
• Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)
  
• Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
  
• Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
  
• Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
  

The current release is the Intrepid Ibex.

Ubuntu 9.04 will be Jaunty Jackalope.

Hello World from Android

This is my first post and Internet message of any kind from the Google Android phone.

Happy Winter Solstice!

The winter solstice this year occurred this morning at Sunday 21 Dec 2008 07:04 EST (12:04 UTC).

Lights on Computers

Hah!  Something just occurred to me.

In the old days, even in the 70s when I first became exposed to computers, it was normal to represent the contents of memory registers as blinking lights.  By the 70s these were red LEDs of course, which were lower power.

These days equipment has lights but it's usually a flashing LED for network activity on a port, power lights, run status lights, and such.

But what if a modern computer was attached to a display that had an LED for every bit in every CPU register!  What would that look like?  Well, at CPU speed the changes would be so fast that all of the LEDs would probably all glow at a nearly equal continuous glow.  If some bits were statistically more often a one or zero, they would be slightly brighter or dimmer than average.  So you'd actually have to, I suppose, just periodically sample register state to get actual blinking.

With 32-bit and 64-bit registers and lots of them, it would be an interesting display.  With today's absurd multi-colored LEDs, it would also be a pretty display.

LEDs are also absurdly bright now.  In the HPC ELLIPSE cluster at Emory, each X2200 had a bright green LED which was pretty much too bright to look at.  Due to the color of green and the brightness of these lights, I'm convinced they are the same LEDs that are used in green traffic lights.

They also had locator lights (which you can flash with software to find a particular machine—a common feature on high-density, clustered machines these days).  The locator light was a blueish white LED that's as bright as what they use in those new flashlights, meaning it was like a spot light!

Lost in Space! and the Burroughs B-205

My long time friend Phillip told me about IMDB featuring all the full episodes of Lost in Space!  The streaming is actually by Hulu.  This is actually a great Christmas present!

I hadn't seen this show very much over the years and it was one of my favorites in the past.  

It was interesting to watch the two pilots.  The first pilot was pretty laid back and almost like Disney's Swiss Family Robinson, no accident I'm sure!  It appears as Episode 0 in this list.

Then they produced a second pilot ,which wrote in both Dr. Smith and the Robot, and takes the form of a two-part series.  Looking down the epidode list it appears that they reused the removed sections from the first pilot in later shows during the first season.

The first pilot also used the theme music from The Day the Earth Stood Still which made it sort of neat.  The real jet pack, the Bell Rocket Belt, appears in the first pilot, too, though not really operating of course—it's a dummy suspended on a wire or something like that.

I was  struck by the computers that appeared in Alpha Control and again in the Jupiter Two space ship.  When I looked these up, I found they were actually consoles from the Burroughs B-205!  It turns out that the B-205 was used in many TV shows and movies like Batman, The Time Tunnel, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, and more!  I now realize that this machine strongly influenced my idea of what a computer looked like in the mid-60s.

The B-205 was a fascinating decimal-based computer (not binary really) with rotating-drum memory, i.e., no electronic memory in the usual sense!  Numbers were made up of decimal digits represented by four-bit bytes (which means some patters were left over of course).

The console displays the registers and their bit patterns with lights, as many computers did in those days.

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.php?c=45

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/images/manuals/

The Lost in Space autographed picture is from  www.1st4autographs.com.

The Burroughs console is from the TV show Batman, 20th Century Fox Television, Greenway Production, ABC, and DC Comics.

A-Z of Programming Languages

Techworld has been featuring a series of interviews with the creators of various programming langauges.  It's hard to find a “home page” for the series but here's the most recent page, I think.

The interviews aren't excellent and are repetitive at times, they are probably done by email, but still interesting reads particularly when you place the various authors' responses side by side.  Warning, the Stroustrup interview is interesting but almost unbearably long.  It's not really that long but it seems that way sometimes.

Rocket Man

It's pretty much old news now, but rocket man Yves Rossy crossed the English Channel using his back-mounted rocket wings on 26 Sep 2008.

Unfortunately, on the National Geographic video (and on the TV show which I actually watched) I think they looped in a rocket sound while he was flying. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck0kWgI4TFU

http://www.jet-man.com/prod/index_en.html

What's All This Fuss About Erlang?

A nice article on Erlang on the Pragmatic Programmers.

Quote of the Day

The economy outside is frightful, but our machines are so delightful…

—Jerry Pournelle

Which Programming Paradigm

Once again this age old question comes up on Slashdot with a focus on the question of which paradigm should be learned, imperative, OOP, or functional.  The usual discussions of various languages ensues.

There was also this discussion of programming languages (“for Linux”).

Here's a book!  In one of the posts, this book (which is said to be used for the introductory programming class at MIT) is linked to:   Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Albelson, Sussman and Sussman, MIT Press, 1996.  The entire text is on-line.

My Humble Opinion

Oh, you want to know what I think?

I think the order should be:

1. Imperative language
2. OOP
3. I'm not even sure about functional yet, but it should probably be learned at some point.

I would add the principles of structured programming into the process of learning procedural programming using the imperative language.

What language do I currently think should be taught as a first programming language?

Python.

What order did I learn in?

Please note this caveat:  I'm not suggesting this as an order that should be followed now.  The years over which I learned these languages span from the mid 1970s to the present and this order is strongly linked to the history of the development of programming and languages.

Focusing on mainly the languages that mattered somehow, and skipping those that I dabbled in some.

1. FORTRAN
2. BASIC (almost immediately after)
3. Pascal (structured programming)
4. Modula-2  (modules!)
5. C   (and the world of UNIX)
6. Objective-C  (my first OOPL)
7. Perl   (more real work than in any other language)
8. Smalltalk (OO purity)
9. Python  (The same slot as Perl)

I learned BASIC on the CDC Cyber mainframe computer and in later years used it on micro computers.  (Remember when they were called micro computers?  Hah.  I wonder when that term went out of use?  Probably around the time the so-called micros became more powerful than the mainframes&hellip).

What about LISP?  Well, I learned it around the same time that I learned Pascal, but never did a whole that was useful with it.

Neil Young

Some Neil Young videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7M1Se-p7uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq0tAoO3-xQ

Chrome is now my Default

I've now made Google Chrome the default browser on the two Windows systems that I regularly use at home, one of which is my main desktop system.

Internal IT Departments

I enjoyed this line quote from an industry analyst by Jerry Pournelle in his Chaos Manor Reviews regarding cloud computing.

…with business groups doing end-runs around their Soviet-style lethargic, inefficient, overpriced internal IT departments in order to get things done quickly and more cheaply.

Star Trek Trailers

Here is a trailer on YouTube for the new Star Trek movie.

While looking for it, I also found this trailer for new remastering of the original series.

Ice Age

Jerry Pournelle comments on the ice age.

We are back to ice: there is now serious but not conclusive evidence, convincing to some, that the only thing preventing a new ice age is CO2; and we are busily removing CO2. Now admittedly the serious studies anticipate this happening over a fairly long time period. On the other hand, all the historical evidence is that ice ages happen fast. England went from deciduous trees to frost plains to ice in well under a hundred years, and to kilometers of ice in another hundred. There is similar evidence from lakes in Belgium. When the ice comes, it comes fast.

Note that climate changes are odd. A few miles south of the ice wall average temperatures were not all that much colder than they are now. The ice didn't extinguish life; but it sure made large parts of Europe and North America uninhabitable. Ice is a [far] greater threat than a few degrees of temperature rise between [now] and the end of the century. Prudence demands that we continue to look at the CO2 rise. Prudence also demands that we not wreck the global economy in order to play carbon restriction games that, according to even the most optimistic models, will have only a tiny effect on the average temperature of the Earth in 2090.

Spam Host Cut Off

The Washington Post reports on the disconnection of one of the key spam sites.

E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening.

Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second.

Also…

Multiple security researchers have recently published data naming McColo as the host for all of the top robot networks or "botnets," which are vast collections of hacked computers that are networked together to blast out spam or attack others online. These include SecureWorks, FireEye and ThreatExpert.

Reports by Joe Stewart, director of malware research for Atlanta-based SecureWorks, said that these known botnets: Mega-D, Srizbi, Pushdo, Rustock and Warezov, "have their master servers hosted at McColo.