October 2012
1 post
An Open Letter to Apple on App Financing
Dear Apple,
With Amazon’s recent decision to begin lending capital to sellers, I thought it was time to suggest the possibility that you could do the same for your App Store developers.
It’s tremendously difficult for independent developers to raise funds for their projects. Many of us have gone for extended periods with little or no income, putting our savings towards finishing...
September 2012
1 post
The Slowness of Virtuality
I need to get something written, so I was just thinking how agonizing it is to draw something like a conic section in Google Sketchup. I finally got it to work, but it was so much slower than just using a lathe in real life.
It got me to thinking about how slow it is to do anything on the computer. In the old days, if I wanted to test out a little transmission with gears in Legos, I just built...
July 2012
1 post
A Mistake in Go
It’s been 3 months since I last wrote, now that freelancing takes 100% of my time. I’ve fallen into the busy trap.
So I decided to post something, anything, to get past my writer’s block. I was reading this jgc article about Go and it all sounds about right to me, and I think very highly of Go because it breaks the cold hard strictness of other languages to give us the...
March 2012
1 post
Solve My Biggest Problem and I'll Solve Yours
I have not written for some time. For the last year, I’ve been freelancing online and fixing old Macs to bootstrap my shareware business. It takes all of my time. Here is a table of the startup process, as I’ve experienced it as a “technical cofounder”:
Stage Effort Timescale
----------------------------------------
Discovery 0% 1 day (hackers know what to...
February 2012
2 posts
Functionless Programming
In my last post I gave my take on why every API is flawed. I realize that sounds defeatist but consider that it’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are a multitude of problems with programming today, and even if we set out to solve each one, we have to consider that the rest of the world isn’t likely to follow our example. So instead of changing the world, I want to talk about how I...
Every API is Flawed
Apologists annoy me. As hackers, we make all kinds of excuses for why things are a certain way, and then we route around the damage and encapsulate it away inside our own APIs. John Carmack once said (as I recall) that if a system API is good enough, then we don’t need a library. Libraries (especially open source) exist because of fundamental flaws in operating systems that make them...
January 2012
3 posts
All In
I wake up as my phone rings and check the number. Another long distance area code, probably a debt collector. I push the button and set my head back down on my arms but realize it’s been twenty minutes so I should probably get back to work. The screen comes into focus, the first tab open to a protocol description for an encrypted p2p wireless network. Tabs cascade off the right side of the...
Homesteading
I read this concise response from Joel Spolsky the other day on the best way to divide ownership of a startup:
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/6949/forming-a-new-software-startup-how-do-i-allocate-ownership-fairly/23326#23326
Discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3489719
General points:
Startups are organized into pyramids with early arrivers receiving larger shares of...
Sopa on a Ropa
It’s been about a month since my last post because I was pre-protesting SOPA. Ok actually I’ve been knee deep in code, doing my best to transition to a new life beyond the soul-sucking job. There’s so much I want to say about that adventure over the last year, and I will, but not today. Instead I want to talk about people that tell other people what to do.
I’ve come to...
December 2011
1 post
Blowback
This is two posts in one, since I was scrambling to finish a small contract and just got done.
First off, if you can’t get GLSL shaders to work in OpenGL ES2, they never tell you that you have to have BOTH a GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER and a GL_VERTEX_SHADER attached to your shader program, or else it will compile fine but sit forever and never link, and glGetShaderInfoLog()...
November 2011
2 posts
And You Thought c++ Was Bad
UPDATE: this has been solved, thanks to Anonymous posting this link in the comments. It turns out it was very much like what I was saying, it was checking a reference to the variable instead of its contents JUST like c++ does. This is a case of there being a “proper” way to use the language, but many of the edge cases work fine so the web is swamped with examples that work through a...
Who Built the Pyramids
I spent the last two posts talking about what’s going to happen because of the 99% movement and how it will affect us. We are already seeing people pulling their money out of banks and general strikes are just around the corner. This won’t have as much of an impact as people think, because the banks no longer hold money, they hold debt. So the next step will probably be people...
October 2011
6 posts
Watershed Moments
Yesterday I wrote about what I think is going to happen as a result of the 99% Occupy Wall Street movement. Today I’m going to imagine what it will mean for us. I’ve been curiously amused by media coverage of the protests (where there is any) because it so comically misses the point of all of this. It’s like the story of the blind men and the elephant. They each feel a different...
The New American Patriots
The Occupy Wall Street protests are finally here and it only took 30 years. I’m going to cut to the chase. I’ve known something was terribly wrong in America for pretty much my entire life. I know that you are a smart person so you did too. So let’s skip the review and do what we do best and extrapolate what’s going to happen now.
My constituency is small. I have no money...
Fix Your DVD Drive for Free
My last few posts have been kind of heavy and I decided it was time for something completely different.
So right now I’m in the do-it-yourself computer repair biz bootstrapping my way towards being a successful indie app developer. I fix a lot of older G5 iMacs and PowerBooks and the occasional MacBook. So far the most failure prone devices I’ve found are the slim and super slim...
Formal Nondeterminism
This is part three of my rant on the dismal state of computing and what to do about it. My last post was pretty vague and people have complained that I’m not offering tangible solutions. They also seem to fall into two camps, people who believe that we need to think clearly and mathematically if we wish to solve the problems in computing introduced by the human mind, and those who think...
A Sufficiently Advanced Bullet
On Monday I wrote an article about the miserable state of software engineering and it seems to have struck quite a nerve, judging by the comments and discussion on Hacker News. The gist of my argument was that designing software is very much a hands-on process right now. The computer gives you no leniency at any step of the operation, which means that it takes developers years to perfect their...
The State of the Art is Terrible
I stumbled onto this post the other day through Hacker News. Basically Ryan Dahl (the guy who wrote node.js, a web framework that makes running web servers easy with javascript) called out the deplorable state of software today.
I fully agree with him.
And here’s why - I’ve seen things. In college I learned how to design a computer from the ground up at the mask level. We learned the...
September 2011
5 posts
Neutrino Antigravity?
You’ve all probably heard the news from CERN about faster than light neutrinos. Here is a good discussion about some of the ramifications of this discovery if it pans out.
I’ve stumbled onto some other articles lately that are pointing to some weird interactions with gravity:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-dark-illusion-quantum-vacuum.html...
The Nonstarter Problem
My life thus far can be most succinctly summarized as lost opportunity. Like many people, I feel like I have this grand potential just yearning to be expressed, but there are systems in place in our society that make it difficult to work outside of established channels. What do I mean by that? Well to avoid a lot of issues with interpretation, I can state it mathematically. Our lives are not...
Find the Solution, not the Problem
As the world struggles through the Great Recession, I’m constantly amazed by the proposals that people put forth. Take for example recent attempts to reform social security and medicare, programs that (regardless of opinions for or against them) people have paid into their entire lives. Rick Perry describes them as Ponzi schemes.
So there’s problems with entitlements and the...
F**k. You. Money.
I identify very strongly as a member of Generation X, even though I was born at the tail end of it in 1977. Compared to the baby boomers, Gen X has been hit very hard by a collapsing infrastructure and social fabric. From what I understand, the main issues facing the boomers were the Vietnam War and the stagflation of the 1970s. Today we have the Long War in the middle east and inept...
Back to the Future
I’ve been trying to blog off and on now for 8 years and have managed to do everything but say what I needed to say. I can tell you the ins and outs of building websites and maintaining servers but it mostly amounted to expensive hand waving with the advent of email-based blog sites. I’m tired of micromanaging my tools and just want to write.
I’ve heard people complain that...
