I’m getting ready to spin up a few new web development projects. I think I want to do them on Ruby On Rails. That means getting a good RoR development environment installed on Finrod. About 5 levels of yak-shaving later… it looks like I should install RVM so I can get the version of Ruby I […]
Tag Archives: where are we going?
I Feel Like Part of the Problem
Sunday, July 12th, 2015 – 8:00 pm
In San Francisco now, I no longer feel like a useful, contributing member of The City’s social or cultural scene. Merely by virtue of being “a developer”, I feel like I’ve become Part Of the Problem. I sure as hell try not to be. I try to encourage the arts; I try to defend and promote […]
How Do We Stop the Spying?
Friday, September 6th, 2013 – 1:49 pm
I should really write something about the ongoing — and increasingly horrifying — revelations of NSA spying. The latest round of news basically boils down to: The NSA can now say, “I’m in ur crypto readin ur comms — all of them!” Every time I try to write about this, my heart pounds faster and I feel overwhelmed by sorrow, […]
Singularities Aren’t Just In the Future
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 – 3:10 pm
In my first post about the Singularity, I rummaged through various possible definitions for “what the hell does ‘Singularity’ even mean, anyway?” On my list of five options, number 2 was: “A time when when technological progress goes so fast that we people before it can’t predict it (or what comes after it).” But this means that […]
What Are We Giving Up With E-Text?
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 – 3:19 pm
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and each technology has its advantages and drawbacks. Whenever we leave one technology behind and adopt a new one, we’re sacrificing something. We may be making a terrific trade, getting a hundred times as much cool stuff as give up — but we’re still giving up something, and we should be aware […]
Before You Can Talk About the Singularity, You Must Define It
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 – 8:56 am
If you think about technology, and where it may be taking us, it’s impossible to ignore the idea of the Singularity. But if you’re going to talk about it at all, it’s best to start off by defining just what it is you mean. Different people are using the term for a few different concepts […]
Facebook and Privacy
Saturday, May 15th, 2010 – 2:22 pm
Okay, so I’m a little late to the party in posting this. All the professional bloggers have already written about it, while I’ve been busy with my day job. Nonetheless, something that’s been on my mind since the beginning of the week, when it would have been timely: I think Facebook has now hit its […]
Augmented Reality vs. Low Tech — Ready? Fight!
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 – 9:18 am
I’ve written before about augmented reality, Sixth Sense, and so on. Here’s a question: Is this really augmentation? As augmented reality takes hold, we’ll have more and more people wandering around looking at their smartphones’ screens rather than what’s actually in front of them. The smartphone delivers some extra information, of course, but it imposes […]
Can You Learn From a Prediction That Was Wrong?
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 – 9:07 pm
Recently, a bunch of the blogs and journals I read (including my friends, not just big, famous sources) have had some bones to pick with Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek opinion piece, “Why Web Won’t Be Nirvana”. Stoll said: “no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent […]