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HOPL:History Of Programming Languages

HOPL: History Of Programming Languages from ACM

After browsing the Alan Kay Wikipedia entry, my attention was drawn to the “History Of Programming Languages”, proceeding that has been published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

This is a very good collection of documents, usually written by the people who were involved in the development of the different languages, including some Danes – Concurrent Pascal. Unfortunately ACM requires a subscription to access the articles, I guess I need to fork out some money and get the paper print.

Hmm great! The ACM web-site currently has an error, so I can’t buy the book online. Should I join ACM? It’ll cost me USD 198, if I throw in an account for the digital library. It would be cool to have access to the ACM digital library.

Considering…BTW it looks like ACM should add some new articles, e.g.. on Java, Python and Ruby.

Sure a lot of things has happened since 1993, but I suppose none of the newer languages are revolutionary, or even more than marginally different from what already existed in 1993, that is somewhat discouraging.

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Sell your expertise with Ether | News.blog | CNET News.com

Sell your expertise with Ether | News.blog | CNET News.com

Ether sounds like a really clever idea, get payed for what you know.

The idea:

1. Sign up with Ether and you get assigned a phone number people can contact you by
2. Set your fee
3. Define your opening hours (eg. when you’ll accept calls
4. People will call you for assistance only if they’ve accepted your fee

The catch…Ether rakes in a 15% comission…But this sounds like a realtively hassel free way of selling your consulting services.

The service should be available in Denmark.

Clever!

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Mactopia Technology

InTheMac.com…Apple Mac Software +

InTheMac.com…Apple Mac Software +

Just discovered this Mac OS X software site, it looks very nice, and above all, it seems to be updated quite frequently.

Being a recent Tiger user, I’m shopping for Dashboard Widgets, and this was how I found this site, Googling for a flickr Widget.

I guess I’ll stop looking for Widgets after a while, but Widgets is a simple and quite useful technology, that can be quite addictive.

And the site really is putting RSS feeds to good use, with an extensive list of feeds sorted by category.

Highly recommended.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology Videnskab

Talk:Alan Kay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Talk:Alan Kay – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was just checking the Alan Kay article on Wikipedia, and I switched to the Talk page, to find a comment by the man himself…

He makes this interesting point:

But today, it matters not that Smalltalk was an “improvement on its successors” (as Tony Hoare said about Algol). None of the so-called OOP languages around today are above threshold to deal with programming in the 21st century. I think this is a huge problem, that is made more severe by the vocational temptations to “get good at something bad” in order to make a living. This has produced a staggering legacy of moribund code, that makes it hard for young people especially to think about qualitatively better ways to proceed.

Very well put, but do we have alternatives today? I have no idea.

I remember a BYTE magazine cover story from 15 years or so ago, “There is a silver bullet”. That “silver bullet was OOP. Maybe it was, but the challenges of software development has also changed. Today we slave away using the same patterns again and again, it’s not exciting writing database access classes and wire them up to the UI, usually starting from scratch, since the new app you’re doing, is slightly different.

Currently people are looking into alternatives to C++ like languages, like Python and Ruby, but they’re still rather traditional. But these languages do seem to have some great frameworks, like TurboGears and Rails.

What I really find interesting is a video where Steve Jobs is demoing NeXTSTEP version 3, he’s demoing amazing application development without any coding at all! Why didn’t this catch on?

Another problem. The traditional web has been a nightmare in terms of usability, due to the fact that everybody basically has been writing their own custom UI.

What the web really is, is a list of connected links, URLs/URIs. What we need to start doing is to assign more meta-data to links, so that we can stop using the browser.

RSS feeds are a step in that direction. Direct links to media files and especially streams is another. After somebody posted a collection of direct links for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s (DR) radio streams, so that I could use the VideoLAN Client (VLC) to listen to music, I’ve finally bothered with it. Why oh why does the media companies develop their own embedded players, it’s a serious nightmare and completely un-called for.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Technology

Lat – Long Finder: This page helps you find Latitude and Longitude

Lat – Long Finder: This page helps you find Latitude and Longitude

This page has a quite useful Google Maps based service to help find the Latitude and Longitude of a location.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

Computerworld – Er Danmark et Microsoft-protektorat, Fogh?

Computerworld – Er Danmark et Microsoft-protektorat, Fogh?

Hold da op, nu skal jeg samle min kæbe op fra gulvet, det må siges at være en leder med bid i fra Computerworld.

Jeg bryder mig nu ikke om at IBM bliver fremhævet som et firma der står for åbenhed, men alt i alt en imponerende leder, udtryk for noget der er sjældent i Danske IT medier, nemlig en HOLDNING!

Respekt!

Citat fra lederens konklusion:

Danmark er kort sagt i dag et globalt mønstereksempel som Microsoft-protektorat.

Intet under, at Steve Ballmer for to år siden begejstret proklamerede: ”I want the whole world to be Danish!”

Det er muligt, at vi som nation er bedst tjent med at møde den digitale fremtid med afsæt i en innovationsplatform, som er ejet af Microsoft.

Det kan ikke udelukkes. Microsoft leverer klart et vigtigt bidrag til Danmark.

Men hvis – og dette er et stort men og hvis – vi skal være et rent Microsoftland, så mangler vi at forhandle betingelserne for den suverænitetsafgivelse, det lægger op til.

Hvad Fogh er i gang med nu, ligner ikke forhandlinger, men derimod en betingelsesløs kapitulation.

Det er hverken godt diplomatisk håndværk eller godt købmandskab.

Under alle omstændigheder taler vi her om så væsentlige rammebetingelser for vores fælles fremtid, at det anstændigvis kræver en offentlig debat.

Christiansborg, quo vadis?

Hvis man er til konspirations teorier…Hvor var det lige nuværende Kronprinsesse Mary arbejdede da hun var – “hemmeligt” – i Danmark.

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'i dag' (Danish) Blogs Bookmarks Design Mactopia Technology

:: macnyt :: danmark :: Sig goddag til Melinda

Melinda Size Matters Cropped:: macnyt :: danmark :: Sig goddag til Melinda

Melinda er en smækker CoreSolo sag, med et godt hjerte (Mac OS X).

Catwalken er den boks der nu bliver delegeret til kælderen, size does matter!

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

Mobile phone companies join forces on Linux | CNET News.com

Mobile phone companies join forces on Linux | CNET News.com

According to CNET NEWS.COM, several mobile handset makers are joining forces to develop Linux based smart phones.

This is great news, I guess especially Motorola was upset by the license fees they had to pay Apple for the iTunes logo on the ill-fated iTunes ROKR phone, and the less than perfect support from Apple. Remember the Steve Jobs Keynote from the introduction of the ROKR, where Steve tried to demonstrate one of the key features, the fact that the music would be automatically paused and resumed during incoming calls, and it didn’t work.

The new ROKR E2 is soon to launch in Europe, and it looks quite cool, at least much nicer than the original ROKR.

I hope for an open platform, with complete community involvement, but that is probably hoping for too much.

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Blogs Bookmarks Kim Blog (English) Open Source Technology

Bandit-project.org – open source identity services

Bandit - open source identity service

Welcome to Bandit – Bandit-project.org
Bandit is a promissing project, sponsored by Novell, that aims to solve one of the major headaches of open source systems, indentity management, which is implemented in thousands of different systems.

This is one of the “missing” open source projects.

Quote form the Bandit website:

Bandit is a system of loosely-coupled components that provide consistent identity services and creates a community that organizes and standardizes identity-related technologies in an open way, promoting both interoperability and collaboration..

It implements open standard protocols and specifications such that identity services can be constructed, accessed, and integrated from multiple identity sources. The Bandit system supports many authentication methods and provides user-centric credential management. On this base of a common identity model, Bandit is building additional services needed for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and for the emission of records to verify compliance with higher level policies.

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Vig Foreningsprogram: Frit program til administration af foreninger

Vig Foreningsprogram
Vig Foreningsprogram

Hvad sker der når man Googler, lidt, og skriver “kasseklade excel skabelon gratis”, så finder man bla. Vig Foreningsprogram.

Dette program, oprindelig udviklet af en kasser fra en badmintonklub, syntes jeg ligner noget jeg har ledt længe efter, nemlig et gratis program til at administrere små foreninger.

Concorde er simpelthen overkill til vores Ejerforening, og jeg tror også det kunne være nyttigt til vores frivilliggruppe.

Skal evalueres, evt. også til at køre mit eget firma.

Der er tilsyneladende tale om en traditonel fed klient, skrevet i Delphi mod Paradox databasen, så der er næppe tænkt i n-tier løsninger, og det er derfor nok svært at koble en web eller Mac OS X klient på, men jeg overvejer alvorligt at kontakte udvikleren, mhp. et porterings projekt.

Jeg skal dog lige evaluere om det kan bruges til noget først. Det der tiltaler mig er at det er udviklet for at adresserer et konkret behov i en forening, og at det har været på markedet længe, og derfor må forventes at være stabilt.