Monthly Archives: February 2008

Very interesting comment posted on this debate about programming languages.  The short form of the argument is that usability testing doesn’t work for products that have a steep learning curve, because by the time you’ve learned how to use the product effectively you’re too biased to comment on its usability fairly.  I think there’s some depth to this argument: it may explain fundamental limits on usability testing for very high dimensional, very complicated products.

However, I also think it misses some of the potential for usability testing for languages.  After all, one of the things that makes a language like Java annoying for the beginning is that there’s simply too much to learn before you can start doing real things with the language.  Usability testing could be a very interesting way to differentiate between different languages that have similar power, to predict which ones would be best for beginners to learn.

Fun debate!
John     

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I’m home sick with a nasty sinus infection today, so we take a break from our regularly schedule program to announce that scientists apparently now have an animal model for the common cold: a mouse strain bred specifically to feel terrible, in the name of sinus — er, science.

John

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Interesting article about the HD-DVD format wars from the Economist.  Basically the article argues that although Blu-Ray appears to have won, they may be fighting a battle that doesn’t matter for three reasons: (1) The upconverters on current regular def DVD players are getting so good that consumers won’t notice the difference; (2) Streaming may get from our curb to our TV player before we start buying HD DVDs; and (3) rewritable media — particularly USB keys — may become so big and so cheap that we start using them instead of DVDs.

My favorite part of the article is the last two paragraphs where the author speculates about how many pixels it will take to fill the complete pixel-consuming ability of the human eye.  It’s interesting to imagine a time when what we see in a “movie” will be exactly the same resolution as what we see in the “real world”.  How will that change entertainment?  Work?

John

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Intriguing blog about the new Git system.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, but sounds like it’s basically a version-controlled file system that (a) does it right; and (b) is easy to build on top of.  If it’s really as cool as this author says, I’m already thinking of several apps that I’d like to port:

1. My home backup system to a terabyte RAID device.  I’d love to have this start storing file diffs.
2. An even better replacement for svn.
3. A way to share files across computers that runs far faster than svn, and is more automated.  (git is reputed to be very fast, and as a programmable platform, should make it possible to automatically trigger updates.  One question: can it support the push model?)

Has anyone tried git?  What do you think?
John  

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