moon traveller herald

Been working with a team: Nuno, Jake and me. To get a technology cartoon. Working like a year on this off and on. And finally got something I like. Running under name of "Zorb" [Zorb Bickowitz, nee Barf Bickowtiz] http://www.theserverside.net/tt/cartoons/TalesFromTheServerSide.tss

Cecelia and I had a nice dinner one evening up at Harvard Sq not very long ago. The students were packing for summer. I remember looking at young people in a restaurant, many of them of the school, and thinking how privileged they were in health, training and connections. I don’t mean privileged in being snooty or anything like that because I didn’t see anything like that. In reading Bill Gates’s commencement speech I was heartened; not that I could articulate it earlier, but I thought a message of some kind somehow similar was needed. He noted that complexity was a problem at the time of the reformation of Europe after World War II, that George Marshall, he of the Marshall Plan, pointed out the difficulty individuals had in processing the mass of facts presented by press and radio at that time, pointed out in fact at a Harvard Commencement 60 years ago. http://www.theserverside.net/blogs/thread.tss?thread_id=45849

Windows software developers can be forgiven if they don’t take too much interest in the wacky machinations of the technology business. But we thought we would note a recent business deal that may indicate where Microsoft is ultimately headed, and which, though not accomplished, is a good sign for Windows developers. Last week, Microsoft passed on the opportunity to buy DoubleClick, the major force in placing Internet banner ads. Rumors had Microsoft behind the scenes bidding for DoubleClick ahead of Google’s eventual $3.1-billion move. There seems little question that Microsoft’s interest pushed the price of DoubleClick up, far past the price paid earlier this year in the more touted Google buy of YouTube. The latest deal shows that Google’s business, for all the buzz about its Ajax software and nifty productivity suites, is the advertising business. There was fear here that Microsoft would enter that same advertising business in a big way with the DoubleClick purchase, in order to cou...

John Backus, leader of the original IBM Fortran development team, has died at 82. Fortran is widely held as the first successful high-level computing language. As such, it began the evolution of mainstream software programming away from the realm of machine and assembly coders, allowing a more ‘human-readable’ approach to programming. One of his first jobs at IBM allowed him to work with famed computer scientist Wallace J. Eckert - then director of IBM’s Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory - to compute lunar orbits. Like many other engineering efforts, the drive to create Fortran was at least in part the drive of an individual to eliminate some form of tedious work. In the biography of Backus on the IBM web site he says: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.” http://www.theserv...

Some of the stuff gets lost over the years. One web site I worked for transfered ownership, and the Web server actually fell off the back of the truck during migration. Anyway, found this old story the other day about XML. It is from April 1999, and pretty suprisingly on target in a lot of ways as to what XML turned into. This story includes part of an interview I did via E-mail with Web Inventer Tim Berners Lee. I saved the email. It's around the house somewhere. A giggy kid I still is. As a journalist, I wish I could have picked up on RSS earlier...it seems to me like the killer app for XML..at least for content folks. http://xml.coverpages.org/adtMag-xml990510.html XML:The last silver bullet -ADT