Category: tech
-
Scratch is a one of the best languages to learn how to program computers. The language is easy to learn while being surprisingly powerful. Often I meet students who want to learn how to create web sites or applications. They want to immediately learn Python, C#, or other other “practical” programming languages. My recommendation is…
-
Periodically I get asked questions about computing in the age before Linux, OSX, Microsoft Windows (NT based), Google, Stack Overflow and Chat-GPT/Claude. I encourage people to look at historical systems that can inspire and teach important lessons. The following are sites which are preserving the past. Some of these links are to wikipedia and should…
-
Many of the ideas that drive today’s “innovations” trace their origins to the groundbreaking work done in before 1990. Back then resources were scarse so people had to think and work harder than we do today. I strongly encourage people working on computing systems to read classic systems papers. These are papers that first introduced…
-
My work has had me near the cutting edge of computing technology from 1978-2022. In 2022 I retired. I still follow current trends but I am not as involved in pushing things forward. I take a measured approach to technology. I don’t chase after everything new. Rather I try to thoughtfully adopt technologies which will…
-
In gratitude for changes I tried to capture what I was feeling. I wondered how chat-gpt would improve what I wrote so I fed it my paragraph with a number of different instructions. The original paragraph was: I had planned on going for a hike today, but I missed the group. Instead, I find myself…
-
Originally Published in 1991Minor updates 2005, 2021 “How many IT staff does an organization need?” is a commonly asked and difficult to answer question. There is no magic ratio. There is no ideal staffing level. The appropriate number of a staff depends on what the IT organization is responsible for and the level of service…
-
Over the last few years I seen a growing interest in gamification of life. There is part of me that wants to say the whole idea was silly. Who needs their real life to be turned into a video game where you are accumulating points and badges. Shouldn’t we direct our lives based on results…
-
In 2007 my ten year old daughter asked me to help her learn to program. It’s not that she’s interested in computer science, it’s that she knows that programming is required to create games and other things that she has imagined. I investigated a multitude of languages / environments. The following is what I decided…