Viewing profile — brettmjohnson

In 1984 I was working for a small company that made Z80-based desktop computers running CP/M. All of the software was written in Z80 assembly language. MS-DOS was gaining traction,…

Why just Obj-C for iPhone (or more accurately iOS) dev? What about Objective-C for Mac development?

As a developer and long time Mac user, I can only ask, "How is Adwords any different on PowerPC?" [In other words, if your niche uses some obscure jargon or acronym, don't assume m…

Agreed. Using git or mercurial would get around this. I worked for nearly a decade on cross-platform code that followed a similar methodology. Our rule was the code most compile w/…

It is realistic. I worked on a cross-platform product for nearly a decade that followed a methodology very similar to this. Our code worked on 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit, big-endian an…

Hmmm, "heard/read" limits it a bit, as "self realization" is more memorable. However, in the 7th grade (age 13-14), my math teacher explained to me that education was a "privilege,…

Although not totally worthless, it is nearly so. It is ~350 slides, most with a single word. To find those commands you've never heard of, you have to wade through a deluge of mean…

What seems like a lifetime ago, I was taking graduate CS classes at my local University. I had been writing software professionally for more than 20 years, so I was atypical in my …

I have a 12 character password and it is a pain in the ass to type it several times a day. I couldn't imagine using a 50 character password.

Once they start breaking your fingers, it gets a whole lot harder to enter that 50-character password.

Paved roads in the U.S. are not really cheap. A typical 2-lane rural road is about 1.7 million dollars per mile. A suburban road is double that; 3.5 million dollars per mile. ftp:/…

Why does this surprise you? Since deficit spending is generally disallowed for state and local governments, nearly all sizable projects are funded through bonds. Bonds are basicall…

The problem with these types of Ballot Initiatives: Do you want to eliminate the state income tax? X Yes _ No Do you like to drive on paved roads? X Yes _ No Do you want fire fight…

Back in 1995 or 1996, I spent a long week-end doing extreme pair programming with Philip Nelson. We set up in his dining room and took an image from his whiteboard to a 80+% done p…

#include int main (int argc, char **argv) { puts("Screw you guys! I'm going home."); } I'm thinking they were glad to see you go because you took an hour to do 60 seconds worth of …

I, too was annoyed at the obtuse presentation of message passing. I've been writing software for Mach/NeXTstep/MacOSX since 1988, and even before that, message queues between threa…