Viewing profile — greggraham

I was planning on buying a KIM-1 when my dad surprised me by buying an Apple II. I didn't end up writing anything in assembly on the Apple II, though. My first assembly language wa…

Exactly! The existence of something like a reliable Internet depends on some form of physical civilization with laws and law enforcement, not to mention food production and distrib…

I learned to program in BASIC on an Apple II, and although it was my entry language, I don't see it as necessary now. The school I work at uses MIT Scratch with the 5th graders, an…

Notice that technology is not a critical part of their success. I didn't see a lot of shots of kids in front of computers, but rather, teachers and students interacting with each o…

I recently read _Cryptonomicon_ after having put it down last year. It was fun, and overall it was definitely worth it. I'm reading his _Snow Crash_ now. It was published in 1992, …

Gattaca is a well-done movie in general. My wife liked it, and she prefers art films and usually does not like science fiction.

I use aquamacs at home on my Macintosh, and GNU emacs on Windows XP at work. I have switched back and forth between emacs and vi/vim over the last 25 years because they are both gr…

Old versions of BASIC used LET for assignment, but Microsoft BASIC and other BASICs of that era dropped it as being unnecessary.

It doesn't necessarily take any longer to live in the moment. It's a matter of where your mind is focused. In fact, if you are focused on what you are doing, you will likely be mor…

I currently use Python and Django for the following reasons: 1) Coworker familiar with Python 2) I had an easier time understanding the mechanics of Django than I did Rails 3) Some…

Without the ability to communicate with people all over the world, you are forced to deal with the people in your own proximity, who might not be the people you would prefer. They …

I spent a year writing C# in Visual Studio and ReSharper, and it is nice, but I'm happier now doing Python with Emacs and the command line.

I know that PHP brings a lot of good things to the web development arena, but I'm glad I've never had to use it for anything of significance. I've been able to use Python/Django an…

I think people like this help balance the population. They provide an example that a good life is possible without all of these things that some of think we can't live without. The…

I've heard complaints about the poor battery life on the G1. How is that working for you?

The article agrees with you, "many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a m…

I have the same problem, so I've had to do things to cope with it. Fortunately, I have an office with a door at my work now, and that helps tremendously. At home I have a room to w…

I really enjoyed reading that. As russell said, it is far outside my experience, but it is more like I wished my experience would have been. I read an article on APL back in the ea…

I gave up on awk when Perl became available, and after that, Python. However, after reading this interview, I think I should relearn it.

When I used to ride the train to work, I sat next to a young man who was looking over a printout of what I recognized as COBOL code. I talked to him, and he was debugging a problem…

I searched and found products to convert to C ( http://www.mpsinc.com/cob2c.html ) and to Java ( http://www.jazillian.com/howCOBOL.html ). However, it is probably easier to maintai…

So all that has happened is that the Internet has allowed schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars to be broadcast on an international scope and compete with professional journalism a…

Scratch has been used with great success in the 5th grade computer class at our school. Last year they were slogging through Logo with little motivation. When we switched to Scratc…

Unfortunately, people are often short-sighted when it comes to the use of their money. In earlier days, there were influences of culture and religion that were stronger than econom…

Ah, the power of social networking.