miner49r

The Go Programming Language

2009-11-12T10:25:00.001-05:00

Google announces a new programming language: Go.

http://golang.org/

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Secret History of Silicon Valley « Steve Blank

2009-10-29T16:43:00.001-04:00

A great series of posts with old war stories, many of them involving Stanford University:

http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-valley/

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Twelve Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Out of Posterous

2009-10-16T09:11:00.001-04:00

Guy Kawasaki is the famous old-time Mac evangelist. Here are his tips about using Posterous:

http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/twelve-tips-and-tricks-to-get-the-most-out-of-posterous-guy-kawasaki

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John Lloyd inventories the invisible

2009-10-01T11:23:00.001-04:00

(via daringfireball.net)

Nature's mysteries meet tack-sharp wit in this hilarious, 10-minute mix of quips and fun lessons, as comedian, writer and TV man John Lloyd plucks at the substance of several things not seen.

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Switching to posterous.com

2009-09-25T09:04:00.001-04:00

I'm moving my personal blog to posterous.com. They make it really easy to update via email (including pictures and videos). They also can cross-post for you automatically to many other blogging and social web sites. That make posterous.com the new headquarters for my web empire!

From now on, look for me at http://miner.posterous.com.

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McCarthy Presents Lisp (1959)

2009-09-25T08:29:00.003-04:00

http://www.paulgraham.com/mcilroy.html

Just fifty years ago, John McCarthy circulated a notice that he would be giving an informal talk that he thought would be of interest. I drove up to MIT from New Jersey to attend this seminar of typical length in a typical classroom. But the seminar was anything but typical. It was a revelation. In one session at the blackboard, John introduced Lisp—all you could do with car, cdr, cons, cond, lambda, and recursion.

In the course of the lecture John introduced the usual basic list functions like copy, append and reverse (quadratic and linear), as well as tree manipulation. He went on to higher-level functions, demonstrating maplis and lambda. By the end of the hour he had put together a powerful little toolkit of functions which he used in his finale: symbolic differentiation of univariate expressions.

There it was—functional programming ex nihilo. McCarthy acknowledged IPL V and recursive function theory, but the elegant and practical face he put upon these antecedents was a work of genius.

Me: Attending seminars by John McCarthy was one of the highlights of my undergraduate years at Stanford. For more on JMC:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/personal.html

St. Mary's in Edgefield

2009-09-24T09:10:00.001-04:00

After our move to Mount Vintage, I started attending Mass at St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Edgefield. It's a beautiful old church, dating back to 1860. I recently volunteered to start a web site for the parish. There's only a temporary home page there now, but I'll be working on it during the weeks to come. StMarysEdgefield.org

Learning Clojure with Project Euler

2009-09-23T11:35:00.001-04:00

http://grok-code.com/367/learning-clojure-with-project-euler/

When getting started with a new language, I like to use a site that has excercises for programming practice. A great site for this is Project Euler; it gives you short problems to solve, and once a problem is correctly solved you are given access to the forum for that problem which contains hundreds of solutions written in different languages. Each of the problems are designed to be solved by some combination of mathematical insight and computer programming.

Project Euler

Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome

2009-09-23T11:14:00.001-04:00

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/google-turns-internet-explorer-into-chrome-yes-seriously/

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. Let me restate that slightly to make it more clear: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.

Bwana, Bwana

2009-09-17T18:34:00.001-04:00

My friend, Paul, recently reminded me an old cheer that we used to do at Bellarmine. When I was a freshman back in 1976, we all had to learn this cheer as part of our indoctrination. If I remember correctly, a crazy cheerleader named Damien taught it to a group of us. I never knew exactly what it meant, but it sounded African to me. I assume it's one of those tribal traditions that's primarily intended to perplex outsiders.

Cheerleader: Bwana, Bwana
Crowd: Simba
Cheerleader: Bwana, Bwana
Crowd: Simba
All: Sooey, Sooey, uh uh uh.

My father (class of '57) says he didn't remember it. I asked Paul what if he knew the history of the cheer. He has some good theories, but he's going to do some more research and publish an article in the alumni magazine so I won't steal his thunder.

The important thing is that next time someone google's "Bwana, Bwana", they'll find something useful!

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review

2009-09-01T14:19:00.001-04:00

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review
Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple's new OS offering to see what's new, what's still the same, and whether it's worth upgrading.

Connecting SLIME to a remote Clojure Repl

2009-08-21T14:07:00.001-04:00

http://asymmetrical-view.com/2009/08/20/emacs-slime-remote-repl.html

Being able to connect to a remote running image can be useful – especially for times when you can't have your development environment present on the remote server and still need to introspect the running process.

Stanford Classbook - Class of '84 reunion

2009-08-07T15:02:00.004-04:00

Steve Miner
Stanford 1984

now living in South Carolina

email: Miner[at]StanfordAlumni.org

Favorite Stanford Memories

Bringing a keg into the stadium to watch John Elway play football

Todd's shortcut to a party at Roble, ending with a splash

Midnight Mass before Christmas break

The Patio Grill: young entrepreneurs find a way to succeed only to be undone when a photo in the SJ Mercury News prompts unfair competition complaints from Casa de Fruta

John McCarthy's seminars

Major: Electrical Engineering

Residences: Donner, Mirrielees, Newman Center (off campus), Adelfa

Student Activities: Hasher, Newman Center (Catholics), B.Baggins@LOTS

Life after Stanford

Places: Menlo Park; Mountain View; Sunnyvale; Calabash, NC; Evans, GA (near Augusta); and Mount Vintage Plantation near North Augusta, SC.

Married Lisa in 1994. She's originally from England, has a Master's degree from Oxford (1982), formerly an accountant, now a landscape designer and horticulturalist, also mummy to two wonderful dogs.

No kids, several dogs who are truly members of the family: Bertie (Basset Hound) 1994-2006, Heidi (Belgian Malinois) 1997-present, and Cleo (Great Dane) 2006-present.

Software jobs: SRI International, Xerox PARC, Institute for Research on Learning, Price-Waterhouse, ParcPlace, Apple and Janus Research Group.

My mother thinks I invented the iPod, which is not strictly true, but it's a good story to tell at parties.

Volunteer firefighter in Calabash (2004 - 2006)

Volleyball: My volleyball highlight was playing with Olympic Gold Medalist Eric Fonoimoana on the beach at Turks (see picture). I played in the IVL rec leagues for many years in the Bay Area. I'm now the oldest guy in the gym in my Augusta league.

Golf: I'm a duffer, but I'll keep at it. As P.G. Wodehouse says, "Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character." I had the good fortune to attend a practice round at the Masters last year.

Favorite quote:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

-- Ronald Reagan

Bertie and me at 3:00 AM 1994

Firefighter gear 2004

Beach Volleyball with the Pros 2003

Steve, Cleo, Lisa and Heidi 2008

Still Alive, not (D)

2009-07-31T10:47:00.003-04:00

Stanford informs me:

It has just come to our attention that there is a misprint in the front of the '84 Class Book. The notations indicating which classmates are deceased in the freshman dorm listing are incorrect, so please disregard the (D) notations that appear after classmates names. For an accurate listing (to the best of our knowledge) of deceased classmates, please refer to the In Memoriam section at the back of the book. We realize that this kind of misprint may have caused some alarm, but we hope that you'll still enjoy reading the rest of the book and catching up on your classmates' lives.

In case anyone was wondering, I'm still alive. I plan to attend the
25-year reunion in October.

This mixup brings to mind the '84 yearbook, "The Quad", featuring
Milner and Tudmala. I wonder whatever happened to those guys?

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

2009-07-29T09:23:00.000-04:00

http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

2009-07-22T15:59:00.001-04:00

UPS is having problems finding 83 Beaver Pond Court. Google Maps doesn't have it yet, but I hope Google will find this link.

iPhone Development Emergency Guide

2009-07-22T11:46:00.001-04:00

Nice summary by Matt Legend Gemmell

http://mattgemmell.com/2009/07/14/iphone-development-emergency-guide

Jazz Guitar & Cabernet Celebration

2009-05-14T14:15:00.002-04:00

Jazz Guitar & Cabernet Celebration
Saturday, August 15, 2009, 8 pm at
Miner Family Winery
7850 Silverado Trail
Oakville, California

Join us for an evening of fine wine and live jazz featuring "The Benedetto Players" -Featuring Bucky Pizzarelli, Howard Alden and Howard Paul in celebrating the release of the 2006 Miner Benedetto Signature Series Cabernet Sauvignon and Benedetto Guitars' 41th anniversary.

Follow the link for more info...

http://minerwines.com/events/index.html

Clojure on the Google App Engine

2009-05-11T13:55:00.001-04:00

http://www.fatvat.co.uk/2009/05/clojure-on-google-app-engine.html

So how easy is it to get Clojure going in the cloud?

Looks pretty easy.

Use OpenSSL for Base64 encode and decode

2009-05-08T19:23:00.001-04:00

This hint came in handy today...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030721010526390

To decode from Base64:
openssl base64 -d -in <infile> -out <outfile>
Conversely, to encode to Base64:
openssl base64 -in <infile> -out <outfile>

Clojure 1.0

2009-05-05T09:22:00.001-04:00

Rich Hickey announces Clojure 1.0

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/1e661d16bd910ddd?hl=en#

(dosync (alter congrats conj (System/getProperty "user.name")))

Basic Clojure Setup - Part 1: Installing Clojure

2009-05-03T10:52:00.001-04:00

http://yusupov.com/blog/2009/basic-clojure-setup-part-1/

These series of posts describe how I setup Clojure development environment on my system. Even though these instructions are geared towards Mac users, they should work for other Unix-like systems with small (if any) changes. I hope it saves some time to anyone new to Clojure.

baseJS: A Mobile JavaScript Framework : Paul Armstrong Designs

2009-05-01T11:55:00.001-04:00

A JavaScript Framework for iPhone developers:

http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/weblog/basejs-a-mobile-javascript-framework

Bill Clementson's Blog: iPhone App Development Notes

2009-04-30T11:23:00.001-04:00

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/090429.html

Standard order for adjectives

2009-04-28T15:52:00.001-04:00

Interesting tidbit on a rule of English that I had never noticed...

http://blogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/2007/05/rules_no_one_te.html

Wendalyn Nichols, editor of Copy Editor, responded, "There is indeed a standard order for adjectives, and you'll find it described in dictionaries and textbooks for learners of English as a second language."
Ms. Nichols reproduced a version of a chart showing a hierarchy of modifiers: determiner, quality, size, age, color, origin, material. She gives some examples: a colorful new silk scarf; that silver Japanese car. I've just been looking over a couple of other such charts, and I find that the hierarchy they list goes like this:
Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose.
Not all noun phrases have adjectives from each of these columns. But this is the order they should be in. Thus "little old lady" or "angry young man" are set phrases in the language that illustrate the idiomatic order. "Little" (size) comes before "old" (age). And "angry" is an example of what the charts call an opinion adjective – one of the modifiers that seem less essential than those referring to age or origin, for instance.