Some friends of mine own a consulting company with about twenty employees. Every once in a while they buy “something nice” for the common area used by all the employees, and very recently it was an automatic coffee maker. This is not just any coffee maker, but a very sophisticated machine...

It was 1998 and I was attending a Comdex event in Chicago. Comdex was one of the largest computer trade shows on earth, and for a while they held two events a year, a Fall event always in Las Vegas, and a Spring event typically in some other large city. That year “Spring Comdex” was in Chicago...

I have written about my frustrations with service before, but I wanted to share three more items. For those of you who have not seen today's (January 9th, 2011) “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip, it mirrors some of my frustration with service groups. This was the first item I wanted to share. ...

Over the New Year's weekend a news story started to unfold. It was about the Apple iPhone and how the standard clock application would not sound its alarm when set. The story became (said a radio announcer) the number two story of the day. All day long I heard about the iPhone's clock not...

I was at a Linux Meetup a couple of months ago and I ran into another former employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (“They are everywhere, everywhere!”) named Larry Camilli. We started talking and somehow the conversation came around to a program called “AXE” (vaX Archictecture Exerciser)....

My friend Benjamin Scott send some email around today stating that Alcatel/Lucent had published all the old Bell System Technical Journals from 1922 to 1983 online and freely accessible. As Ben said: Bell Labs practically invented much of our recent civilization (communications theory,...

One of my favorite sayings has always been "You should eat your own dog food". When applied to programming it quite simply means that you should use the code that you generate. I started saying this many years ago when I noticed that the Unix product managers at Digital Equipment Corporation...

Recently I was reading an article that was quoting Steve Jobs about how the Android phones from different manufacturers were all slightly different. He was pointing out that HTC and Motorola were putting on slightly different human interfaces and that this was crazy compared to his iPhone where...

Readers may have noticed that I have a theme lately regarding storage sizes, for example talking about disk drives and the TK50 tape drives. This was in anticipation of purchasing a new “laptop” computer, the first new one I have had in six years. More about that machine tomorrow. Recently I...

I was visiting a friend of mine, Dennis Jensen, while I was in Florianopolis, Brazil. During my visit I started telling Dennis about the period of 1975 to 1978 when some people were building computers from kits by soldering integrated circuits with hand soldering irons to the printed circuit...

Last month I briefly blogged about my love affair with old automated musical instruments such as the player piano, player reed organ, nickelodeon, wind-up phonographs and my long association with the Automatic Musical Instrument Collector's Association (AMICA). June, 2008 was the first time...

Sometimes you run across something so discouraging you want to just hang your head. That happened today as I received a letter from the folks at Creative Commons stating that The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of the groups that supposedly represents artists...

This past weekend I visited my family who now lives in Pennsylvania. My mother and father are long retired and living in a retirement community. This weekend was their 68th wedding anniversary. My brother retired from the telephone company a long time ago, having been an electronic technician...

Last week I spent two days that the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Unlike a lot of conferences I attend, I actually spent much of my time in technical talks listening to some of the things that Red Hat was going to be putting into RHEL 6.0 which is due out in a short time. Tim Burke, VP of Platform...

On a recent trip to Ghana I took along 137 T-shirts that O'Reilly and Hackerteen had given to me to hand out at conferences. I stuffed them into my suitcases and carried them with me on the airplane, both to make sure they got there, and to avoid huge amounts of shipping cost. When I got to...