Monday  2006-10-09   Software

Ralph Griswold 1934-05-19 -- 2006-10-06

Ralph Griswold passed away a few days ago. He was one of the early pioneers of computer science, invented SNOBOL language at the Bell Labs and Icon at University of Arizona, where he started its computer science department. Icon was and is an elegant language that supports goal-directed evaluation, high-level constructs and powerful string handling capability. As Larry Wall once put it "Icon is a cat language, and Perl is a dog language."

 
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Friday  2006-08-25   Software

Schoonschip

Probably very few people know of software named Schoonschip. It is a computer algebra system for high energy physics -- it can handle tens of thousands of terms in equations, sum over indices in those terms, carry out integrations, etc. It is possibly the first software ever that helped its author (Martinus J.G. Veltman) win the Nobel Prize.

 
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Monday  2005-12-26   Software

browser 15 years later

One of the most important milestones in 2005: cross platform local persistence for browser. Fifteen years too late? No matter, this event will be remembered fifteen years from now.

 
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Wednesday  2005-03-02   Software

Jef Raskin 1943-03-09 -- 2005-02-26

Jef Raskin passed away the other day. Raskin was one of the pioneers of GUI, UI design and other efforts for improving personal computers, the most famous of them being Apple Macintosh.

 
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Thursday  2004-10-21   Software

Ken Iverson 1920-12-17 -- 2004-10-19

Kenneth Iverson passed away. Iverson invented APL, later J, and won Turing Award.

 
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Wednesday  2004-05-26   Software

For your eyes only

A few months ago Islamic fanatics bombed Madrid commuter trains and murdered two hundred people. Soon an American lawyer (a convert to Muslim) was arrested because his fingerprint appeared on a piece of evidence of the bombing. Alas he was not the right man, New York Times reports:

The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation ought to hang their heads in shame over the mistaken arrest and jailing of a Muslim lawyer in Oregon who was supposed to be a material witness in the Madrid train bombing case. The arrest turned out to be based on a faulty fingerprint identification by F.B.I. "experts." That finding was ultimately retracted when more careful Spanish investigators concluded that the fingerprint had actually been left by a different man. Federal authorities apologized for the error and the unjustified jail time, but they still have a lot of explaining to do. The case smacks of a rush to judgment based on flimsy evidence. Clearly fingerprint analysis is not the gold standard it is cracked up to be. The method itself is not foolproof, and the analysts who provide the final judgment sometimes make the wrong call. [...]

This story and the oft-sited story about an amateur fooling fingerprint readers with fake fingers made of gelatin should serve as a warning against "the Lures of Biometrics" -- "However much fervent proponents and keen vendors of biometric solutions market their wares, the guiding factor should be proven reliability and appropriateness of these solutions to specific uses, not marketing hype, which seems at times to dominate this arena." Indeed.
 
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Saturday  2003-09-27   Software

Twenty missing years of GNU

Slashdot reminds us that Richard Stallman announced his intention to write GNU operating system 20 years ago today. GNU was to be an alternative to proprietry Unix system that could be shared freely among its users. Over the last twenty years,

• Unix vendors rose then fell (from early 1980s to mid 1990s),
• but free Unix like Linux and BSD picked up where vendors left (mid 1990s to date).
• The World Wide Web took off and the Internet expanded (early 1990s to date).
• And more and more users write their emails in Outlook Express or on Hotmail, read MSN with Internet Explorer and play games on PCs or XBox -- none of which existed in 1983 and all owned by Microsoft.

Maybe today is an occasion to reflect how an escapist ideology remains to be, well, an escapist ideology -- out of touch with common people and impotent in the larger world.

 
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