Since writing about stock market crashes and normal accidents, I spent even more time talking about the events of May 6th. Good analysis is starting to come out. The best I have seen so far is Nanex’s Flash Crash Analysis. Their conclusion is that the crash was precipitated primarily by a queuing and timestamping bug [...]

A number of months ago I posted my disappointment in the version 1 Kindle. I’ve also tried out the version 2, and continue to be convinced that the Sony Reader is a better piece of hardware for dedicated book reading.
But (if there wasn’t a but there wouldn’t be much of a post here) the Sony [...]

Researchers at the MIT OpenWetWare project are attempting to engineer Synthetic Biology, creating reusable and composable biological components that can be combined to create useful organisms. In the process, they are discovering that biological systems don’t follow the same patterns of good architecture familiar to us from software.
In software engineering, architecture is perceived as critical [...]

Riding the Acela to New York yesterday, I had my first opportunity to try out the new WiFi service. I’m glad to see Acela moving into the 21st century and joining the ranks of BoltBus and LimoLiner by offering WiFi on trips to New York. It’s been a long time coming, and now that it [...]

On Tuesday January 5 Google announced the Nexus One smart phone. On Thursday January 7, my Nexus One arrived.
For context, I’ve historically been a BlackBerry user, but have been steadily driven away by the browser experience. My wife was a zero-day iPhone adopter, and I’ve spent a lot of time using an iPhone. I also [...]

In my last post, I shared benchmark data for the web browser on the iPhone versus BlackBerry. My theory is that web browser performance is critically important for smartphone user experience. Furthermore, the BlackBerry seems to be embarrassingly inferior to the iPhone in this respect. This begs the question, how do other phones stack up.
Thanks [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. They seem trendy, and I like gadgets. But I’ve started questioning what I would get from one that I don’t get from my current devices. I’ve concluded that what I want isn’t a netbook, it is a phone that is actually good.
I’m the happy owner of a [...]

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at MIT on Cloud Computing. One of the questions from the audience was how cloud computing impacts high performance computing. The response was that in a cloud of inexpensive commodity servers, scientific applications must learn to spread applications across large numbers of parallel compute nodes. This [...]

I switched to Wordpress. Let’s see if anyone notices.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Edward Tufte’s lecture in Boston thanks to StreamBase. This was one of his standard lectures on information presentation, for which he has become famous. As usual, it came complete with a set of his books. This was convenient since sometime in my last 4 [...]