Bill Katz

I used to develop courseware for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Over the years, I moved into Unix and Windows programming, but I've kept an eye on the resurgent Unix-based Mac offerings. Yesterday, I placed an order for the newly announced MacBook Pro notebook computer. The MacBook Pro sports an Intel dual core processor and allows an upgrade to a 100GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive. I plan on comparing TextMate + Rails + Mac to my current Eclipse + TortoiseSVN + Windows development system.

Wishlist for software I'd like to put on the new Mac:

• a nice image/vector graphics program, like a new Adobe Photoshop / Macromedia Fireworks, but running natively on Mac OS X with Intel
• a virtual PC system for the new Intel-based Mac. I assume Microsoft is working on a new version of their VirtualPC. VMWare should give them some competition.
• a native version of MindManager Pro 6, which is a pretty useful mind mapping tool.
• a nice subversion client like TortoiseSVN.

I'm looking forward to rejoining the Apple fold. Go Apple. (disclaimer: I've been an Apple shareholder :)

It was approximately two decades back that Doug Lenat went down to Texas to work on Cyc, his vision of how to solve the common sense problem inherent in Artificial Intelligence. Computers are pretty good at doing some tasks, like playing Chess in a very inhuman way, but they fail when asked general questions that touch on life. For example, if a patient told a doctor that he had heart pains after the Dallas Cowboys scored a touchdown on the Washington Redskins, a computer would have a hard time asking context-riddled questions: Did the patient have money riding on the game? Did he get upset because he's a die-hard Redskins fan and the subsequent stress precipitated some angina? These are very tangential ideas, and ones that computers have failed in the past. It's why there's a Turing Test for artificial intelligence.

ActiveGrid just released the early-access version of their application builder and grid application server. The specifics of this open source grid-based web system had been kept under wraps since last November; CEO Pater Yared dropped hints about a Google-inspired system built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python) for delivering scalable web apps. I say "Google-inspired" because ActiveGrid pays a lot of attention to scaling web apps across a grid of commodity computers (minimum hardware: 800+ MHz x86 processor, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB hard drive). ActiveGrid allows six deployment patterns, most of them focused on high-availability. The grid application server is implemented as an Apache module with libraries that run within language-specific modules (mod_python, mod_php, mod_perl, tomcat).

On reading Paul Graham's essays on computer languages, I was struck by some interesting points he makes. This blog entry could just as well be called "What Paul Graham made me realize about Ruby and Rails."

First, new languages may be trending towards LISP, perhaps because LISP was initially a theoretical exercise by McCarthy, a gedankenexperiment not really designed to be shoehorned into 1958 computational constraints, but rather discovered "when you try to axiomatize computation." (See Graham's full postscript paper The Roots of Lisp.) FORTRAN and C, on the other hand, took a lot of cues from the hardware; they had to be fast. Over time, the lower-level languages have been relegated to handle algorithmically-simple, computationally-needy problems, while the scripting languages - PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby - have been getting fast and moving from simple glue to more complex processing tasks.