I was on a conference call with a group of IT application architects, and, with a few minutes left until the end of the scheduled hour, the summary of the meeting began with that phrase: “History teaches us …”. As an amateur historian, my interest was immediately piqued. The end of the [...]

I’ve been writing code lately. Makes me feel young, again. Unfortunately, something terrible happened.
For some reason (and thereby hangs a tale), I decided to write the application in Brazillian Portuguese. You know, localized for pt-BR only.
Based on my Smalltalk days, I decided to write the “Check for Updates” code first. (A [...]

In Adobe Illustrator I type the word copyright into the search box in the Help Center. The page that results includes the following paragraph:

This product includes either BISAFE and/or TIPEM software by RSA Data Security, Inc. This product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young (eay@cryptosoft.com). This software is based in part on the [...]

“Did you know,” said Gina, the other day, “that in Spanish, the word meaning to make is the same as the word meaning to do?” I don’t speak Spanish, but it seems that the usage of the Portuguese fazer and the French faire supports this hypothesis. I’m going to have to back [...]

I met and had breakfast last week with Ben Hyde. A really smart and interesting fellow — I wish I had recorded our conversation. We had fascinating and wide-ranging discussions all morning — but like when trying to remember the really hilarious stand-up routine you heard last night, you can only remember one [...]

After work, the question got asked. It came up in the context of another discussion about the relevance of Free/Open Source Software. Availability of the source code is probably only relevant to computer programmers. After all, if you aren’t a programmer, what would you do with source code? In which case, [...]