Word Press has a new P2 "theme" which provides a sort of group-MicroBlogging interface.

The official language of Extreme Programming. Because it makes refactoring as painless as possible. (more)

Inventor of SmallTalk, a father of OOP, conceiver of the DynaBook in 1968. Was at Xerox PARC 1970-1980. At Atari 1984-1984. Became an Apple Fellow in 1984. During that time he started Squeak SmallTalk. He later moved to Disney for a few years, which he left in Sept'2001. Worked on Open Croquet at HP 2002-2005. (more)

Interview with Alan Kay on the history (and design) of programming languages, including SmallTalk, SqueakSmallTalk, Java, Lisp, etc. I had the world’s greatest group (Research Lab), and I should have made the world’s two greatest groups. I didn’t realize there are benefits to having real implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch every few months. I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher, but it took me a long time to realize that I was interfering with them by trying to improve things. I believe that the only kind of science computing can be is like the science of bridge building. Somebody has to build the bridges and other people have to tear them down and make better theories, and you have to keep on building bridges.

Ted Leung on Croquet Collaboration Ware, based on Squeak Smalltalk. So what did I find depressing? During the QA session, Alan Kay took stock of the state of computing today: "When they set out to build Croquet, they intended to do it in Java, but they felt that they had to abandon it because it lacked (and still does) the meta facilities that they needed. Instead they chose to use Squeak. They had to go back to 1970's technology. Kay regards this as a disaster. All languages, Smalltalk included, are bad for this day and age. We essentially haven't learned anything since 1975 when the last interesting feature was added to Smalltalk... OpenGL is the best thinking about 3D circa 1972 at the University of Utah. At least it doesn't get in the way too much...Lisp is the number one programming language idea of all time. Smalltalk's contribution was to build encapsulation on top of the ideas in Lisp." Much as I love Lisp, it seems to me that the Smalltalk community, led by folks like Kay, are continuing to demonstrate a convincing agenda for forward progress, while the Lisp community is perennially struggling with basic infrastructure issues like which dialect of Lisp/Scheme, which windowing environment, etc. Perhaps this is due to the conception of Smalltalk as a system, in addition to a language.

I always thought the "V" in SmallTalk/V was a roman 5 (without caring too much), but it really stood for Vivarium (an Apple/Alan Kay project). The goal of the Vivarium program is to do for the next generation of personal computers and human interfaces what the Dynabook did for the first - to be, a "forcing function" for the most appropriate new technology. The original idea for the Vivarium, the ecology-in-a-computer concept, came from Ann Marion, now the Vivarium Program Manager, when she was working with Alan at Atari. One of their projects was to try and do intelligent autonomous Warner Bros. cartoon characters, to send Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd into the forest, and have them play out a cartoon as a result of their personalities. Ann, however, sought to infuse life into more realistic creatures engaged in social interaction with each other and with their environment. She chose to model an aquarium, with fish that would chase and eat one other and reproduce. It was an arduous task, and one that we now seek to make as easy as child's play.

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 1/28: Muddling Through. There’s the situation short term, there’s the new strains, there’s the vaccines. (more)

aka Medicare for all https://medicare4all.org/ (more)

non-consensual movement?

a scary source of Energy (more)

see Warrior, Personal Mastery, Master And Apprentices, Craftsmanship (more)

PolitiFact: Did Donald Trump fire pandemic officials, defund CDC? (more)

Structured Wiki, renamed Decko? https://decko.org/ (more)

Open Source PBX Phone System http://www.asterisk.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_(PBX) (more)

Voice over IP (more)

Rands In Repose uses a "Taste of the Day" for his Daily Review process. Today’s record for consecutive uninterrupted seconds is 47... (Being a manager is) a gig where you need to keep track of everything, constantly re-prioritize, but remain strategically limber. And to do all of this, you need a task tracking system that allows you to strategically forget... By taking a deep breath and considering your entire day, I’m attempting to ditch all the bright’n'shininess and gather perspective: “What is going to matter today?” (Most Important Task) With this rough priority scale in mind, I do a complete scrub of the To-Do List... My task list has no hierarchical organization. I’ve used systems before that allow me to lump tasks by projects or by theme and, inevitably, I end up maintaining the structure rather than getting shit done... No Priorities... No Dates... The process for the Evening Scrub is slightly different. (more)

Jon Udell's piece on Tacit Knowledge and computer use made me think of wanting an Online Help System written as HyperText that a Desktop Search tool can index and integrate with other stuff. And that I want that search engine to be a WikiProxy, too. The clash of these cognitive styles -- knowing how to do things versus knowing how to find out how to do things -- is a source of friction between IT folk and our clientele. From our perspective, it's annoying to be asked constantly to write down detailed step-by-step procedures. If we don't rely on them, why should anyone else need to? (more)

documentation that's not meant to be printed! (more)

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition is a model of how learners acquire skills through formal instruction and practicing, used in the fields of education and operations research. Brothers Stuart Dreyfus and Hubert Dreyfus proposed the model in 1980 in an 18-page report on their research at the University of California, Berkeley, Operations Research Center for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research.[1] The model proposes that a student passes through five distinct stages and was originally determined as: novice, competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition

see Expert