http://blog.snowtide.com building complex, innovative software and the business that goes with it Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:49:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Next Tuesday, the 5th of May @ 6:30PM, Snowtide Informatics and Atalasoft will be hosting Ben Fry, creator of the Processing programming language and environment and author of Visualizing Data from O'Reilly, at Snowtide's offices in Northampton, MA. (This hasn't been a secret or anything (for good reason!), but I thought ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/04/28/snowtide-informatics-welcomes-ben-fry-of-processing-fame-to-northampton This week, I find myself lucky enough to be at the International Lisp Conference at MIT in Cambridge, MA.  I won't get into why I'm here right now, for those of you who might be surprised.  The purpose of this post is simply to paraphrase what Gerald Jay Sussman, one ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-instead-of-scheme-for-its-undergraduate-cs-program I just wanted to say 'thank you' to everyone who came to last night's Western Mass. Developers' meeting.  Further, many thanks to those who helped out in one way or the other  -- especially Miles and Doug for running for the D'Angelos, Doug for bringing the ice and cooler, Joe ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03/13/western-mass-developers-meet-snowtide I often enjoy the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcasts, which deliver talks from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.  In particular, it is often useful to glean an idea or moral from the war stories told by some of the weathered entrepreneurs that the STVP invites to talk about their past or ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/03/05/vcs-are-entertaining-please-dont-take-them-too-seriously I'm generally not one to be impressed by celebrity -- you won't catch me reading People or US Weekly, example.  However, this morning I noticed with a shimmer of glee that Peter Norvig used some code that I wrote years ago in one of his recent projects.  So, just for ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/02/26/whoa-peter-norvig-used-some-of-my-code I hadn't tried TweetDeck yet, and thought I'd give it a run.  It requires Adobe AIR, and I thought I'd end up having to do the download/install dance.  But lo-and-behold, the TweetDeck "Install Now" Flash button bootstraps a local install of AIR for me!  No mess, no fuss, and the ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/02/03/ria-platform-judo-javafx-flash Last Friday, Paul Graham announced that his Y Combinator incubator was leaving Boston for Silicon Valley, prompted by the impending birth of his first child.  He didn't lose any sleep over it though, and made his thoughts on Boston vs. Silicon Valley clear (yet again) in that announcement: Boston just doesn't ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2009/01/26/paul-grahams-y-combinator-boston I happen to work in a particular corner of the software industry that isn't exactly the most happenin' party zone.  Compared to whatever is "hot" at any point in time, extracting data from documents seems dull to most.  I'm not deterred though – quite the contrary, being able to deliver ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/11/19/surprising-praise I've been doing a lot of writing in our FogBugz wikis of late, and I eventually found it irritating that so much of my vertical screen real estate was being eaten up by the FogBugz controls and such that take up permanent residence at the top of the screen.  So, ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/07/22/full-screen-wiki-editing-in-fogbugz While at dinner with a friend of mine a couple of weekends ago, we got to talking about how certain programming problems, usually the hardest ones we've faced, are ones where we ended up having to simply work the problem: stare at the code, stare at the reference / specification ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/05/01/burn-it-down