maddog celebrates his 60th birthday
Aug 07, 2010 GMT
Today, August 7th, is the sixtieth anniversary of my birth.
To mark this occasion I am going to inaugurate a project of my retirement called “maddog's mansion and marina of math, music, micro-computing, micro-brewing, micro-winery, micro-distillery and bait shop”, a nice place by the beach where I hope to house and inspire young people who wish to be involved with producing Free Software.
Part of this “inspiration” of the students will be to ask various people that I have known over the years to come to “maddog's... more »
You Wave "Good-bye" and I Wave "Hello"
Aug 05, 2010 GMT
A new blog posting from Google points to the fact that the highly touted “Wave” project has been terminated, and the general philosophy around this seems to be that “Wave” was a failure.
I was one of the people who looked at Wave and tried to figure out how it fit into my daily life. I tried using it from time to time, but in my life I am “off the net” so frequently that the real-time and high-bandwidth... more »
Windows Too Unstable For Anything As Important As An Organ Concert: Debian Day (DebDay) talk in NYC
Jul 31, 2010 GMT
Some people know that I collect automated musical instruments. Player pianos, player organs, nickelodeons, and other mechanisms that use a roll of paper to control the playing of the instrument. This was a natural outcome of my fascination of controlling a piece of hardware with "logic" and "software", and my love of music. I have even developed a talk about how Free Software is like a player piano, and have given this talk several times over the course of the years, complete with... more »
Help Needed: Survey of home automation needs and desires
Jul 28, 2010 GMT
A while ago I wrote a blog entry about Project Cauã, a project that could create millions of new, high-tech businesses in Latin American and other countries with dense, urban areas.
I also blogged a short time ago about the vertical markets that Project Cauã will be penetrating and asking people if there were any additional target markets that we should consider.
We have more or less settled on two target markets for the first two... more »
Systems Administrator Appreciation Day: Friday, July 30th
Jul 28, 2010 GMT
One of my Brazilian brothers, Dennis Jensen, sent me email reminding me that the last Friday of every July is System Administrator Appreciation Day, where we should show our appreciation to those hard-working system administrators that keep our systems going.
In my early years of working with computers my connection with these people was limited to handing in a stack of punched cards through a window and praying that I... more »
35 Dollar Indian Pad? Go Indians, Go!
Jul 28, 2010 GMT
By now you probably have heard about the “pad” computer designed in India that is being touted as costing thirty-five U.S. Dollars to manufacture. While there is very little in the way of technical details about it, some information has been published that says it consists of:
Taiwan Motherboards - NOT!
Jul 20, 2010 GMT
I was visiting a friend of mine, Dennis Jensen, while I was in Florianopolis, Brazil. During my visit I started telling Dennis about the period of 1975 to 1978 when some people were building computers from kits by soldering integrated circuits with hand soldering irons to the printed circuit boards. Many of my computer friends built these types of kits, including me.
I remember one kit in particular, purchased by my supervisor at Aetna Life and Casualty, where the directions on how to assemble the system often did not match the circuit diagram, and neither matched the holes in... more »
