I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.
The blog here at dsandler.org is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on Google+.
Oh, awesome. The Penny-Arcade guys have uncovered
the Harvard
geographic dialect data underpinning that “Yankee vs. Dixie” quiz
(the link escapes me at the moment). The raw data is much more
interesting than the quiz (which is based on the data but then makes
some bizarre mathematical leaps based on how you answer). Oh, and then,
there’s the Speech Accent
Archive from George Mason U. Delicious.
Home again, safe and sound … and exhausted. She just passed the 24 hour
mark. (And then passed out.)
From a software architecture point of view, HyperCard had a number of
interesting ideas which might bear reexamination. At a time when
persistent object stores were still novel, HyperCard was built around
one. It’s not going too far to say that its user interface was simply a
reification of the object database. HyperCard’s programming model was
object-like, but didn’t fall neatly into either the class/instance or
delegation styles. Individual visible cards in a stack were created as
instances of prototypic backgrounds and could be pre-populated with text
fields and action buttons. Default message passing was an odd hybrid of
visual containment and fixed object hierarchy.
A Eulogy
for HyperCard (via λΩ.)
K5 presents the first in a series: “Japanese for
Nerds”, which aims to build up a working conversational knowledge of
Japanese in semi-humorous, surprisingly useful constructive semantics. “At
some point in your study of Japanese, you will learn how to say ‘eat’ in
eight different ways. In the meantime, would you rather be able to
communicate or not?” (I’m particularly amused by the bizarrely
Yiddishesque examples that are generated by using nothing but the word
for negation: Q: “Got any cash?” A: “I’m not completely out.”)
The 10 Worst
Album Covers Of All Time. Highly objective, of course.
Who what now? Prothon is a
Python-like language which is entirely prototype-based (rather than
class-based—think NewtonScript or ECMAScript/JavaScript).
Or, you know, maybe it’s just an anagram of “hot
porn”.
