I started my own company back in 2006. The company, Figure 53, LLC, has been a labor of love since long before it was officially formed. Scraping together a few hours each night, and cramming 20 hours into the weekends, I slowly managed to make a product and…holy hell…even managed to sell a […]

An idea I don’t have time to pursue right now:

The new iPhone SDK, which gives developers access to the accelerometer, should make it easy to write up a little iPhone pedometer application.

Just tell the app your stride length, turn it on, slide the iPhone in your pocket, and away you go. A friendly display […]

Hint: it’s not on the Wii.
I played this as a kid, except all the motion was in my head:

Utterly cool.
(Really, I used to fill up sheets of paper with frozen-in-time contraptions that funneled a ball around the paper into a goal. But turning that into a video game? Stroke of genius.)

From Microsoft Excel for Mac:

I sure love being told that the programmers knew exactly what I was trying to do, but decided they weren’t going to bother doing it for me.

Another cross-platform development solution hit the geek news sites recently: Lina. According to their website,
With LINA, a single executable written and compiled for Linux can be run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems.
Native look and feel, eh? Not likely. There’s a clue right […]

The plus character (+) is a valid character in an email address.
Stop telling me it isn’t.
Actually, Web Developers in general, please take note of that fact. Half of you are guilty of the same thing.
But much more importantly, don’t let me sign up with a ‘+’ in my email address if your “forgot your […]

I’m not a particularly smart guy. I don’t retain information well, and I’m prone to intuition over reason. I do math slowly, not in firey blasts.
That’s one reason I like programming. I can get away with being mediocre 90% of the time. For the price of persistence, I get to seem […]

I work as a software engineer. It’s a pretty swank gig. I get paid to build ideas.
Building, of course, has traditionally been a physical enterprise. If I suddenly time-shifted into an English-speaking village at the turn of the ninth century and tried to convince a passing gentleperson I build ideas […]

I’d like to learn Lisp.
I’ve dabbled in Scheme, I’ve poked at Python, but I’d really like to sit down and write a substantial piece of Lisp code [1].
Lisp seems to be the ultimate judo in algorithms, and there are no end of essays on the Web to convince you of that. Lisp practitioners almost […]

I’ve got two kinds of people I want to talk to today: programmers and actors.
First things first. Let’s define some terms. Well, really just one term: The Text.
Programmers, most of your time as a programmer is spent working on other people’s programs. Likewise, actors, most of your time as actors is spent putting […]