Day 18.1

I just set up Inbox on a very old, in fact my oldest, earliest, Gmail account. Come to think of it, I guess that’s appropriate in a way. Here, briefly, are my very first impressions.

Short Version

Inbox is like the dead mouse your cat brings to you. Thanks but that’s not exactly what I wanted and it’s not quite useful to me, though I appreciate the work you’ve done. I may even be impressed by it. It’s true I could use something to eat right now, maybe even something about that size, but that isn’t it.

Day 18

I recently made a list of the program’s I’ve written that I’d consider my favorites. Then I made a list of the programming languages I had used. I think the result would qualify as a list of my favorite programming languages.

• FORTRAN
• BASIC
• SNOBOL
• Pascal
• C
• Objective-C
• Perl
• Python

I’m pretty sure I’ve written more code over the years in Perl and Python. I’m not sure which would be in the lead at this point.

Two other languages, Smalltalk and LISP, are languages I really enjoy but only in an occasional, recreational sense. I’ve never found either to be useful for anything very practical. However, it’s a joy to write pure object-oriented code in the wondrous Smalltalk-80-based environment of Squeak. Similarly, it’s a thrill to write pure functional programs in LISP, using Racket Scheme.

Day 17

From the NASA Chandra pages.

Centaurus A is the fifth brightest galaxy in the sky — making it an ideal target for amateur astronomers — and is famous for the dust lane across its middle and a giant jet blasting away from the supermassive black hole at its center. Cen A is an active galaxy about 12 million light years from Earth.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Rolf Olsen; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Day 16

From Business Insider.

Day 15.1

Well, I’m half way to having blogged for 30 days straight. It’s required keeping up with it but I’ve enjoyed it so far. The fact that I’ve thrown some re-tweets and link postings in there helps. I like the mid-length blogging ideas and those really fit my thinking. Short, quick posts that say something you want to say are fine!

Some other takers of the 30 day challenge have been reflecting mid-way.

Om Malik
Colin Devroe

Day 15

What’s the best way to learn the Python programming language? I think the on-line tutorial at python.org is the fastest but it works best if Python isn’t your first language.

Day 14

From @wxbrad.

RT Fall colors at Cherokee, NC… photo from @sanderswx pic.twitter.com/Wjpsfl4AXe

— Brad Panovich (@wxbrad) October 24, 2014

Day 13.1

Ten years of Ubuntu: How Linux’s beloved newcomer became its criticized king. Ars looks back at the decade in Ubuntu, from Warty Warthog to 25 million users worldwide, by Scott Gilbertson at Ars Technica.

Day 13

Google is now making available to all users, albeit by invitation only for now, Inbox, it’s new Gmail app.

I’ve barely seen it but initially I’m a bit skeptical. There’s a focus on automatically bundling your email for you and managing todo lists. I already manage my email with a strong and extensive set of filters and I manage todo lists and things like that via my implementation of David Allen’s GTD. So I’m probably not an intended user.

It will probably look compelling. One thing I do like are email-like systems where the messages look more like short messages in a chat session rather than email. When I think about this as a good idea and then look back at Gmail, it really already goes a long way in that direction. The messages in a conversation are nicely minimal.

Inbox also seems to have a little floating circle, in this case a red dot. This little floating circle, that is both highly annoying and in the way as far as I’m concerned, seems to be a popular gimmick lately. Witness the little chat circle in Facebook’s mobile apps.

I’m being highly critical of software I’ve never even seen, so I may be wrong about Inbox. I do like the idea of an even nicer and somehow simpler email application but I want full control over what’s happening. And I don’t need a new Gmail. It’s actually nearly perfect already. I fear that ongoing attempts to move it forward will begin to degrade what I like about Gmail.

Using Google Inbox: this feels like the future of email at the Verge.
Google May Be About To Blow Up Email With Its “Inbox” App at Readwrite.

Day 12

Lee Gomes writes in Slate The autonomous Google car may never actually happen.

For starters, the Google car was able to do so much more than its predecessors in large part because the company had the resources to do something no other robotic car research project ever could: develop an ingenious but extremely expensive mapping system. These maps contain the exact three-dimensional location of streetlights, stop signs, crosswalks, lane markings, and every other crucial aspect of a roadway.

…

…the maps necessary for the Google car are an order of magnitude more complicated [than Google Maps].

…

To create them, a dedicated vehicle outfitted with a bank of sensors first makes repeated passes scanning the roadway to be mapped. The data is [sic] then downloaded, with every square foot of the landscape pored over by both humans and computers to make sure that all-important real-world objects have been captured. This complete map gets loaded into the car’s memory before a journey, and because it knows from the map about the location of many stationary objects, it’s computer—essentially a generic PC running Ubuntu Linux—can devote more of its energies to tracking moving objects, like other cars.

Driving in Circles by Lee Gomes in Slate