The future of user interfaces

Interesting article from Mark Shuttleworth on HUD.

Today's games developers are a great leading indicator for where user interfaces of all forms are headed. The kids growing up with all todays amazing game technologies will one day put on suits and/or beards and go into business. When they do, they will bring models for HMI with them that are very different from the Text heavy, Form-Oriented, Bar Charted models of their parents.

Facts and opinions

Inside every spoken "fact" lies one or more unspoken opinions.

A new form of "Engrossing"

Law making revolves around a process called engrossing and so when it came to naming the Propylon band...Well the name "Tyson and the Engrossers" fitted the bill nicely. The Tyson here is Tyson Deines. A legislative business analyst with Propylon but also former full time musician/singer/song-writer.

Some videos from the Propylon XMas party here : Tyson and the Engrossers

The Engrossers are:

- Tyson Deines : Drums, Vocals, Guitar
- Bill Hastings : guitar
- Sean McGrath : guitar, harmonica
- Beth Rice : Base, Vocals
- Matt Smith : keyboard
- Warren Smith : vocals
- Alex Smith : vocals

GIS in the future of law/rule-making

Last year, I had the pleasure of presenting the closing keynote at the GIS Pro conference. The videos have been posted:

Main Talk Part 1

Main Talk Part 2

Main Talk Part 3

Main Talk Part 4

Also, lightning talk here.

Legislative Software on Netbeans

A short writeup on the LWB Legislative/Parliamentary Software Suite on the Netbeans Developer Zone website.

Leonard Cohen

New song. New album. 'Nuff said.

Another sad loss

My mum used to say that bad news and good news travel around in groups of three...We had Steve Jobs. Then Denis Ritchie, and now, apparently, John McCarthy.

Lisp was one of the great inventions in all of computer science. Its influence on all programming languages - including those that chose to make themselves not-lisp-like, has been immense. If ever a programming language embodied a paradigm - a way of looking at the world - .... that is Lisp.

Emacs, AutoCad, Softquad SGML Author/Editor, Interleaf...

Then of course there was SICP...