Entries Tagged 'Cool News, Links & Reviews' ↓

Why Amazon.com Could Be This Year’s Most Important Startup
“[Amazon.com’s new payment processing API] is everything that Paypal isn’t: well designed, API-centric, and built with developers in mind.”

The platform even accepts payments as small as $.01 (a.k.a. micropayments), which have yet to be “done right.”

It appears that Amazon is trying to become the next “platform” for developers. Add payment processing to their storage, queuing, search, mechanical turk, elastic compute cloud, and e-commerce services.

Amazon also has a $100,000 Start-up and Entrepreneur Challenge. Submit an idea (you don’t even have to build it), and they will choose the top 5 finalists. After that the Amazon community will vote on the best idea; prizes include $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS usage credit, and an investment offer from Amazon. Not sure how excited I would be about those last two.

Hilarious.

I relocated from Los Angeles to Connecticut a few months ago, and a few of my geekier friends joked that I had to meet Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham before I came back to California.

Joel is in the midst of his 21-city FogBugz World Tour and one of his first stops was in New York City, where I saw him demo FogBugz 6.0 two weeks ago. In fact, in the picture at the top of Joel’s post about the session, you can barely see my head peeping out over the guy with the black shirt and white stripes on the left side. Those stinking paparazzi never leave me alone.

FogBugz 6.0
The demo went well; it wasn’t spectacular, but it was a good 40-minute overview of FogBugz’s main components: a wiki, forums, bug tracking, and scheduling. But it didn’t need a big flashy presentation - the application itself is seriously impressive.

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TechieCrossing, a technology job site, just published a nice write-up on me as part of their Tech Star series (complete with a color photograph). An excerpt:

“At the University of California, Davis, Rob immersed himself in a formidable double major in computer engineering and electrical engineering. He had decided early on that he did not want to pursue programming; in fact, after his C++ (mid-level programming) class, he swore he would never write code again.”

You can read it here.

I’m a huge believer that the more stuff you have on your mind the more stress you will have in your life. I’ve done everything in my power to automate my bills, outsource repetitive tasks, stop buying junk I don’t need, get rid of junk I already own, and be on a constant search for services that make my life simpler.

About 4 months ago a friend of mine recommended Mozy, an online backup service. He said the installation was super simple, and that he had forgotten he had it installed until he accidentally deleted a file and was able to restore it in a few seconds. The hair on my neck stood up as I thought about the backup solutions I’ve previously investigated - solutions involving software with genome-esque complexity, or setting Outlook reminders and handling the process manually each day/week/month/never (the latter in my case).

I’ve been on an ongoing search for an inexpensive, completely automated solution that will backup my PCs to a secure, remote location. My laptop only has 70GB of data including my MP3s, but backing it up remotely with the solutions I’ve seen would involve a hefty monthly storage fee (not to mention my desktop I use for video editing with the 500GB hard drive). The beauty of Mozy, and the reason I decided to try it, is the $5/month per computer for unlimited storage.

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I’ve been a fan of Programmer’s Paradise for years, so imagine my surprise when they asked to include Software by Rob in a new section of their catalog devoted to developer blogs. I assumed there would be 20 or 30 blogs in a directory-style listing, but I’m one of only three blogs on the page, and company to none other than Joel on Software and Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware News.

You can view a PDF version here.

My wife is getting her PhD in Psychology, and a few months ago she was in need of a statistics program called SPSS. There are many questionable avenues one could travel to obtain a copy of this software, which costs over $600, but being a developer myself I purchase all of my software legitimately.

I was lucky; I found a used copy of the student version on Amazon for $87. But my wife soon found that it lacked the features necessary to run the stats for her dissertation. So back to Amazon I went, but, unfortunately, the full version was nowhere to be found.

The Sale
After over an hour of searching and three phone calls, I found out that she didn’t need to pay for the full version (which runs $600), because there is something called a “Grad Pack” that would provide her with the full version for right around $200. “Piece of cake,” I thought, “I’ll buy this copy and re-sell the student version on Amazon.” Things were looking better and better by the minute. Until I posted the student version on Amazon.

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This news is via a post from Michael Neel:

Charles Petzold, author of Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, has been working on a sequel to this book that explains Alan Turing’s work on computability. The problem? The new book has been turned down by his publisher, Microsoft Press.

If you enjoyed Code, or are interested in a well-written look at Alan Turing’s work on computability, please spread the word that Charles Petzold is looking for a publisher.

By the way, if you are a C or C++ developer migrating to .NET, Mr. Petzold also wrote a free eBook called What the C or C++ Programmer Needs to Know About C# and the .NET Framework.

I recently had lunch with Lutz Mueller, creator and author of the programming language newLISP.

I’ve never used Lisp, but I’ve always had a fascination with the “AI” languages. There’s something magical about a language designed to solve ridiculously difficult problems.

In the same vein, there’s something magical about an individual who writes a programming language on his own. So someone who writes an AI language on his own ranks pretty high on the list of intelligent people I’ve met.

Like a renaissance man, Lutz’s experience runs far and wide: he has a PhD in Psychology, a background in statistics, and spent many nights programming punch cards (and many nights working for an internet startup). He’s now the one-man show behind the open source scripting version of Lisp called newLISP.

Rob: Give us some background on newLISP. How long has it been around, how has it evolved, etc…

Lutz: newLISP started on SunBSD in the early 90’s, then moved to Windows 3.0/1 as a 16-bit application, then to Windows 95/98 as a 32-bit program. During all that time newLISP was more like a hobby for me. Around 1999/2000 I made it Open-Source under the GPL license on Linux. At the end of 2002 I started working on newLISP full time and a community of users has been growing quickly since then. In 2005 it was adopted for the first time by an internet startup as the only development language for a large scale (~100 CPU’s) distributed application running a specialized (sentence) search engine.

Rob: How is newLISP different from LISP?

Lutz: newLISP is a scripting language very much in the culture of Perl or Python; quick to learn and to get the job done. newLISP takes its core elements from LISP, such as lists and lambda expressions, and adds name-spaces and implicit indexing.

The style of programming has changed dramatically during the 90s and the internet age. Programming is more casual, interactive, and performed by different people than before the internet and personal computer, and is now used for different sorts of applications. Scripting languages have made access to programming easier for people with no previous programming experience and has greatly increased speed of development for professionals.

Rob: What inspired you to create newLISP?

Lutz: I was always intrigued by LISP but found that the current standards of Common LISP and Scheme were behind modern times in their approach to programming, and too overloaded with academic concepts to be useful for solving real world problems. I wanted to create a LISP with a scripting feel, like Perl or Python, but still a LISP.

Rob: Creating your own language seems like a massive undertaking. How is writing a language different from other software development you’ve done?

Lutz: What you are creating has the potential to be used by many different people with different backgrounds, motivations, and on different applications. Making a language has as much to do with Psychology as it has with Software Engineering. It is very important to listen to users and to know many other programming languages: from machine assembly language to high level languages like SQL.

The core of a well designed programming language should be small. The bulk of the newLISP code consists of the newLISP API functions that are, internally, relatively independent from each other. But looking from the outside, from an API-level, those functions have to work together and should paint a cohesive picture of the language.

Designing and writing the software is only about 25% of the entire project. The rest is QA (Quality Assurance), documentation, and contact with the community of users via support and exchanging newLISP code and ideas. The way a programming language is used differs very much from person to person and from application to application.

Rob: Are you the sole developer on the project?

Lutz: For the core of the language I am the only developer, but many bits and pieces in the project come from other projects and programmers, as is typical for many Open-Source projects. I especially depend on help on the documentation side since I am not a native English speaker.

Rob: Most of my readers are enterprise developers using .NET, Java, or PHP. Why would an enterprise developer want to learn newLISP?

Lutz: Many people like the functional style of programming, but they feel that Common LISP and Scheme do not offer the API they have come to expect from .NET, Java, or PHP. Things like regular expressions, network functions and support for popular protocols like XML or HTTP are all built in to newLISP without the need of external libraries.

Many types of problems, i.e. complex statistical analytics, modeling and simulation are much easier to design and implement in a functional programming style using readily available functions in newLISP. This also includes financial functions and Bayesian modeling implemented on a high level.

newLISP has a documentation facility similar to JavaDoc, which makes it easier to use in an enterprise setting. It also allows splitting large programs into independent modules. But using newLISP is not an all-or-nothing decision, it can live and cooperate well with other languages in a project.

Rob: How does newLISP compare to Python in terms of AI programming?

Lutz: newLISP has better functional abstraction and symbol handling and is more flexible in modeling. The same list syntax for program and data makes it easier to write programs which generate or modify other programs. newLISP has built-in support for distributed applications.

For example, you can use the same function to read/write from/to the local disk or over the network, or the same functions to load program code locally or remotely. A built in function called net-eval exists to distribute processing to many remote nodes in one function call.

Rob: I’ve never used LISP or newLISP. If I want to learn newLISP, where should I begin?

Lutz: On http://newlisp.org you will find introductions created by professional writers and a few small tutorial movies. The newLISP manual and reference is full of examples and there is a ‘Code Patterns’ document describing common solutions for common problems. Traditional books on Common LISP or Scheme are not recommended for learning newLISP, because they emphasize a style of programming not suited for newLISP.

Here are some pointers to pages on the newlisp.org site:

For introductory and reference documentation:
http://newlisp.org/index.cgi?Documentation

Short code snippets:
http://newlisp.org/index.cgi?Tips_and_Tricks

User contributed short examples:
http://newlisp.org/index.cgi?Code_Contributions

Support and community:
http://www.alh.net/newlisp/phpbb/

A blog about newLISP:
http://newlisper.blogspot.com/

The last link also contains links to other newLISP related sites.

Rob: Have you seen the Netflix contest (www.netflixprize.com)? Is newLISP up to the challenge?

Lutz: I believe this is a typical problem that can be solved with newLISP, but I don’t have the time and do not quite agree with their terms. Perhaps someone else will take on the challenge using newLISP, it would be the best tool for this contest

Rob: Thanks for your time, Lutz.

Lutz: Thanks for talking with me.

Dice just released their local job market reports for Q4 2006 for twenty U.S. metro areas. Some highlights:

Baltimore, MD
“We see a need for project managers, senior quality assurance/testers, web developers, and software engineers. Help desk and desktop support work is also starting to come on strong.”

Boston, MA
“…in-demand job titles: business analysts, project managers, developers (JAVA and .net), systems administrators (UNIX, Windows, DBA), systems engineers, network engineers, IT security personnel, and storage consultants.”

Chicago, IL
“[most in-demand are] project managers, developers, network engineers/administrators, SAP, QA, and programmers specializing in .NET, SQL, JAVA, J2EE, and C++.”

Denver, CO
“…the most requested skill sets are .NET developers and Oracle/SQL server DBAs.”

Detroit, MI
“…the most in-demand positions include all levels of consulting and project management, SAP, Oracle, system analysts, and network administrators.”

Hartford, CT
“Who is most in demand? .NET web developers, application developers, business managers, and project managers…”

Los Angeles, CA
“What’s hottest right now? According to MacKinnon, it’s project management and business analyst positions.” (Although my experience is that experienced .NET developers are in huge demand in L.A.)

Silicon Valley, CA
“…heaviest demand for: .NET developers, software developers, business analysts, project managers, QA experts, desktop support experts, data warehousing experts, and interface developers.”