Catching up on more of my new year reading, especially with technology stories that are cool, strange, odd and more. I read a tweet by Grady Booch and almost at the same time was reading a BBC article (the BBC used the title "dodgy program code explosed") about a cool web site that has screen shots from television shows and movies showing source code from various programming languages, applications, shells scripts and other places. Over the holidays there was a crop circle sighting in Chualar Ca...

We celebrate what would have been Grace Hopper's 107th birthday.  Today, Google's cool doodle celebrates Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper, also known as "the first lady of software" was one of the earliest programmers (she was the first to coin the term "computer bug" , when she found a moth in Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator), computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the US Navy. Each year, the Anita Borg institute celebrates the life and career of Grace Hopper by presenting the "Grace Hopper Celebra...

On June 15 and 16 of 2012 we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing (June 23, 1912) in San Francisco (http://turing100.acm.org/final_program/tcc_final_program.pdf) with 33 living ACM A.M. Turing Award winners!  It was especially great to see Nicklaus Wirth on the "Programming Languages: Past Achievements and Future Challenges" panel along with Susan Graham, Barbara Liskov and Frances Allen. You can watch the replays of the sessions at http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcast...

I'm probably late to this party, but I've discovered that you can find incredible deals on used CS textbooks at Amazon, especially for older editions. For example, I recently ordered a copy of Programming Language Pragmatics, by Michael L. Scott. It's $63 new for the hardcover or $43 on a Kindle. I got a used copy of the (somewhat older) second edition for $3 + postage, for a total of $7. True, I don't get the new chapter on VMs, but I can live with that. The third edition totally dried up th...

The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed this morning on Runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida at 5:57am EDT.  The landing marked the end of 30 years of the Space Shuttle program.  I want more explorations both robotic and manned spacecraft.  In Star Trek we were told over and over again "To boldly go where no man has gone before".  In software development we continue to go where no programmer has gone before. Exploration drives us forward. Exploration drives our imagination.  Explo...

On June 18, 1985 I joined Borland International in Scotts Valley California.  It was great to come to a developer tools and software company.  It is a special treat to be able to work on developer tools and be a developer.  25 years have passed and they have all been great years.   There have been some ups and downs, some changes (of company names and addresses in Scotts Valley).  One thing has stayed in the same place (besides me) - the drive to continually improve, enhance and simplify this th...

Michael Swaine, of Dr. Dobb's Journal Swaine's Flames fame (say that fast 10 times), recently blogged with a list of the most commonly mentioned top technical books - "What Makes a (Tech) Book a Classic?".  he also goes on to discuss what makes a technical book a good read.  In one of my past Sip from the Firehose blog posts, I also wrote about my "Six must have computer science books".  That post received comments with suggestions for additional must have books. In all the book lists that Mi...