Category Archives: Uncategorized

Watching your laundry over the Web

A laundry room operator in Boston, Mac-Gray, has started installing a Web based tracking system for users of its washing machine facilities. You can monitor the minutes left on a cycle, see who is waiting to use a particular machine, and check usage data for an entire building’s facilities….

Orkut launch party

Last night I attended the birthday party of Orkut Buyukkokten, which he cleverly double billed as an Orkut launch party so Google would pay for everyone. We were downstairs at suite one8one for most of the night. Interesting mix of people, including some Tribe.net crashers. The video projectors at the club were playing content licensed under Creative Commons. Suite one8one had no beer on tap and served me Guinness in a can: an act of sacrilege to an Irishman. This was my first social networks gathering. It was interesting to try to figure out how you may be connected through…

Eric Rudder on Microsoft’s past and future

Tonight I attended an event featuring Eric Rudder of Microsoft. The Commonwealth Club of California gave Eric an award for being a person who will shape the upcoming century. I sat in the second row with my Tablet PC and have the whole hour recorded, if only I can clean up the sound from my built-in mic. It was interesting to hear Eric speak about software engineering as a profession in its infancy and therefore very prone to making mistakes. Brown’s computer science department will celebrate its 25th anniversary this year. Ten years ago computer science degrees were still not…

Chris Pratley on bug fixing

Chris Pratley writes about bug fixing within Microsoft and how Watson, a software reporting tool, has changed their debugging process. He follows up with a second post about attention to detail and how hardware obscurities sometimes lead to buggy software….