I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit. My exposure to “software archeology” goes as far as back as the first time I earned money from programming. I was 17 and had just come ba...

I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit. My exposure to “software archeology” goes as far as back as the first time I earned money from programming. I was 17 and had just come ba...

Today the team at Clarifai is releasing an amazing second version of their API that makes two breakthroughs available to every developer: custom training and fast visual search. The beauty of Clarifai’s API when it first launched was that you could be up and running in minutes and get great results with their models. But what if you wanted to train your own concepts? Well, if you were a bigger customer willing to pay, Clarifai would train a custom model for you. With the newly released versio...

Today the team at Clarifai is releasing an amazing second version of their API that makes two breakthroughs available to every developer: custom training and fast visual search. The beauty of Clarifai’s API when it first launched was that you could be up and running in minutes and get great results with their models. But what if you wanted to train your own concepts? Well, if you were a bigger customer willing to pay, Clarifai would train a custom model for you. With the newly released versio...

Starting the middle of last year, I thought it would be great to have a competitor to the iphone that would make it easy to create web based applications that can fully exploit the capabilities of a smartphone. I therefore started rooting for Palm as soon as they showed the Pre at CES at the beginning of this year. Well, the Pre is arriving tomorrow and the reviews by Mossberg, Pogue, Engadget et al suggest that it could actually be a contender. Of course there are some issues, such as the me...

Starting the middle of last year, I thought it would be great to have a competitor to the iphone that would make it easy to create web based applications that can fully exploit the capabilities of a smartphone. I therefore started rooting for Palm as soon as they showed the Pre at CES at the beginning of this year. Well, the Pre is arriving tomorrow and the reviews by Mossberg, Pogue, Engadget et al suggest that it could actually be a contender. Of course there are some issues, such as the me...