A groggy morning in Seattle started with the typical regional sunshine forcing its presence through heavy cloud cover–the first overcast day in nearly a week of clear, scorching weather. Seattle to Newark, hustle off the plane, bad coffee, hustle to the next gate, and then encamp for the next 9 hours of travel across the [...]
There was once a time when your home directory was treated as a nearly sacred place, a safe haven where you had near complete control. This trust was only breached for very special reasons: user specific settings and background storage for applications could go in “dot-files”–the hidden files or directories that begin with a “.” [...]
A recent project at work required building a multi-step dialog to manage the interface between a user and an expert system (and some fairly advanced NLP to boot). On the surface this looked like a fairly standard Wizard problem — design a bunch of screens with questions, and then collect the answers as the user [...]