So last year I got tired of waiting for Apple to come out with a tablet computer (which Jobs will never purposely do, even though Ink Services are built right into OS X). I also got sentimental for the Newton that I outlined my thesis on, lo these many years ago. My sentimental reflections were enhanced by this article by Phillip Torrone on building a sub-$100 laptop out of an old eMate from eBay. I had never used eBay, so as an experiment (one of two: I also picked up a copy of the long out of print Avalon Hill board game Dune) I found myself a Newton MessagePad 110.  Read →

I forgot to post last week that my latest article for David Mertz’s column, XML Matters, went live on the IBM developerWorks site. It’s fallen off the front page now, but it was gratifying to make it there. The article is Ajax Tradeoffs: The many flavors of XML, and it is an exploration of various XML (Open Office, XHTML, custom) and non-XML (JSON, CSV) formats for data exchange in Ajax-enabled websites. I used my wife Daniela’s efforts at tracking her poetry submissions as my example data.  Read →

Well, I’ve been promising this off and on here in my intermittent blog, but I’ve had the code up on Google code hosting for some time now, my kids have tested out the latest version, I’ve fixed some bugs introduced when PyObjC switched from distutils to setuptools. It is still pretty raw, unpolished, unoptimized, but I’m ready to let the world see it and let me know what they think.  Read →