Category Archives: software

Mary had a Little Lambda (Architecture)

Posted on November 2, 2016 by

  Nursery rhyme aside, I’ve been looking avidly at Big Data Lambda Architectures. Nathan Marz introduced the term back in 2012, which is reminiscent of λ-Calculus. The first time you hear the term it brings memories of high-order functions in … Continue reading →

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Customizing Priority Queues in C++

Posted on September 28, 2016 by

A nifty feature of priority queues in C++ is that you can implement a max heap or a min heap by simply changing the compare type. For most purposes, std::less and std::greater can do the job, provided that you use built-in … Continue reading →

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The (White) Elephant in the Room

Posted on July 15, 2016 by

All successful software development projects are alike; each unsuccessful software development project is unsuccessful in its own way…and some become white elephants. Paraphrasing and extending the first sentence of Anna Karenina, a white elephant is not only a failed project, but also a project that fails miserably, severely late to market–if … Continue reading →

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My Sister From Another Mister

Posted on July 15, 2016 by

No, this is not about family infidelities.  Rather, it is about copyright laws.  You see, a couple of months ago the debate team in my daughter’s school had to prepare for a topic on copyright laws and how effective or … Continue reading →

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The Leprechaun Trap

Posted on March 16, 2016 by

A few years ago and on occasion of St. Patrick’s Day, my daughter built a leprechaun trap. She wrapped a shoe box in shiny green paper and cut a slot through it, decorated it with a border with jingle bells, added … Continue reading →

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Observations on Observer

Posted on March 3, 2016 by

My first encounter with the Observer design pattern was circa 1998.  The GoF book was still new–published in 1994–and the community was still assimilating design patterns. Java  the Hot* even offered an Observer interface and an Observable class. What could be simpler? However, I’ve used Observer … Continue reading →

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Skeuomorphic

Posted on November 2, 2012 by

This week, and propitiated by Scott Forstall’s exit from Apple, we’ve been bombarded about the impending UI changes that will supposedly be making way into iOS and OS X to go back to basics –or should I say, Bahaus?–from skeuomorphic user interfaces. … Continue reading →

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