Science fiction writers have always speculated about the future -- sometimes they are quite accurate (Jules Verne predicted live newscasts, space travel, and the Internet in the 19th century) and other times not so much (flying cars haven't taken off yet). Authors typically set their science fiction stories well into the future, so they can get in a few good years of sales before the future becomes the present and their works begin to look naïve and obsolete.

I'm traveling in Arizona at the moment, and decided to get in a bit of geek tourism by swinging by the Western Design Center (wikipedia) in Mesa, Arizona. The Western Design Center was founded by Bill Mensch, one of the creators of the MOS Technology 6502 series of microprocessors found in many personal computers of the 1980's, including the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. The 6502 series is somewhat nostalgic for me, as I taught myself machine language programming on the 6502 as a kid.

This advanced system can be used to arrange words and make edits without the need for white-out. When I was growing up back in the 1980's, I wrote a lot of documents on my Commodore 64 including school assignments, letters, journals, and attempts at fiction. I used several different word processors during this time, but towards the end I was mostly using a product called Word Writer 4 from Timeworks.

Warning: The following post may contain weak metaphors and bad analogies. If these are offensive to you or illegal in your jurisdiction, you may want to skip this post. Like many people who grew up in the forward thinking, happy go-lucky days of the twentieth century when anything seemed possible, I sometimes wonder what happened to all the futuristic luxuries that technology was supposed to have delivered by now.

I occasionally need to login to embedded Linux devices over serial connections. One frustrating thing about using a serial login is that programs running on the remote device don't know the window size of my local terminal emulator, so 80x24 is usually assumed even if I've resized my xterm to be much bigger (or even full screen!). Most network remote login protocols, such as ssh and telnet, use protocol features to communicate window change events transparently.

Prologue I broke down and bought a Kindle, the electronic book reader designed and sold by Amazon. I was somewhat interested in this device when it launched back in November, but Amazon sold out in five hours. Whether that's because of exceptional demand, or because Amazon only made eight, we'll never know. As a voting member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention, I recently received several books in electronic format for me to read and consider for the Hugo Award.

For various reasons, I'd like to get a summary of new mail in my IM client. Since I use a traditional mail server with procmail support, and also operate a Jabber (XMPP) IM server, I decided to whip up a small python script to accomplish this. I used a Python XMPP library called xmpppy. For what it's worth, I use the excellent Openfire Jabber/XMPP server software from folks at Jive Software.

When developing database-oriented business webapps, the data model can sometimes become quite complex with many database tables referencing other database tables. To maintain referential integrity, you can (and should) declare foreign key constraints so rows cannot be deleted if other rows depend on them. However, if the application is a basic CRUD webapp that provides the user a direct, non-abstract view of the data, the user may be surprised to get a confusing constraint violation error when he or she attempts to delete a row.

When I decided to start this blog, I installed the Roller 4.0 weblog software. Many different blogs can run in one instance of Roller, and the URLs for the blogs are arranged as subdirectories of a master Roller URL. For instance, if you installed Roller to be /roller, then your blogs might have URLs like /roller/my_blog, /roller/potato_farming_in_pocatello, and /roller/i_like_lettuce. That's fine for many uses, but I prefer to have more concise URLs.

Greetings, Blogosphere! I've finally found the time to set up a blog where I can yap about technical topics that might be of interest to other people working in the wacky, wild field of software development. I actually started to do something similar back in 1997, before the word "blog" had been invented, but I ended up getting distracted by real life and abandoning it. Hopefully I'll do better this time.