In my day to day life, there are few things I truly dislike doing: I’m a pretty happy person. There is one thing, though, that I really don’t like – at all – and that strikes me as a truly pointless exercise in futility: searching. Shouldn’t we have a solution for that by now? It [...]

A few days ago, I explained to a colleague why certain communications protocols have a “tell me twice” policy – i.e. to allow for any command to have any effect, the same command – or a command to the same effect – has to be received twice (from the same master). In human parlance, this [...]

D.G. Gibson et al. reported, in Science Magazine, the “Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome”. Now, I used to be a biologist and have studied this particular type of biology for a number of years before leaving the field, mostly for financial reasons, for a career in computer science. I’m [...]

Business is largely about management which, in turn, is largely about reducing costs and reducing time-to-market. However, today’s management models for human resources are largely based on two things: physical presence in the office and seniority. Performance is often only part of the equation when it comes to promotion – people tend to get promoted [...]

For the last few weeks, and in the coming months, I’ve had to (and will have to) work with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Any problem is an invitation to find a solution. Any solution – at least in my line of work – is an amalgam of concrete implementations of abstract concepts. Each of those implementations may or may not meet the requirements just like any of those concepts may or may not be the right one for [...]

When explaining the design of some application to some-one, I find the use of analogies is one of the best tools available to me – better than diagrams and much better than technical terms: when using technical terms, the listener often starts “glazing over” after only a few seconds – maybe a minute. It really [...]

Like a warm spring breeze
writing is to summer’s dawn
as language to dusk

is this coming spring
or is’t autumn in disguise?
spring doth promise much!

For the past five years now, I’ve worked on vision inspection systems for the pharmaceutical industry. In those years, I have seen many applications in which cameras were used to read data on bottles, cartons, even tablets. Barcodes can be printed almost anywhere and can be of almost any size. One application I’ve worked on [...]