Steve Jenson's blog

Emerging Technologies was a lot of fun. Spicy Noodles dinner was enjoyable and I ran into my old friend Dave Smith on the train ride back while Bram chatted it up with one of the Danger hip-top guys.I'm really thinking about that little beast. Always on 150k/sec GSM connection, email, IM, and it's a cell phone! The fact that the screen isn't touch sensitive is a real boon, I think. I've broken a lot of touch-screen PDAs. too sensitive for a big monkey like me.

At the conference I couldn't figure out what makes WuWu different than BEEP, except that WuWu is less general purpose and the only implementation is closed source. Ontonet makes an interesting product, one I'd like to use. The freenetworks.org guys had some fun toys, some old Creative VoIP Blasters, and they had a Yagi dish without a Radome, which I don't seem to see very often.Maybe it was just a skeletal parabolic dish. I'm not really a radio guru.

Overhead at ETCon: "There's no such thing as software engineering anyway" No such thing as "software engineering"? I've been hearing this more and more frequently and even from people who I would normally consider clueful but this cute phrase of the punditocracy needs to die. There is a field called software engineering but it's numbers are far fewer than the number of people who put "software engineer" on their PetFoodsOnline.com business card and wowed you at some pointless loft party.

software is math, young apprentice. learn that and perhaps you'll no longer confused by this perturbing "software engineering" term.

# — 17 May, 2002