Vivek Haldar

Aza Raskin on the ubiquitous “Save” icon : It’s a floppy disk.

Well, I loved this movie.

I started writing here in 2008.

For the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on what I loved about Mad Men.

A meeting is a big honkin’ mutex.

Via Daniel Lemire’s blog, I came across this three-part series of posts by John F.

It’s a lazy Sunday.

Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali will receive the 2012 ACM Turing Award for their work in cryptography.

… is deep infrastructure backend stuff.

Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, writes about her all-consuming workaholism in the New York Times: I didn’t start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job.

I knew I was ready for jump to ChromeOS because I was already spending most of my time on any computer in Chrome.

A compendium of recent tweets: “Son, in my time we wore eye glasses without computers in them.”

I’ve been trying to figure out the place of the desktop computer in my computing universe.

Imagine, if, in today’s world, you saw someone jotting down notes in a meeting with a fine fountain pen.

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord But you’re gonna have to serve somebody – Bob Dylan.

This geometry book from 1847 (!!)

The opening pages, where two programmers are completing each others sentences as they try to find the root cause of a bug, is the lure that will immediately pull any programmer into this book.

One of the most under-rated gems in professional computer science is the Taulbee Survey put out every year by the Computing Research Association.

This will be hard to miss as it is the cover story of the next Communications of the ACM, but here’s a shout out nevertheless to the article titled “The Tail at Scale” by Googlers Jeffrey Dean and Luiz André Barroso.

There have been a couple of recent calls for blue collar coders and knowledge workers.

My computing slab is in a cave.

As an engineer, I’ve always been flummoxed by the word “culture”, esepecially as it pertains to corporate entities, especially those of the tech variety.

I’ve been following Cal Newport’s writing for a long time.

Over the last couple of years, I have noticed a marked change in the way my colleagues and I communicate with each other at work.

I love functional programming just as much as the next guy, but I’m wary when someone unabashedly declares it the savior from our software crisis.

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. — Louis CK.

It has been another great year blogging, and I am deeply grateful for everyone who chose to spend some time with the words I put out, and even more so for those who started a conversation, either in the comments, or on their own online spaces.

Just in time for the new year.

This was the year I got a Kindle.

I’ve been doing more and more writing on the tablet, and even on the android phone.

There’s something about all the recent talk about distraction and concentration and shredded attention that doesn’t quite sit right with me.

On the latest Build and Analyze podcast, Marco Arment disses automated and unit-testing.

Carr delves into the differences between computer and human memory.

(Reproduced from my answer to this Quora question.)

C++, and its programmers, may not be in the limelight (were they ever?)

I’ve admired Treesaver since I first came across it.

(It’s Thanksgiving here in the US, and the peer pressure for counting your blessings finally got to me.)

Interviewing is a touchy topic.

That’s a quote by Jeff Hammerbacher, claiming that the current crop of high-tech companies are not tackling the really hard world-changing problems.

The latest CACM asks if MOOCs will destroy academia.

Philip Levis looks back on the history of TinyOS1, one of the earliest sensor networking platforms, reflecting on its evolution, and design choices and their consequences.

Seeing as I spend the vast majority of my working life interacting with plaintext, and a lot of it through an interactive shell, I have found that one thing that is absolutely crucial to my productivity is having a very deep history, coupled with an unres…

The meme is strong in this one.

Atul Gawande wrote about how he used a personal coach to take his performance to the next level.

John Regehr raises this question, prompted by a paper of the same title by Tony Hoare.

It Might Get Loud is a documentary that traces the musical careers and philosophies of three guitarists—Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White.

I wanted the Berg Little Printer ever since they announced it, which I think was about a year ago.

I think the technology press is doing us all a disservice by focusing so much on the money.

Computer Science has had an identity crisis since its very inception.

The New York Times takes datacenters to task for wasting electricity, but I do think they’ve missed two crucial points on the other side of the debate: there are strong incentives to reduce power consumption, as that is a huge capital drain, and, well, co…