The Veteran Neophyte

These are links to the columns I wrote while working as the technical editor for develop magazine at Apple Computer. develop was a code-level technical journal for Macintosh programmers, and I wrote a regular column that was intended to lighten up the otherwise fairly dry technical content of the magazine. Sort of "bathroom reading" for thinking programmers. Hope you enjoy them. Please email me with any comments.

• Lisp, Color Icons, and Layers in develop 5. Learning Lisp, Dave learns some other stuff as well.
• A Familiar (Inter)Face in develop 6. Chernoff faces, n-dimensional points, and simulation in the human (and canine) interface.
• If I Had a Hammer... in develop 7. Kids, MS-DOS, wireless modems, collaboration, and computer binges. Disparate topics? Perhaps.
• Don't Fence Me In in develop 8. An experiment in wireless communication involving schoolkids and technogunk.
• Silicon Surprise in develop 9. Computers are great for studying complex systems, but they also ARE complex systems. Self-referential fun and games.
• Yeah, but is it art? in develop 10. Musings on what makes art art, and a program to make scanned photos into "paintings."
• Quantum Lunch in develop 11. Lunch with a brain researcher. Can thought and matter be separated? Do you care?
• Digital Zoology in develop 12. Artificial Life. Too cool.
• Tower of Babble in develop 13. Comparing programming languages to natural languages yields some surprises. One of my favorites.
• Tiny Futures in develop 14. A report on a slightly scary conference on nanotechnology.
• Through the Looking Glass in develop 15. A dip of the toe into the mathematics of symmetry, and a QuickDraw GX program to draw tesselations of the plane.
• Abracadabra in develop 16. Searching for the source of that old elusive magic, Dave stubs his toes on some obvious truths.
• Why We Do It in develop 17. Why programming is cool. Great for getting your significant other to understand why you spend all night in front of a computer.
• Rubber Meets Road in develop 19. Edges make the world go 'round.
• Nothing Comes from Nothing in develop 20. Creation-shneation, nothing's really new. Then again, maybe not.
• The Downside in develop 21. Sometimes programming really sucks. But I keep doing it anyway.
• Paper Juggling in develop 22. You can invent new multi-person juggling patterns on paper, even if you're not a juggler. Really!
• A Feel for the Thing in develop 23. Is there still room for magic in computing? I hope so.
• The Right Tool for the Job in develop 24. Are dynamic programming languages the Next Big Thing? Should they be?
• Your Friend the Drill Sergeant in develop 27. Drill is a great way to learn some things, but it's a lousy way to learn other things. Which things are which?