Tag: computing

Coping with hardware obsolescence

Back in the 1980s, I awaited every devel­op­ment in hard­ware and soft­ware with bated breath. When the antic­i­pated new prod­uct appeared, I aban­doned the computer/​software I was using with­out a sec­ond thought. The only issue was the cash needed for the upgrade or replacement.

Some­where around the turn of the cen­tury, that cir­cum­stance changed for me. Hard­ware and soft­ware (espe­cially Linux) had come to a level that met all of my pro­fes­sional and per­sonal needs. The appeal of com­put­ers to the gen­eral pub­lic as a new form of media was never a motive for me to own a com­puter. I only care about what work I can do with it.

In March of 2005 I pur­chased an 17″ G4 Apple Power­Book lap­top. At the time, this “alu­minum air­craft car­rier” pro­vided me with one of the most pow­er­ful plat­forms for mobile com­put­ing — a desk­top on my lap, so to speak. With OS X, all my devel­op­ment tools that I had cre­ated on my Linux box worked seam­lessly on my Power­Book. I was a happy camper!

This month marks the sixth year, and my Power­Book still runs and meets my needs. It has been a faith­ful and reli­able work­horse. I have felt no real need — and could not really jus­tify — an upgrade. Yes, a new lap­top, whether PC or Apple, would be nice; but not yet mis­sion crit­i­cal. But I’m start­ing to feel the pressure.

First, a year or so ago Apple aban­doned the PPC G4 with the intro­duc­tion of Snow Leop­ard, the lat­est ver­sion of OS X. PPC sup­port was dropped. I’m not really crit­i­ciz­ing Apple, mind you. Hard­ware has a life­time and a life cycle. But my sys­tem still met my needs, so I declined to upgrade at that time.

About six months ago, Cal­i­bre (a tool to man­age ebooks on eread­ers) stopped sup­port­ing PPC sys­tems. Or rather, the graph­i­cal user inter­face wid­get library stopped sup­port­ing PPC sys­tems. Oh, well. The last ver­sion still works just fine; I just miss out on the lat­est bells and whistles.

Yes­ter­day, how­ever, some­thing more seri­ous occurred: I dis­cov­ered that the new Fire­fox 4 has dropped sup­port of the PPC. Fire­Fox 4 is a sig­nif­i­cant upgrade, not just a new user inter­face and new fea­tures but sig­nif­i­cantly improved per­for­mance. For­tu­nately, a group of Apple hack­ers has back-​​ported Fire­Fox 4 to the PPC and opti­mized it for that hardware.

Happy end­ing, right? Sure. But one has to ask, when will another crit­i­cal piece of soft­ware orphan the PPC? I have to plan to pur­chase another lap­top within the next year or maybe two. Six or seven years is the longest I’ve owned a com­puter of any type. The next pur­chase will be quite a leap forward.

But I can wait. Unlike twenty-​​five years ago.

User Interface Design Patterns

When one works in an area — it doesn’t mat­ter whether it’s in the human­i­ties or in build­ing con­struc­tion — one begins to rec­og­nize pat­terns in how prob­lems are solved. Typ­i­cal solu­tions accrue as a body of knowl­edge and are passed on to new practitioners.

In com­puter sci­ence this has been hap­pen­ing for a decade or more. “Design pat­terns”, soft­ware con­structs which have both data struc­tures and the algo­rithms to effi­ciently and effec­tively manip­u­late them, are becom­ing more and more well-​​known and well under­stood. For exam­ple, there is the “fac­tory” pat­tern, which makes “wid­gets”, defined by the pro­gram­mer. This is a com­mon task, so com­mon that it has been done many times. The gen­eral prin­ci­ples of how to con­struct a fac­tory are described, regard­less of the soft­ware plat­form or environment.

The idea of design pat­terns can be extended, and the folks at Endeca have done just that for user inter­faces (UI): the Endeca User Inter­face Design Pat­tern Library. There is no rea­son the rein­vent the wheel; this library deals with com­mon tasks or prob­lems in pro­gram­ming a UI, e.g., search, faceted nav­i­ga­tion, and infor­ma­tion dis­cov­ery. There are other UI design pat­tern libraries out there, e.g., Pat­ternry.

Why my inter­est in this? Because Patrick Durusau and I are exper­i­ment­ing with new ways of inter-​​acting with text, using the rab­binic Miqra’ot Gedolot (the Rab­binic Bible; kind of like a medieval Jew­ish “study Bible”) as a point of depar­ture for design con­cepts. We are play­ing around with var­i­ous ways of map­ping rab­binic ideas of text study to mod­ern UI con­cepts. Maybe we will come up with a design pat­tern library for the study of bib­li­cal and other ancient texts!

Tools for linguistic research

Steve DeRose pointed out to me this web­page by Bill Poser, a lin­guist who uses the com­puter in sophis­ti­cated ways. This page of resources is not about Com­pu­ta­tional Lin­guis­tics, which is a spe­cific dis­ci­pline. Rather, think “gen­eral com­puter resources”, or “how I can use the gen­eral com­put­ing power of my desk­top to do linguistics”.

Besides the tools avail­able to any sophis­ti­cated user of the com­puter, a lin­guist in addi­tion must col­lect data and mas­sage it into many dif­fer­ent forms so that other tools can be used. Per­haps the most impor­tant tool cat­e­gory for the lin­guist is text manip­u­la­tion. For me per­son­ally, the most pow­er­ful tool I ever dis­cov­ered was reg­u­lar expres­sions. “Regexes”, as they’re famil­iarly known, are descrip­tions of strings of char­ac­ters, no mat­ter how com­plex. These can then be used in scripts and pro­grams to rec­og­nize seg­ments of text on input which can then be manip­u­lated for the desired out­put. The Poser web­page pro­vides an excel­lent set of links to resources and tutorials.

There are many other lin­guis­tic top­ics that are cov­ered on this page. While sur­vey­ing the entire web­site, I ran across an excel­lent list of “Rec­om­mended Read­ing” of books for the lin­guist who desires to lever­age the com­puter for his or her work. I own or have read nearly all of these. Highly recommended.

For any researcher in the human­i­ties, there is no excuse not to have mas­tered the sub­set of these resources appro­pri­ate to his or her sub­ject of study. I have no patience or sym­pa­thy for schol­ars who mas­ter all kinds of arcana and yet object to learn­ing how to use the com­puter prop­erly because it is too “dif­fi­cult”. It’s not too dif­fi­cult. Nor does one need for­mal train­ing. One only needs motivation.

An immod­est postscript

I was pleas­antly sur­prised to see listed on this page my 2008 review in the jour­nal Lan­guage Doc­u­men­ta­tion and Con­ser­va­tion of the data­base engine Emdros, a pro­gram opti­mized for anno­tated text.