Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips People should use the systems they build. If they don’t who will? A new concept in the military – Optionally Piloted Vehicles – once again raises the issue of using your own systems. “Eat your own dog food.” This is an old saying in computer terms – are computers old enough to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Several weeks into the iPad has me still searching for that one great application. Now I’ve had the iPad for several weeks. Some observations: 3G or not to be – My model doesn’t have 3G, just WiFi. This is fine for what I want to do, but I recommend a model with […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A recent peek into the world of grad students in engineering and related fields reveals a group of people with a strong desire to work for the benefit of others. I have been working with grad students on writing. This took many months to arrange, but for the past couple of weeks […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The title of this post is a telephone number – the way we used to say telephone numbers. Much has changed in telephones, and much of the change is for the better. Still, we have lost a lot of our culture about telephones. The title of this post is a phone number. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A few observations from a few more days with the iPad. You touch the iPad with your hands, even with dirty hands. Handwriting recognition software is one of the apps that could change everything. A few more impressions after a few more days with the iPad. The number 1 question: What can […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Initial impression – I like the iPad. Let’s not forget how far hardware has advanced in two years. I bought an iPad this morning. I have a model with WiFi and 16 Gigabytes of memory. As most people already know, it doesn’t have: a phone 3G a camera (neither video nor still) […]

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by Dwayne Phillips As a designer and writer, two of my favorite tools are the blank sheet of paper and the pencil. I love a blank sheet of paper. I love to have a pencil in my hand when I’m looking at a blank sheet of paper. This is freedom. There are no guidelines, no […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Old guys should keep learning. I like to write computer programs, so one of the things I am (re)learning is programming in Java. I am spending some time each day studying the Java programming language. Some of my background: I have written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code I have written thousands […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I experimented with using a wiki to gather and trace requirements. I tried the MediaWiki software. While it works well for building a flow down of requirements, it is not good at placing the individual requirements into a single Word document. A systems engineering project is looming at work. We don’t have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I now have a computer in the kitchen that runs Windows 7 and Fedora. If HP would just update their printer driver… I have finally upgraded my kitchen computer to Windows 7. This machine now is dual boot-able with Windows 7 and Fedora 11 (see this old post for the background). I […]

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