I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, recently and had a chance to meet Tim for the first time in person. Tim teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and is Deputy Head of the Computer Science and Software Engineering department. I got a chance to ask him about his work in data compression as well as one of his new areas of interest, Computer Science education.

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Back in the day the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was all the rage in the study of linguistics. With apologies to those who actually work in the field, I’ll crudely summarize it as the idea that the language you speak both constrains and influences how you think. The idea says that if your language only has one [...]

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Photo by Nick Richards Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, died Sunday, February 6 at the age of 84.

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You may have never heard of Vinay Deolalikar, but there is a chance that he may become next year’s Turing Award winner, not to mention an overnight millionaire. It seems that Vinay dropped the news at the start of this week that he had proven that P does not equal NP. In short, this proof [...]

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Yes, another middle manager in my organization has decided to part ways with my employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. Dave Corley has been a key part of Cisco since he was acquired along with the rest of Selsius in 1998. He’s now giving us a friendly handshake and showing himself out after just shy of 10 [...]

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Jeff Bezos Hawks the Kindle It’s still not clear whether electronic books are the wave of the future or a consumer products cul-de-sac. Technology continues to improve, and there are certainly lots of good reasons for a device like Amazon’s Kindle to be the leading edge of a major wave of adoption. A few of [...]

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Chances are good that you don’t know who Richard Platt is. Richard was never in the business of self-promotion – had he been, he could have been a household name among the cognoscenti. But Richard didn’t spend his time talking to the press, speaking at conferences, or teeing up with the titans of industry. His [...]

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The IEEE has announced its list of medal winners for 2007, and this year’s Richard Hamming medal was awarded to Dr. Abraham Lempel: For pioneering work in data compression especially the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. This is a timely award, because it comes on the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first of two seminal papers [...]

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The eminently quotable Samuel Johnson had a very pragmatic view about writing, and was quoted by Boswell as having said: No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. Personally, I think Johnson is pretty close to the mark on this one, but I will add one caveat. Ask any writer about their first [...]

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I worked for Don Killen at Greenleaf Software for quite a few years in the late 80s and 90s. Don was a pioneer in the world of commercial C and C++ libraries, and I received the sad news that he passed away this week.

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