jefflinwood

I built a Tcl/TK GUI in 1997 and I thought that it (specifically Tcl) was dated then. If you're used to anything beyond shell scripting, Tcl feels very un-programming. It does look they added objects in 2012, I can't speak to that.

Notwithstanding anything about LLM tools being able to do GUIs any way you want in 2026, I'd really consider just about anything else at this point. JavaFX, React Native, Electron, Flutter, etc.

I actually built this, and shipped it, in 1996, with no knowledge of page rank, citation analysis, or bibliometrics, for an internal/external search engine for the Envirolink web site. Envirolink was a directory of environmental web sites, so they already had a list of URLs to crawl. The reason it was feasible to build was that it was a fairly constrained list of URLs, it wasn't the entire web.

I didn't really know what I was doing (I was 17), but it was an awesome unpaid summer internship. There were two parts of the search engine - a crawler and the search engine. Both were written in Perl.

I just finished reading this book, which came out this year.

Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age by James M. Tabor (Author)

About this telegraph cable, and all of the different attempts to lay it on the sea floor.

I also recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1998) if you want to learn more about telegraphs.

Code review - it's now baked in to Claude Code and Codex CLI.

If you look closely at the author list, you can see that some of the same names still hang out here, which is pretty cool.

It's also fun just to look at the article titles to see what the zeitgeist of the era was for a given time period.

Interestingly enough, Envirolink's web search engine had bibliometric search ranking in 1996. It only searched a small subset of the web - mostly around environment advocacy.

I built in 1996 as an internship, it all ran as some perl scripts, and I had no idea what I was doing, of course, I was 17. I just thought it was clever to use the links between pages as a signal to the search engine. I'd never heard of citation analysis.

I tried the onboarding, but I think it timed out on the Analyzing screen because it couldn't find any issues in my Sentry environment. So I couldn't get too much further.

EDIT: It did let me in, but I don't know why it took so long.

I've worked on teams where there's been one person on rotation every sprint to catch and field issues like these, so taking that job and giving it to an AI agent seems like a reasonable approach.

I think I'd be most concerned about having a separate development process outside of the main issue queue, where agents aren't necessarily integrated into the main workstream.

It's still around!

This was a great article!

I saw "To Fly!" for the first time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles location (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) on their IMAX screen two years ago. Definitely a film of its moment, and I can see how that influenced future science film documentaries.

My dad worked for Spitz doing Omnimax installations and planetariums, but I don't know any of the details. I would assume this was probably the late 70s or early 80s.

I'm having the LLM work with human-readable behaviors for each component. You can have the LLM take those behaviors and create a Mermaid diagram, for instance.

It seems a little counterintuitive, but you can ask an LLM to improve a prompt. They are quite good at it.

San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.