Artful Code

I just bought the Blackberry Bold 9930 with OS 7′ newly available from Verizon (I have heard that the Torch will be available later this week). After some very hairy experiences with OS 6, I was both excited and anxious to experience the new OS on a handset with the hardware to run it well.

I have been using Blackberry OS 6 on my Bold 9650 (pre-installed) for a few weeks. I love some of the new functionality, especially search and the new context menus. Search works very similarly to Spotlight on OSX. The new context menus do a good job of splitting common contextual options out of the BB menu. I also like the quicker boot time.

After silently drooling over the usefulness of my wife’s iPad for the last few months, I finally gave in to temptation and decided to get a tablet. Of course, being a Blackberry man, I was ecstatic about the release of the Playbook. The Playbook OS is QNX, and ultra fast, light-weight, real time unix that I have been a fan of since college. I always felt that it would have been a wonderful system for Apple to have built OSX on, but it seems that Blackberry at least gets to beat Apple to the punch on something, anyway.

Everyone knows not to use goto, right? Dijkstra’s words on the subject have risen to the level of gospel in the programming community. Not that I do not completely agree… in most cases.

A few of us are old enough to remember the days before the Internet, when “online” meant you had Prodigy, AOL, or CompuServe. Some of us are venerable enough to predate even those dinosaurs and recall the age of 300 baud modems, Telix, typing ATDT into the terminal, and local BBSes with names like Gunner’s Grotto and Elfstone (and if you recognize those two, you probably know where I lived in high school). I spent quite a few late nights chatting on the Grotto, a lavish MajorBBS with more than a dozen phone lines on rotary. I remember getting that brand new 9600 baud modem and being awed by its speed.