Through the Interface

AU 2024 Days 0 and 1 (mer., 16 oct. 2024)
On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn’t start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ;-) in future. Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat...
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250 years of programmable computing (Tue, 08 Oct 2024)
This is a topic I can’t quite believe I haven’t covered at any point during this blog’s existence, as I'm such a huge fan of a) the Neuchâtel region and b) vintage computing. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the world’s first programmable computer, which also happened to be the world’s first programmable robot. This might be a bit confusing to some, especially those who associate this concept with Babbage, Turing, etc. The world’s first “computer” was a mechanical automaton that translated a “program” into (mechanical) hand-written output. So no, it’s not a general-purpose computing...
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