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Interesting blogs 3: Dan Weinreb's middle-aged hacker's blog

I had dinner* with Dan Weinreb tonight, which makes this as good a time as any to write about his blog. At the opposite extreme from the last one I recommended, Jeremiah Owyang's, Dan's blog is very low volume. There's been less than one post per month since May, and in the most active and unique technical category – the one on Lisp – there are still only seven posts overall.

*At Daikanyama in Lexington, which has instantly become my second-favorite Japanese restaurant in Boston, behind only Oishii Sushi ... but I digress.

Dan was one of the better hackers of the 1980s, and among that group, he's one of the more articulate and personable. Symbolics was co-founded by a bunch of very smart guys from the MIT AI Lab, and of them, Dan is the one who was most often selected to explain things to me. He was one of the co-creators of the Common Lisp standard. He was the lead author on a paper that pretty much introduced message-passing. He was lead architect for ObjectStore, one of the major object-oriented database management systems. Now he's doing very interesting stuff for ITA Software. Along the way he's found the time to be the single best commenter – out of a very good group -- on my blog DBMS2, to be an active angel investor, to plan next year's major Lisp conference, and to take a very cool vacation around the Galapagos Islands.

That broad set of interests is reflected in a few, deeply thought-out posts on his blog. You're not going to find many posts that interest you on Dan's blog, for the simple reason that there aren't many posts overall. But chances are good you'll find some that open your mind to things you weren't aware of before, either in general subject matter, or else because of the depth with which Dan pursues them.

Blog name: Dan Weinreb's blog

URL: http://danweinreb.org/blog/

Editor/Author: Lisp and OODBMS pioneer Dan Weinreb, currently an architect at ITA Software

Archives go back to: October, 2007

Post frequency: As low as 1/month

Look and feel: Default WordPress (boring)

Topics: Eclectic, from Lisp and OO database technology to tech business history to book reviews

Strength: Deep analysis

Weakness: Eclectic choice of topics

This is part of a series highlighting blogs that may be of interest to NetworkWorld.com readers. A list of all the blogs covered may be found at the bottom of the introductory post to the series.

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About Curt Monash

Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.

Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.

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