Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
13may2008
The collected jwz bicycle wisdom, must read.
The Thing That Should Not Be, Or: How to import 18500+ patches from Darcs into Git in less than three days, by Thomas Schilling.
Getting started with awk, essential Unix skills.
100 Essential Jazz Albums, compiled by David Remnick.
Confusion’s prince is at my door.
The crown I wear’s the one he wore
He’s here to bring me down some more
And bend my mind.
— Grateful Dead, Mindbender
An IRC client in 40 lines of shell script, Kragen was bored.
Using a Proof Assistant to Teach Programming Language Foundations, or, Lambda, the Ultimate TA, by Benjamin C. Pierce. “In Fall 2007, I taught an introductory course on logic and the theory of programming languages entirely in Coq. The experience was quite demanding — for the students and especially for me!— but the overall payoff in terms of student engagement and performance on exams far exceeded my hopes. I am now convinced that this is the right way to teach programming language foundations and am working on course materials that will allow the approach to be replicated elsewhere.” Wow, the material looks really good.
pymeta, OMeta in Python.
Barcodes as URLs, a QR decoder for the iPhone.
SigScheme is a R5RS Scheme interpreter for embedded use. It features small footprint (64KB in library form on the ‘small’ configuration) like SIOD and TinyScheme, low memory consumption (2-words per cons cell), multibyte characters handling (UTF-8, EUCs and Shift_JIS) and more. Cool.
Mountain Monuments, what a bunchload of steps.
Dynamic Languages Strike Back, autotranscript by Steve Yegge.
Those who misremember history…, critique of Yegge’s talk by Avi Bryant, who says: “Strongtalk was that much faster whether you used the optional static type system or not. Strongtalk’s optimizing compiler completely ignored the types, and it made your program run not one iota faster to add them.” Which is freaking amazing.
Preparing For EC2 Persistent Storage, “Using LVM + DRBD + NFS + Heartbeat + VTun To Gain Data Persistence, Redundancy, Automatic Fail-Over, and Read/Write Disk Access Across Multiple EC2 Nodes”, by M. David Peterson.
“I want you inside me…”, PNSFW but genius lubricant ad.
GChart exposes the Google Chart API (code.google.com/apis/chart) via a friendly Ruby interface. It can generate the URL for a given chart (for webpage use), or download the generated PNG (for offline use). Seems nice for avoiding the marshalling stuff.
I run through the forest, I cut past the vine
Head through the thickets, many a time
Octave of voices, sweet voices belie
I live for the comfort of cold Clementine
— Greateful Dead, Clementine
Is QWERTY harming language design?, Daniel Berger wonders. The time for Unicode has come IMO.
Good Margaritas, Bad Slugs, Mark Bernstein: “I mention the margaritas because, when we have margaritas on the porch, it always brings out the garden slugs.”
Useless use of *, good slides by Jan Schaumann on optimizing shell scripts.
Ajax anno 1858.
11may2008
Survive a Nuclear Blast, it’s not that hard apparently.
oEmbed FAIL! Represent RESTfully, a very good point.
I looked at you for the very first time
You’re like a river running through my mind
They say we’re young, we don’t know what we do
But I can’t make it if I can’t have you
— Dead Moon, Over The Edge
Desingularisation and its applications, very nice.
ctrlaltdel candy, oh I love salty liquorice
obsessing.org, pure JavaScript processing.js environment. Very neat idea, but buggy and the editor sucks.
How To Make a Skull Bong, a guide for the ultimate deadhead. WJW.
Commit Policies, Oliver Steele should write a book about Git.
Rain gonna come but the rain gonna go, you know
Stepping off sharply from the rank and file
Awful cold and dark like a dungeon
Maybe get a little bit darker ‘fore the day
— Grateful Dead, Doin’ That Rag
Elevators I Have Known, “Why maintaining the elevator should require eleven hours of hammering is something I try not to think about, just as I avoid asking why this particular elevator has to get its inspection certificate stamped each month instead of, say, every three years.”
Gaggia, a fantastic short poem by Dean Allen.
10may2008
The Blonde Map of Europe, hehe.
ECL = (not only) Embeddable Common Lisp, slides from ECLM 2008 by Juan José García Ripoll.
XTags is a little keyboard-driven Window Manager for X11. “It’s main goal is to get rid of a “real” WM by using it with dvtm on the master tag and put the secondary clients into the other tags.”
Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know
See how it feels in the end
May Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you
Soft, strong, sweet and true
— Grateful Dead, Crazy Fingers
Some Chrome For Pjs, _why wrote a small Processing.js IDE for Firefox.
Slides from last night’s BayFP talk, Bryan O’Sullivan talked about “Concurrent and Multicore Haskell”.
The Bla Language, by Wouter van Oortmerssen. “We investigate an (unpure) functional language whose concept of environment is not implicit as in traditional languages, but made available explicitly as a first class value.” The paper also presents lots of other languages with similar ideas.
My Git Workflow, by Oliver Steele. Includes a very nice diagram of data transport.
The summer sun looked down on him,
His mother could but frown on him,
And all the other sound on him,
He had to die, you know he had to die.
— Grateful Dead, That’s It For The Other One
Answers from John McCarthy, “Here is a VERY rough transcript of the informal interview.”
A Formal Investigation of Diff3, by Sanjeev Khanna, Keshav Kunal, and Benjamin C. Pierce. “We offer a simple, abstract presentation of the diff3 algorithm and investigate its behavior. Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that people find diff3’s behavior intuitive and predictable in practice, character- izing its good properties turns out to be rather delicate: a number of seemingly natural intuitions are incorrect in general.”
erlocaml, a tight bridge between Erlang and OCaml.
Content negotiation is a waste of bits. — Roy T. Fielding
Apache 3.0 (a tall tale) (PDF, 13.6MB), by Roy Fielding. On the way to Waka! (What is Moccasin?) Required reading.
BlackBerry vs. iPhone, by John Gruber, “wherein neither ‘RIM’ nor ‘Blackberry’ are even mentioned, but rather the stage is set for showing why they might be seriously screwed.”
09may2008
Processing.js, John Resig says: “I’ve ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element.” Yay!!
peg-markdown in an implementation of markdown in C, using a PEG grammar and Ian Piumarta’s PEG compiler.
Transparent Post-Its, WJW. Wanthave.
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.
Politik use drugs
Politik use bombs
Politik need torpedoes
Politik needs blood
Thats what my friend is an evidence
Politik is violence
What my friend is a evidence
Politik is violence
— Manu Chao, Politik Kills
The end in sight, great shots of Chile’s Chaiten volcano, which began erupting last week “for the first time in some 9,000 years” and notice that the BLDGBLOG Book will be ready for print soon!
The Origin of Consciousness, read by Mark Dominus. Mentions “Involuntary Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand Syndrome.”
A ternary search tree (TST) is a nice and simple data structure which provides a way to store strings in order for fast searching. It also supports more advanced string queries. A TST can be seen as a hybrid between a binary search tree and a digital search trie.
trish2 is a library to handle PATRICIA trees, a structure suited for large dictionary lookups. The library provides C functions to create, search, write and read PATRICIA trees. The tree nodes can be associated to arbitrary data so PATRICIA trees can act as a hash. An executable is also provided for fast search in a list of fixed string patterns.
Jack Kerouac explains On The Road, I like.
tms allows basic cvs style operations on local (not yet Time Capsule) Time Machine volumes. Looks useful.
Let the world go by
all lost in dreaming
To lay me down
one last time
To lay me down
— Grateful Dead, To Lay Me Down
When seekdir() Won’t Seek to the Right Position, Mark Ballmer has a nice story: “What I found out in the end is a surprise and was not expected: A bug that has been there in all BSDs for almost all the time, since the 4.2BSD times or for roughly 25 years…” (Honestly, I prefered reading the directory directly, like they did in K&R1.)
A Close Look at the Colossal Squid, “The squid’s resemblance to fiction’s monsters of the deep, including its dinner-plate-size eyes, has attracted global interest.” Fhtagn.
Karl Kraus, jede Menge Texte frei verfügbar.
08may2008
Pi Years, Feel younger and geeky at the same time! Calculate your pi age! WJW.
How are rubies cut?, Charles Nutter was only close.
Discrete Elastic Rods, by Miklós Bergou, Max Wardetzky, Stephen Robinson, Basile Audoly, and Eitan Grinspun. Impressive rendering.
My mantra is “Look for the Second Right Answer.” — Roger von Oech
Beautiful differentiation, Conal Elliott “stumbled across a terser, lovelier formulation for the derivative rules.”
Beginner’s Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2, by chromatic and Doug Sheppard.
History of the Development of Logic Programming, by Carl Hewitt.
Mapping the Human ‘Diseasome’, interesting map.
Wie schreibe ich denn?!
Ganz frei, ganz ohne Bedenken. Nie weiß ich mein Thema vorher, nie denke ich nach. Ich nehme Papier und schreibe. Sogar den Titel schreibe ich so hin und hoffe, es wird sich schon etwas machen, was mit dem Titel im Zusammenhang steht. Man muss sich auf sich verlassen, sich nicht Gewalt antun, sich entsetzlich frei ausleben lassen, hinfliegen –. Was dabei herauskommt, ist sicher das, was wirklich und tief in mir war. Kommt nichts heraus, so war eben nichts wirklich und tief darin und das macht dann auch nichts. — Peter Altenberg
Anti-Fly Sphere Device, by José de la O. “The refraction of the water, amplifies the colors and movements for the sensible eyes of a fly reflected on this sphere, scaring it away.”
moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago. Yay!
Zur Rolle des Projektionszeichnens bei erzählenden und beschreibenden Aufgaben.
Will I see you tonight
on a downtown train
every night is just the same
you leave me lonely now
— Tom Waits, Downtown Train
Projective geometry is a non-metrical form of geometry, notable for its principle of duality. Fun stuff.
Algernon: your personal assistant for Squeak, “A team of undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just released “Algernon”, a new keyboard-based launcher to help you navigate around your Squeak environment.”
DaMa(h)lszeiten, ach ja.
07may2008
Rechenschieber-Online-Museum, empfehlenswert.
Text Sects, by Theo Honohan. What do Unix, politics, and psychoanalytic theory have in common? Amazing. More of this!
Keep a rolling
Just a mile to go
Keep on rolling, my old buddy
You’re moving much too slow
— Grateful Dead, Jack Straw
Shallow Binding in Lisp 1.5, by Henry G. Baker, Jr. Using the genius rerouting trick.
Decipher, very neat cryptograms.
Núcleo is a toolkit for exploring new uses of video and new human-computer interaction techniques.
I’d meet you anywhere in the country
or anywhere on the sea
All over the world it could be
I would follow you with the heart of me
— Grateful Dead, From The Heart Of Me
instantrimshot.com, essential.
An updated tutorial for Session Types in Haskell. “For the purposes of these tutorials, a Session Type is a specification that dictates how two parties should communicate with each other over a given channel.”
06may2008
Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places), _why translates YARV bytecode to Python. WJW.
The Future of Newspeak, “Cadence has generously agreed to make Newspeak available as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.” Gilad Bracha just doesn’t know when yet.
Does it take much of a man
To see a whole life go down
To look on the world
From a hole in the ground
Too late for your future
Like a horse thats gone lame
To lie in the gutter
And die with no name
— Bob Dylan, Only A Hobo
linenum→info is a service for code readers to share knowledge about softwares in source level. You can leave comments on the Web-based source code listings. I wonder how that works with updates?
Mu License, neat.
Moving to Unicode 5.1, Google: “For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another.” It’s about time.
Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow, by George Oates at A List Apart. “Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.””
Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?, by Jessica Enders at A List Apart. “Many believe that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along the row. However, despite being in use in both paper and electronic mediums for almost half a century, there is practically no evidence that it actually assists users in this way.”
When something interests us, we play around with it. Sometimes this yields a funny observation; sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s about all there is to it. Once in a while the cartoonist will find himself in a beam of light and angels will appear with a great idea, but not often. — Bill Watterson
An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don’t Know How We Program, “So the next time someone in your organisation says something seemingly dumb about software process improvement, try explaining that software engineering has processes for everything except actually writing software.”
Pure JavaScript HTML Parser, by John Resig. Possibly useful.
Abstracting Control, by Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski. “This article investigates an alternative formulation, exploiting the latent expressive power of the standard continuation-passing style (CPS) instead of introducing yet other new concepts.” This is the paper introducing shift/reset.
Prolog CHR – Prime Seive One Liner, CHR rock!
05may2008
Delimited Continuations in Computer Science and Linguistics, a talk by Oleg Kiselyov. “We give a detailed introduction to delimited continuations – the meanings of partial contexts – and point out some of their occurrences in multi-processing, transactions, and non-deterministic computations. After briefly touching on the formalism and the logic of delimited continuations, we concentrate on two their particular uses: placing and retrieving multiple contextual marks (dynamic binding, anaphora) and meta-programming (generating code, generating denotations of interrogative sentences and clauses).”
We’re standing on the beach,
The sea will part before me
(Fire wheel burning in the air)
And you will follow me,
And we will ride to glory
— Grateful Dead, Estimated Prophet
Learning J, a tutorial by Roger Stokes.
Attention Beijing Olympics Visitors, “A national alert has been issued.”
Theorems Into Coffee, John Baez gives you coffee for proofs.
A located lambda calculus, by Ezra Cooper and Philip Wadler. “We show how to implement a location-aware language on top of the stateless-server model.”
Right outside this lazy summer home
you don’t have time to call your soul a critic, no
Right outside the lazy gate of winter’s summer home
wondering where the nuthatch winters
Wings a mile long just carried the bird away
— Grateful Dead, Eyes Of The World
Reluctant Sorting Algorithms, “I would like to present you two new sorting algorithms. They wholly follow spirit of multiply and surrender paradigm and still are damn beautiful.”
RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable[!] W3C compatibility. It is an in-situ parser written in modern C++, with parsing speed approaching that of strlen function executed on the same data. Entire library is contained in a single header file, and requires no building or configuration.
04may2008
Word War vi is your basic side-scrolling shoot ‘em up ’80s style arcade game. You pilot your “vi”per craft through core memory, rescuing lost .swp files, avoiding OS defenses, and wiping out those memory hogging emacs processes. When all the lost .swp files are rescued, head for the socket which will take you to the next node in the cluster.
jsvi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript and should work in any modern web-browser. Works amazingly well here.
Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: don’t you see?
got to make it somehow
on the dreams you still believe
— Grateful Dead, Comes A Time
Death of a racehorse, David A. Black asks: “Why is this allowed to go on? Is it simply because more horses survive races than don’t?”
The taxes on vodka became a key element of government finances in Tsarist Russia, providing at times up to 40% of state revenue.
Meandering leads to perfection. — Lao Tzu
The Haskell Execution Model, good to know.
Haskell is a strict language, fusion for the win!
You Could Have Defined Natural Transformations, didn’t we all?
Vertical House, “Kitchen, dining room, living room, and master bedroom are encountered in sequence as one moves up through the structure.” Given the space available there, doh.
03may2008
tako3, a very cryptic, but clever site that allows you to group urls by common topic and then read aggregated feeds.
State of the Union Sentence Bars, cool visualization.
A Persistent Union-Find Data Structure (PS), by Sylvain Conchon and Jean-Christophe Filliâtre. Contains some wonderful code.
The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in
With its words of a life where nothing is new.
Ah, Mother American Night, I’m lost from the light.
Ohhh, I’m drowning in you.
— Grateful Dead, Black-Throated Wind
It’s not homoiconicity, yes yes yes! “So why is Lisp better for metaprogramming? It’s because the representation of code is a convenient one.”
Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home. Cool.
How to Test RAM Under Mac OS X, worth knowing.
Going where the water tastes like wine
Well I’m going where the water tastes like wine
Going where the water tastes like wine
I don’t wanna be treated this a way
— Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad
GitHub Badge for your Blog with 100% guarantee of more coolness, a client-side inclusion of your GitHub projects.
Functional record update in SML. “We will show below how to implement functional record update in SML, with a little boilerplate code.” Awesome what one can do.
02may2008
Curry’s paradox, so named for its discoverer, namely Haskell B. Curry, is a paradox within the family of so-called paradoxes of self-reference (or paradoxes of circularity). Unlike the liar and Russell paradoxes Curry’s paradox is negation-free; it may be generated irrespective of one’s theory of negation.
dilbert.com/fast, yay yay yay.
Little Elegy, a tiny zine for tiny lit.
Random Password Generator, “Pronounceable password in one click”. Useful.
Her hair was brightsome color
Her voice was sweet to me
I know that I will always love her
And I hope that she loved me
— Charlie Monroe, Rosa Lee McFall
Twitter Charts show when and how often you twitter. Hook this idea up a SCM and find out your most productive times!
pdf2djvu creates DjVu files from PDF files. It’s able to extract: graphics, text layer, hyperlinks, document outline (bookmarks), and metadata. Very nice!
I once had a friend who said liquor will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no liquor. — Bob Dylan
Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively, very useful tip by Matt Neuburg.
Long Drives on Google Maps. In six days from the west coast to the east coast!
Aquablue font, for funny programs.
Show Trial Of The Gang Of Four, hehe.
Mountain high, river wide
So many roads to ride
So many roads
So many roads
— Grateful Dead, So Many Roads
Keyboard Calligraphy, the history of Arabic typesetting.
Beluga: Functional Programming with Higher-Order Abstract Syntax, “Our main interest in this project is to investigate programming and reasoning with data structures that provide support for binders. Many object languages include binding constructs, and it is striking that functional languages still lack direct support for binders and common tricky operations such as renaming, capture-avoiding substitution, and fresh name generation.”
A DTD for Protesting and the keeping track and planning of protests, by Pierre Anoid. The Revolution won’t be marked up.
01may2008
International Workers’ Day is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement.
Tresling: Tetris + Arm Wrestling, WJW.
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit den Bedrängern!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein Nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht länger
Alles zu werden, strömt zuhauf!
— Die Internationale
Migrating to Ruby 1.9, good slides by Bruce Williams.
OpenBSD 4.3 Release, now official.
MagLev: Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM, very interesting.
An Efficient Incremental Algorithm for Solving Systems of Linear Diophantine Equations, by Evelyne Contejean and Herve Devie.
No saviours from on high deliver,
No trust we have in prince or peer;
Our own right hand the chains must shiver.
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.
‘Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot,
Each at his forge must do his duty
And strike the iron while it’s hot!
— The Internationale
Retsaot is Toaster, Reversed: Quick ‘n’ Dirty Firmware Reversing, pretty interesting how to do such stuff.
Embedded video is broken, Dean Allen is so right.
The Architecture of Ascent, “In what would merely have been an article about camping equipment in almost any other situation, revamped Italian architecture magazine Abitare recently took a fascinating look at portable mountain climbing shelters.”
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l’air, et rompons les rangs
S’ils s’obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux.
— L’Internationale
COLA (Combined Object-Lambda Abstractions) tutorial, “Our tutorial on COLA provides insight on how programming languages can be implemented using the combined abstractions and an implementation of parsing expression grammars in COLA. The “esoteric” programming language brainfuck was chosen for its simplicity, which allows for concentrating on COLA’s features.”
Zorba is a general purpose XQuery processor implementing in C++ the W3C family of specifications. It is not an XML database. The query processor has been designed to be embeddable in a variety of environments such as other programming languages extended with XML processing capabilities, browsers, database servers, XML message dispatchers, or smartphones. Apache 2.0 licensed.
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