Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30sep2006
KeyJnote is a program that displays presentation slides in PDF format.
SHIFT: The Web 2.0 Drinking Game, who joins in?
In-Browser Wireframe Prototyping with Frametastic, nifty.
Yahoo! Developer Network: Ruby Developer Center, “If you’ve ever thought about combining Ruby with Yahoo!’s open APIs and Web services, read on.”
And always moving upward and ever upward to this gentle, golden promised land
With the smartest of them all moonlighting as a word processor
And the strongest of them all checking IDs outside saloons
— Dan Bern, Wasteland
New JRuby Interview (part 1), Pat Eyler interviewed the JRuby guys.
Perian is a free plugin that enables QuickTime to play almost every popular video format. Uses ffmpeg.
(String < Enumerable).nil?, “So, it sounds like the 1.9 series will remove Enumerable from String’s ancestry, in favor of String#lines.” Hooray!!
A random thought on String theory, by Damien Katz.
Infinitesimal Types, “I want to combine two things I’ve previously discussed: Synthetic Differential Geometry (SDG) and Derivatives of Containers.”
The FXT library: Fast transforms and low level algorithms, featuring the ebook “Algorithms for programmers”. Think of Knuth meets Hacker’s Delight. Very neat.
CurlyML is a simple, concise format for storing and transmitting structured data and documents. Of course, just another format that never will catch on, but it’s kind of nice, though.
Programming without Control: Smith, “It’s got no jumps, no branches, no control flow whatsoever. The program counter starts at zero, and every step, it increments by one and only one.”
How To Get Kicked Out of CSE Class, by Drew Yates. A lesson learned?
But, sooner or later, one of us must know
You just did what you’re supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you
— Bob Dylan, One Of Us Must Know
Chronology of Wakeup Calls at NASA. “In the honored tradition of playing wakeup calls in space, the chronology lists the verifiable songs played during both human spaceflight and robotic missions.”
Die Schiffsbegrüßungsanlage Willkomm-Höft ist eine Einrichtung am Schulauer Fährhaus in Wedel an der Unterelbe.
29sep2006
Berkeley DB Release 4.5, “This new release now supports multi-version concurrency control, non-stop upgrades for replicated environments, and a pre-built replication framework to simplify development of highly available applications.” Now at Oracle.
Now anyone can Talk with Google Talk. (“Gmail accounts no longer required.”)
Smoking the Hubble-Bubble, by GhostOfTiber. “Take one part Indiana Jones, add a heaping spoonful of boring and a pinch of action, and you have military life abroad. The smell of shisha begins there, and it doesn’t smell like the Air Force…”
While I got the time I’ll do my drinkin’
While I got the time I’ll do my drinkin’
Every single day
Every single day
— Dan Bern, Sacre Coeur
This Chocolate Cake Recipe Tastes Terrible!, by chromatic. “Steve Yegge’s Good Agile, Bad Agile needs a filk song.”
Scaling Dynamic Websites with Apache Modules, by Yogesh Makwana. Uses mod_perl.
Open Up Your Wiki and We’ll Finish it For You, collaborative web development?
Things I Know, by Damien Katz: “1. I am forgetful.”
Stop Kidding Yourself You Understand, Dan Creswell says.
New Ruby BetaBrite – 0.0.2, nifty!
Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines (or queues).
GIF is NOW finally free—for real, with a final Unisys joke, by Tony Mobily. Can we please stick to PNG?
I don’t understand why I owe anybody anything
I feel like a tightrope walker and they took away my string
Feel like someone squeezed the juice out of my fruit
— Dan Bern, Fly Away
Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215–2006), “With a smug stroke of his pen, President Bush is set to wipe out a safeguard against illegal imprisonment that has endured as a cornerstone of legal justice since the Magna Carta.” Ouch!
Why I often implement things from scratch, by Joe Armstrong. “If you have the right tools it’s often quicker to implement something from scratch than going to all the trouble of downloading compiling and installing something that somebody else has written.” So true…
Rhabarberbarbara (YouTube), soo geil.
28sep2006
John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticise (agricultural) civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like.
The OpenMRTD.org project tries to provide a Free Software (sometimes referred to as Open Source) toolset around the new electronic passports. Technically speaking, it wants to provide access to ICAO compliant MRTDs (Machine Readable Travel Documents).
Latin profanity on Wikipedia.
Rails is not about inventing your own style, Robby Russell’s quote collection of RailsConf Europe.
So if you see me wearing a swastika tonight
Don’t be angry don’t start a fight
Raise your voices up above
Oooh! Swastika love
— Dan Bern, Swastika
prolog :- tutorial, by J. R. Fisher. For beginners.
So, …, Lispmeister tells his life story.
Testing Concurrent Programs, by Brian Goetz. “Testing concurrent programs is also harder than testing sequential ones. This is trivially true: tests for concurrent programs are themselves concurrent programs.”
Let’s kill off FTP, Chris Josephes proposes. Hell, yes!
How not to teach database design, hehe: “It also seems to have been written by somebody who has the empathy of a brick wall and the teaching ability of a dead albatross.”
And on every planet I would
Have one girl, and I would
Take her out where and whenever
I was flying by that planet
You would be my Earth girl
— Dan Bern, Earth Girl
Thanks Nick, “This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006.” Sad.
Machine Obstructed Proof, “…I have rarely felt as stupid and frustrated as I did during my first few weeks using Coq.”
Levitz: CouchDb GUI client, looks pretty nice.
$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
115 less
39 tail
38 ruby
28 cd
27 ls
21 racc
18 open
16 wget
15 rm
12 vim
The Baggage Dialogues, The departure lounge of the Buenos Aires international airport, many months ago…
Have fun (without me) at RubyConf!, David A. Black can’t come. I don’t come either…
Songbird 0.2 “Test Flight” has been released.
27sep2006
Java Was Strongly Influenced by Objective-C, I have a hard time believing that.
Jesus image found in dog’s butt, SCNR.
The ThreeBallot Voting System (PDF), by Ronald L. Rivest. “We present a new paper-based voting method with attractive security properties. Not only can each voter verify that her vote is recorded as she intended, but she gets a “receipt” that she can take home that can be used later to verify that her vote is actually included in the final tally. Her receipt, however, does not prove to anyone else how she voted.” Just what we need…
Strange Clouds, Lenticular clouds and many other strange kind of clouds!
You’re gonna need
You’re gonna need my help someday
Well, if you can’t quit your sinnin’
Please quit your low down ways.
— Bob Dylan, Quit Your Low Down Ways
Sue the b***ards!, by Curtis Poe. “phpBB security holes abound and the developers are probably guilty of negligent or ignorant malpractice. I seriously doubt they’re guilty of willful malpractice. But how would you sue them?”
Is Functional Programming Going Mainstream?, by Abhijit Nadgouda. “Functional Programming is going to sound Greek to any developer who is experienced imperative or object oriented programming.” Is it?
Tornado 0.05 released.
Dr Haskell is a tool to detect common mistakes in beginner Haskell programs.
The Addresses to My Pursuits, _why dressed his SVN repository up.
wurst ist nicht für alle da, Lydia und nicht-vegetarische Kinder.
Python Supplants C# on TIOBE Index, Jeremy Jones says. I don’t give a fuck on TIOBE, but it’s neat somehow though.
Good Agile, Bad Agile, by Steve Yegge. “My bad-cholesterol view was that Agile Methodologies are for chumps.”
I been out in the desert, doin’ my time
Siftin’ through the dust for fools gold, lookin’ for a sign
Holy man said, “Hold on, brother, there’s a light up ahead.”
Ain’t nothin’ like the light that shines on me in Maria’s bed.
— Bruce Springsteen, Maria’s bed
City of the Pharaoh, “In 1923 pioneer filmmaker Cecil. B. DeMille built the largest set in movie history for his silent (and early Technicolor) epic, The Ten Commandments. It was called ‘The City of the Pharaoh.’”
Everything I know about programming I learnt from typography, Matt Patterson finally got around posting his slides from BarCamp London.
Hoodwink.d Nameplates & Rollups, “See, much less intrusive. Much fancier.”
Google löscht Belgien, durch solche Späße verliert Google allerdings auch User.
26sep2006
Guide to the new drafts of documentation licenses, let’s hope the new GSFDL and GFDL will make things better…
GPLv3: recent misleading information, “The Free Software Foundation wishes to clarify a few factual points about the Second Discussion Draft of GNU GPL version 3, on which recent discussion has presented inaccurate information.” Please read.
Rails for Java Developers, a new PragProg beta-book by Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland. “If you are a Java programmer, you shouldn’t have to start at the very beginning! You already have deep experience with the design issues that inspired Rails, and can use this background to quickly learn Ruby and Rails.”
I’ve got my finger on the trigger
And tonight faith just ain’t enough
When I look inside my heart
There’s just devils and dust
— Bruce Springsteen, Devils & Dust
A Calabi-Yau manifold is a Kähler manifold with a vanishing first Chern class.
Amazing Photos of an Atomic Blast (taken at 1/1000,000,000 of-a-second), somehow beautiful.
Limewire Hits Back Hard: Sues RIAA For Antitrust And Consumer Fraud, WJW.
Télécoms Sans Frontières is a member of the United Nations Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications (WGET). Great!
12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards, by Ben Henick at A List Apart. “The cries of frustration I hear from other developers about CSS are only an echo of the ones I made for years. As a result I like to think that I can relate, and I’m writing to convey the most important lessons I’ve learned so far.”
Long Live the Q Tag, by Stacey Cordoni at A List Apart. I really like the Q tag, but that hack is useless and, uhm, stupid.
GDB wrapper for Ruby, by Jamis Buck. Seriously, I was short before writing that myself the last time I tried to develop a VM in a TDD-style.
The New(?) Architecture of Redisplay, by Patrick Logan. “Here’s the real news… there is a *lot* to learn from understanding how Emacs works.”
Tonight I’m gonna get birth naked and bury my old soul
And dance on its grave
And dance on its grave
— Bruce Springsteen, Long time comin’
Programming in Tabled Prolog, book draft by David S. Warren.
Coco: Live at the Tinfoil, by “birds ate my face”. “Coco’s genetic dowry was a pasty, untanned pallor, shoulder length greasy hair, thin lips and a too-small, elfin head.”
Benefits from a real world switch from CVS to darcs, by Mark Stosberg. “I feel like darcs has contributed enough to my productivity and source code management to merit the switch of an important real world project.”
The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science, by Bernard Chazelle. “The Algorithm’s coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
Why Lisp?, Joel Reymont is back to Lisp. “Lisp is my peace of mind and I will keep it!” Question is how long…
25sep2006
Arrows, like Monads, are Monoids, by Chris Heunen and Bart Jacobs.
Out of the loop, Damien Katz on C++ and the STL. (Blame C++ for its uglyness, not the STL…)
We shall overcome, we shall overcome
We shall overcome someday
Here in my heart, I do believe
We shall overcome someday
— Pete Seeger, We Shall Overcome
Seitz 6x17 Digital, 160 million pixel(!) camera.
Sleeping with Cannibals, be careful!
Ten Most Used BitTorrent Sites Compared, I didn’t even know the half of them.
Love at First Byte, a short biography of Donald E. Knuth. Features a picture with his organ.
Thingamablog is a cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server. A Nukumi2 for ordinary people? ;-)
Chaos Computer Club: Gesetzentwurf gefährdet die Computersicherheit, “Der Gesetzentwurf wird die Arbeitsgrundlagen von Sicherheitsberatern und Netzwerkexperten unter Strafe stellen. Bereits der Besitz und die Verbreitung von Werkzeugen zur Netzwerkanalyse und zur Aufdeckung von Sicherheitslöchern in Rechnersystemen sollen strafbar werden.” Ich glaub es hackt.
You can fire me, but you can’t stop me working!, a rehash of the Graphing Calculator story.
There’s a wall of pride high and wide,
Can’t see over to the other side
It’s such a sad thing to see beauty decay,
It’s sadder still to feel your heart turn away
— Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound
SimpleConsole is a tiny framework to get console applications developed quickly. It might be overkill for scripts, but is pretty useful for some applications.
The Least Surprised #14: So…, very good one. I have nothing to add.
24sep2006
Three ways to add Ruby Macros, by Ola Bini. “I should begin by saying that none of these options are entirely practical right now…” The “hack the AST directly”-part seems missing.
After the thinkpad exploded, Alan Cox’s thinkpad blew up. Wow.
Abstract Machine for LDL, by Danette Chimenti, Ruben Gamboa, and Ravi Krishnamurthy. “We propose an abstract machine for LDL that maintains a high-level view of an LDL program while incorporating aspects of its execution that make a performance difference. A canonical AND/OR graph corresponding to the LDL program provides the skeleton of its execution.”
You’re beautiful beyond words
You’re beautiful to me
You can make me cry
Never say goodbye.
— Bob Dylan, Never Say Goodbye
Warren’s Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction, by Hassan Aït-Kaci.
The Carp, by Sławomir Mrożek. “The holidays coming up, and nowhere to stick the carp. We thought about it and nothing came of it. A real stumper.”
The Virgil Programming Language is designed for building robust, flexible, and scalable software systems on embedded hardware platforms.
Questioning Afghan Mission Is Not Being Disloyal, agavero says. A Canadian point of view.
Is “post OO” just over?, “The author of this essay finds that much of aspect-oriented programming’s success seems to be based on the conception that it improves both modularity and the structure of code, while in fact, it actually works against the primary purposes of the two, namely independent development and understandability of programs.”
Ruby’s Array>>shift is shifty, and why conservative GC can be harmful.
Results of an informal GPLv3 poll amongst kernel contributors, not really surprising results.
I’m tryin to draw some lines
In the sand to set the stage
Mostly I just draw a bunch
Of lines on a page
— Dan Bern, Thunder Road
On the Power of Magic, by Catriel Beeri and Raghu Ramakrishnan. “This paper considers the efficient evaluation of recursive queries expressed using Horn Clauses.”
Uschi Obermaier was a fashion model and groupie and one of the protagonists of the 1968 left-wing movement in Germany. She was regarded by many to be the sex symbol of the 1968 generation in Europe. Happy birthday!
Coral is a deductive system which supports a rich declarative language, and an interface to C++ which allows for a combination of declaritive and imperative programming. The declarative query language supports general Horn clauses augmented with complex terms, set-grouping, aggregation, negation, and relations with tuples that contain (universally quantified) variables.
23sep2006
The world’s worst macro preprocessor , by Mark Dominus. But it does exactly what you want it to.
“Inspecting a live Ruby process”, easier if you cheat., Mauricio Fernandez refines Jamis’ techniques. Awesome stuff.
Inspecting a live Ruby process, Jamis Buck using gdb.
That when the rain comes down
And the first-born-son is taken
And the clouds darken the town
They will pass over
— Dan Bern, They will pass over
The AirPort Security Update and the Supposed MacBook Wi-Fi Hack, by John Gruber. “The only way Maynor and Ellch have any credibility remaining is if Apple is flat-out lying.”
Mac OS X Horizontal Scroll Trick, just press Shift. Cool.
this is my powerbook g4, by Sam Brown. “…which after more than 5 years of hard love has stopped working.” It almost makes me cry, really.
FORTH: A Language for Interactive Computing, Chuck Moore’s very first paper on it.
Eight miles high and when you touch down
You’ll find that it’s stranger than known
Signs in the street that say where you’re going
Are somewhere just being their own
— The Byrds, Eight Miles High
The Ex Factor, by chromatic. “If you want to criticize a language or platform or technology you don’t use, attack its scalability.” Makes very good points.
QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994.
Edinburgh in the desert?
The class Thaliacea contains about 70 species of small barrel shaped animals that spend their lives swimming slowly through the warmer seas of the world. They have wierd ways of reproduction.
22sep2006
A Transformation System for Developing Recursive Programs, by R. M. Burstall, John Darlington. “An initially very simple, lucid, and hopefully correct program is transformed into a more efficient one by altering the recursion structure. Illustrative examples of program transformations are given, and a tentative implementation is described.”
Smalltalk for Everyone Else, by Keith Fieldhouse. “Instead of yet another Algol derivative, why not master object orientation with perhaps the purest OO language ever devised?” Nice introduction for newbies.
SquidSoap is a fun soap dispenser designed for teaching children healthy hand washing habits. “SquidSoap works by applying a small ink mark on a person’s hand when they press the pump to dispense the soap. The ink is designed to wash off after the hands are washed for about 15–20 seconds, which is the time recommended by most doctors.”
Chumby, a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but is way more flexible and fun. It uses the wireless internet connection you already have to fetch cool stuff from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, celebrity gossip…whatever you choose. Want-have!
Drum laß am Samstag backen
Das Brot, fein säuberlich—
Sonst werden wir sonntags packen
Und fressen, o König, dich!
— Georg Weerth, Das Hungerlied
App After App: A zoology of next year’s web applications, slides by Matt Webb for BarCamp London. As usual, very good and recommended reading.
Waiting for the revolution, by Mark Pilgrim. “The short answer is yes, I count all Non-Commercial-Use-Only licenses as overly restrictive.” I completely agree, I always hated NC (And the main reason why all my non-documentation coding is licensed for verbatim use only).
Practical Synthetic Differential Geometry in Haskell. “My goal here is to illustrate how the definition of vector field in Anders Kock’s book gives a nice functional definition of a vector field and how that definition leads naturally to the Lie bracket.”
iX-Konferenz “Bessere Software!”: PHP-Erfinder als Keynote-Sprecher, die Überschrift machte meinen Tag.
EuroOSCON 2006 Slides: Guerilla Evangelism, by Zak Greant.
Deutsches Gericht bestätigt Gültigkeit der GPL, und es gab viel frohlocken. “Das Landgericht Frankfurt hat Anfang September erstmals in einem Hauptsacheverfahren mit Beweiserhebung die Gültigkeit der GNU General Public License (GPL) bestätigt. Harald Welte, Entwickler des Netfilter-Codes im Linux-Kernel und Betreiber der Initiative gpl-violations.org, hatte gegen den Hardwarehersteller D-Link geklagt.”
Today is One Web Day, please mail me how Anarchaia has changed your life. The best posts will be published on Monday.
Good and bad I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
— Bob Dylan, My Back Pages
Delicate Situation or how women can hide a gun. Do they discover that when going to airport security? WJW.
Madonna Concert, you wouldn’t expect Joi Ito going there, would you?
If there’s a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it’s the basic fact that all programming languages suck. — Larry Wall
The State of the Onion 10, by Larry Wall. Whoo, finally the commented slides are up. Must-read, as every year. “This expert claims that you can become an expert in just about anything if you study it persistently for ten years or so.” That’s true.
Contribute to CouchDb and show off your AJAX skills, the idea of a VB client really scares me.
Dimensional Analysis, by John Baez. “What’s so special about mass, length and time? Do we have to use three dimensions?”
PlanetDS XSS, outline of an cross-site scripting attack.
21sep2006
Yield Prolog lets you embed Prolog programs directly in Python or C# (or JavaScript, coming soon) by using the yield keyword.
SHARCS’06: Special-purpose Hardware for Attacking Cryptographic Systems, SHARCS’06 is the second workshop dedicated to the challenging subject of special-purpose cryptanalytical machines. Hot stuff.
USBCELL: Batteries That Recharge Through USB, a fantastic idea.
The Virtual Microscope is a NASA-funded project that provides simulated scientific instrumentation for students and researchers worldwide as part of NASA’s Virtual Laboratory initiative. Nifty!
Nominal Closures for Java (version 0.2), looks good to me.
It had zero effect–on me
It had zero effect–zero
It had zero effect–
The thing that brought me to you
Was you
— Dan Bern, Zero Effect
mod_magnet is the new replacement for mod_cml in lighttpd.
Macbeth on Google Books. “When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
When modular arithmetic was a STOC result, discovering Euler on arXiv.
Profiling XML Schema, by Paul Kiel. “I decided to embark on a quest to see if we can put together a profile of XML Schema based on experiences thus far.”
Boykott der Musikindustrie ist absolut hörenswert “Zeitgleich zur Popkomm startet der Chaos Computer Club an diesem Wochenende eine Gegenaktion: Unter dem Motto “Boycott Musicindustry” verteilen Mitglieder des Clubs CDs an Passanten. Auf der kostenlosen CD sind namhafte Künstler wie die Beastie Boys oder paniq vertreten, die ihre Musik komplett legal zum Runterladen aus dem Internet anbieten.”
one step forward, Lydia, ich trinke lieber Segafredo Kaffee.
Want to Help Translate the Ruby Site?, even non-programmers can do it.
Yhc.Core is now a publically available and somewhat supported API! Cool.
And nobody can keep you from the ones you love
Nobody to steal away your sway the way you walk
May there never be a time that you don’t walk through
May there never be a time when you don’t live through
— Beth Orton, Mount Washington
Security: DEFCON — Security Tool Nirvana, by Kristy Westphal. Maybe mentions something you didn’t yet hear about.
Who Drew This Painting… Elephant, Artist, or Preschooler? Test your artistic instincts with this fun quiz!
360 in a circle, 60 minutes and 60 seconds… What is so special about 60?, oh why couldn’t the old Babylonians use hexadecimal numbers?
ATM Backdoor… Why is no one talking about this?, just lovely.
20sep2006
Efficient Top-Down Computation Of Queries Under The Well-Founded Semantics, by Weidong Chen, Terrance Swift, and David S. Warren.
bddbddb stands for BDD-Based Deductive DataBase. It is an implementation of Datalog, a declarative programming language similar to Prolog for talking about relations.
Matz, the Khaki Pugilist, the inventor of Ruby enters the ring! The Japanese are weird. :-) Summary of the event.
Bullet time is a concept introduced in recent films and computer games whereby the passage of time is displayed as extremely slow or frozen moments in order to allow a viewer to observe imperceptibly fast events (such as flying bullets). It is often used to create a dramatic effect, as in the film The Matrix.
Die Evapedia ist eine deutschsprachige Internet-Enzyklopädie nach Machart der Wikipedia zum Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.
No one had slept
No one had eaten
Our bodies were bad
Our spirits were beaten
— Dan Bern, Rome
Haskell Equational Reasoning Assistant (HERA), an architecture that provides both a GUI level and a batch level Haskell rewrite engine inside a single tool. Whoa.
ICFP Programming Contest Scoreboard, “These are the final standings for the 2006 ICFP Programming Contest.”
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science, by E. W. Dijkstra.
Simple MapReduce in Ruby using Rinda. “My goal is twofold: first, to learn to write algorithms in distributed/parallel MapReduce style. Second, to see how simply these concepts can be expressed in Ruby.”
Hotel Room Nudes, NSFW but mostly art.
19sep is a blog on the Thailand 19 Sep 2006 Coup.
Tanks appear in Bangkok. Thailand calls state of emergency, live report of a citizen living there.
Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book covers the Ruby language from the very basics of using puts to put naughty phrases on the screen all the way to serving up your favorite web page from WEBrick or connecting to your favorite web service. Looks great for newbies.
SWFROADS, a flash reimplementation of one of my favourite VGA games, SkyRoads.
The last place you hope to find the one that’s been there all the time
Sometimes, sometimes we can swim beyond the scenery
And the first place that’s on your mind
The first place you’d find each time
— Beth Orton, Paris Train
American Riverography at BLDG BLOG.
Shell Corner: Logeasy and Logez — Handling Log Files, for the hopeless scripters.
What is a Hacker?, by Bruce Schneier. Also, why cheating often isn’t.
jasonp’s Pile of Pi Programs and Peripheral Paraphernalia Page, “An Authentic Archive of Arithmetic Automata that Ascertain Archimedes’ vAlue (Annoying Alliteration, Ay?)” Among them some really small ones.
19sep2006
F# is a programming language that provides the much sought-after combination of type safety, performance and scripting, with all the advantages of running on a high-quality, well-supported modern runtime system. Essentially ML for .net. Sounds very nice.
A marvelous gift from the Royal Society, “For the next two months The Royal Society will make available the complete archive of its scientific journals online. The text is fully searchable.” Great!
Freie Kultur: Wesen und Zukunft der Kreativität, aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Annegret Claushues und Hartmut Pilch. Natürlich CC.
Won’t somebody come and cut me loose with 4 more minutes to go
I can see the mountains I can see the skies with 3 more minutes to go
— Johnny Cash, 25 Minutes to Go
Scheme and Functional Programming 2006, official papers are online. Whoo.
Java, Groovy and (J)Ruby, a side-by-side comparision.
Jesus Camp: Kids Worshipping to a George Bush Picture, …for they do not know what they are doing.
A tale of two developers, I don’t think this is too realistic.
DTrace meets JavaScript, fricking cool.
I fly a starship across the Universe divide
And when I reach the other side
I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I’ll be back again, and again and again and again and again…
— Johnny Cash, Highwayman
Mom: 9-1-1 call was to help son, and they shoot her suicidal(!) son. Really really awesome and sad. WJW.
Pure and simple transaction memories, introduction by Joe Armstrong. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy in non-purely functional languages…
Blogger’s Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp, Steve Yegge on JavaScript.
MetaProgramming Refactoring, by Ola Bini. “I propose that the time is right and nigh for a catalog of Metaprogramming Refactorings.”
grease, bayern und die bayern beim feiern, schlaft doch einfach im Englischen Garten. (Das Papst-Apotheken-Angebot rockt allerdings.)
A scientific investigation into the k5 trolling phenomena, by horny smurf. Great results. ;-)
18sep2006
A Logical Spreadsheet is a spreadsheet in which the formula language is expanded from function definitions to logical constraints.
Five Programming Languages You Really SHOULD Learn Right Now, a good but not special list.
1000 words of advice for design teachers, by Allan Chochinov. Very good.
Optimal width for 1024px resolution?, by Cameron Moll. 960px sounds like a good compromise.
Running the Manual: An Approach to High-Assurance Microkernel Development, by Philip Derrin, Kevin Elphinstone, Gerwin Klein, David Cock, and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty. “We propose a development methodology for designing and prototyping high assurance microkernels, and describe our application of it.”
Stick by me baby, in spite of my thoughts
that’s all I want you to do, and try to help me when I’m down
and I’ll take good care of you
— The Byrds, I Trust
AutoForms is a Haskell library to ease the creation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). It does this by using generic programming to construct GUI components. Looks nice to use.
Searching for a New Epistemology in Berlin, what a workshop.
I Think, Therefore I eXist …, by Kurt Cagle. I don’t think full-fledged XML databases solve problems we really have.
RailsConf Europe and beyond…, summary by David A. Black.
The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. Brilliant conclusion: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”
Now that the war is through with me
I’m waking up, I cannot see
That there’s not much left of me
Nothing is real but pain now
— Metallica, One
Showtime: The New iPods, as usual, in-depth analysis by John Gruber.
Check smoke results while reading Synopses, the Perl 6 testers do really nice things.
“Is Open Source Art Possible?”, event in Tokyo 9/24.
Modeling Gravity with Ruby, by Paul Lutus. Cool.
17sep2006
Charles Hamblin (1922-1985) was an Australian philosopher and pioneer computer scientist. Hamblin was the originator of the recursive stack (or last-in, first-out store).
Metalink is an Open Standard that bundles the various ways (FTP/HTTP/P2P) to get files into one format for easier downloads.
Om is a realtime modular synthesizer and effects processor for GNU/Linux audio systems using the Jack audio server and LADSPA or DSSI plugins. Looks very neat.
Offene Netzwerke auch für Deutschland! Dafür!
The Concert: A Classical Music Podcast, “Download free recordings of classical music performed live in the museum’s Tapestry Room.”
I will keep falling as long as I live,
Ah, without ending,
And I will remember the place that is now,
That has ended before the beginning…
— The Byrds, Fifth Dimension
Tales of the Hive: Blood, Sweat and Honey, by xC0000005. “The holy grail of beekeepers and bees alike, honey.”
The Ancient Arachno-Terrorist Organization: AATO, by mybostinks. Not for the phobic.
Reducing Fractions, the easy way. Or, 26/65 = 2/5, by Jonathan Wellons. Don’t fall for it.
Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed Charles M. Hannum.
Perlcast interviews chromatic, co-author of Perl Hacks, and lots of other things.
Atomic is an Atom protocol client implemented firefox extension. It can communicate with any number of different Atom protocol servers that support introspection. Yum!
RSS and AJAX: A Simple News Reader, by Paul Sobocinski. Good introduction.
Samurai: Protecting Critical Heap Data in Unsafe Languages, by Karthik Pattabiraman, Vinod Grover and Benjamin G. Zorn.
SecPAL: Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language, by Moritz Y. Becker, Andrew D. Gordon and Cédric Fournet. Seems like a good approach.
Draft R6RS available, neat.
AppleScript: a story worth telling, the language doesn’t get better, tho.
Local and global side effects with monad transformers, solving puzzles in Haskell by creating puzzles? ;-)
Blogger’s Block #1: Joelprah, by Steve Yegge: “Part 1 of an N-part series of short posts intended to clear out my bloggestive tract. Hold your nose!” Also see Blogger’s Block #2: Anime for the Nonplussed.
Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?, Jeff Atwood wonders.
Ruby internals: a self-study guide to the sources, compiled by Mauricio Fernandez. This is a great resource for everyone really interested in how Ruby works.
Sharing RJS (PDF), slides of Marcel Molina Jr.’s excellent talk.
Author Interview: Leonard Richardson, co-author of the Ruby Cookbook.
Rails Conf Europe Wrap-Up - Part I, by Christian Romney. Also: Dave Thomas Keynote (On Risk), JRuby, and see xml-blog for the rest.
Jon Gretar has a nice tumblelog.
RIP lilo, Rob Levin, known to many as Freenode’s lilo, was hit by a car while riding his bike. This is very sad. He surely had his enemies, but keep him in good memory.
Tools of the Trade: iTerm—Faster, with Safari-like tabs, Rob Orsini noticed the recent development.
Ruby and Strongtalk, I’m not sure this is a very practical way. Rather, let the Strongtalk developers help with JRuby (or YARV?).
Interview: Perl 6 on Perl 5, with fglock.
Oh What will you give me?
Say the sad bells of Rhymney
Is there hope for the future?
— Idris Davies, The Bells Of Rhymney
A Postcard from Rome, by A Bore. “For the worst pizza in Rome, you have to start from the Piazza San Pietro.”
rabissimo vol. 3, Lydia at her best. Und wundervolle Bilder.
Design in the World, linking to “a lengthy interview with Detlef Mertins, Chair of the Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania.”
Take 42: breakthrough, Jean-Claude Wippler says: “The final frontier has been breached: full dataflow!”
12sep2006
Off to RailsConf Europe 2006, chris blogs and Anarchaia will resume publishing on Sunday, September 17.
Ruby Performance Revisited, by Joel Spolsky. Oh!
Design patterns of 1972, found by Mark Dominus.
CardMeeting is a free-form sandbox for simultaneous long-distance collaboration. Looks good.
Voluntary Technical Debt, very pragmatic: “To make progress so quickly, we cut a lot of corners. We didn’t implement any tests. We only programmed for the best-case networking scenarios. We let bugs creep in.”
Democracy Player, your Internet TV. Gonna give it a try.
World Record #4: Peristaltic Action, an 8 meter turd. WJW. PNSFW.
Strongtalk has gone fully Open Source! The virtual-machine source code is now available, as of September, 2006. Win32 only, at the moment.
Woke up this morning with light in my eyes
And then realized it was still dark outside
It was a light coming down from the sky
I don’t know who or why
— The Byrds, Mr. Spaceman
The Black Hole Theory of Design, James Gosling doesn’t seriously want to claim that closures are more complex than inner classes, does he?
Connecting with people in six steps isn’t true! My world view shatters!
Dynamic Languages Symposium at OOPSLA 2006. Awesome talks, it seems.
Languages used in Ajax development: the most – Java, the least – Ruby, by Hari K. Gottipati. Great. So what?
The history of a templating engine, some day I’ll write something like that too.
Happy September 11, a poem in Perl.
Naan is a round flatbread made of wheat flour.
Text-Resize Detection, by Lawrence Carvalho and Christian Heilmann at A List Apart. “Use JavaScript to detect your visitor’s initial font size setting and find out whenever your visitor increases or decreases the font size.”
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
— Pete Seeger, Turn! Turn! Turn!
A Standardista’s Alphabet, by Jack Pickard at A List Apart. Neat.
The ruby-lang.org redesign went live. Nice.
CouchDb-Ruby, a Ruby based API for working with Couch’s flexible document store.
11sep2006
Subversion 1.4 Release Notes, it appears to have gotten faster. (Read-only svnsync is pretty lame, though.)
Ruby on Rails Workshop by David Black for free in Sweden.
Adding built-in editing support to the Yahoo! UI Extensions Grid , by Jack Slocum. Highly useful.
Mother and child with magazine
Into a story, into a dream
Why is there something instead of nothing
And how is the asking built into the hunting?
— Silver Jews, Like Like The The The Death
Germany: Crackdown on TOR-node operators, it’s only reasonably safe for the end-user…
Wherefore art thou, SVG?, by Kurt Cagle. Good question.
Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the frontline
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues
— Bob Dylan, Workingman’s Blues #2
Google Test Automation Conference, I hope we can see the videos soon.
Elk is an implementation of the Scheme programming language. In contrast to existing, stand-alone Scheme systems Elk has been designed specifically as an embeddable, reusable extension language subsystem for applications written in C or C++.
10sep2006
Some Perfect Hash for Poker hands. Useful.
DebConf 6 videos, loads of stuff.
Piratenpartei Deutschland, war ja nur eine Frage der Zeit.
Pathological Programming: The Worlds Smallest Programming Language, they are, as you may know, Iota and Jot.
AxKit2 v1.1 has been released. Somehow it’s days are gone, though.
It’s so very cold in the mansion after sunset
Snow is blowing through the baseboard outlets.
And I have no idea what drives you mister.
tanning beds explode with rich women inside.
— Silver Jews, Time Will Break The World
Your web app does not require Erlang!, Joel Reymont says: “Use Rails and you will be pleased…” He probably knows.
Will Federal Court ruling over target.com effect Ajax development?, by Hari K. Gottipati. As if non-Ajax sites were significantly more accessible…
More Low Cost Geometric Algebra, with Haskell, of course.
Folds, Church Encodings, Builds, and Short Cut Fusion for Nested Types: A Principled Approach, by Neil Ghani and Patricia Johann. “Initial algebra semantics is one of the cornerstones of the theory of modern programming languages.”
Klein open-source release, “Klein is a former Sun Labs research project intended to learn more about the construction of “metacircular” virtual machines (that is, VMs written in the same language that they implement). […] [I]t is intended to someday be a virtual machine for the Self language, written almost entirely in Self, and a development environment for that VM.” Yay!
I’m Sorry, I have no idea who’s the CEO of Digg, too. But I’d recognize Patrick Logan by name. ;-)
Help write Perl 6 in Perl 6 by extending the Prelude.
Ruby’s Exception Hierarchy, should-know.
I will not eat crow for you or anyone else
I will not, I will patently not
I will not eat crow for you or anyone else
I will not, I will patently not
— Dan Bern, Crow
Is it possible to have a rational Domain Name System?, Andy Oram asks. DNS is one of the things that ought to be replaced but never will.
Why argue about dynamic versus static languages when you can use both?, Jon Udell wonders. Because it’s fun!
Simply RISC ships the S1 Core, based on the OpenSPARC T1, licensed under the GNU GPL. Very cool.
2006 Young Innovators Under 35, according to Technology Review. To be taken with a grain of salt.
09sep2006
Making RubyForge Entries Less Cluttered, by Gregory Brown. Of course, GForge should only show the items that have content, anyway.
Zometool Polyhedra, sounds like big fun.
We live together in a photograph of time
I look into your eyes
And the seas open up to me
I tell you I love you
And I always will
— Antony and the Johnsons, Fistful Of Love
AjaxScaffold generates a production ready, fully styled, interface for managing models with valid XHTML and CSS. By the Kiko guys.
Where do Atheists Get Their Morality From?, “Morality is a built-in condition of humanity; the moral tendency exists in just about everyone, barring psychopaths.” Not sure why there are people not believing this.
Fonts for typesetting Tolkien Elvish scripts at the CTAN. “The bundle provides fonts for Cirth (cirth.mf, etc.) and for Tengwar (teng10.mf).”
We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I’m haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
— Bob Dylan, When The Deal Goes Down
Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes, cool and geeky.
How To Fly Without ID, It’s Easy If You Know How! Neat.
Minimal Perl teaches Perl “to UNIX/Linux people by capitalizing on their existing knowledge and skills.” Sounds very good.
08sep2006
Sexual urges of men and women, mwahahaha.
American torture actually an issue of standards vagueness?, Rick Jelliffe says: “One problem with standards based on text or formalisms only, is that it is very difficult to test them.”
Mesopotamian Mathematics, “We explain the origins of mathematics in Mesopotamia from the earliest tokens, through the development of Sumerian mathematics to the grand flowering in the Old Babylonian period, and on into the later periods of Mesopotamian history.”
We need water
Good, good water
We need water
And maybe somebody’s daughter
— The Who, Water
Global Liberalism versus Local Liberalism, by circletimessquare. “Therefore, for liberalism to win back the upper hand in the West, it must accept that some of the conservative’s agenda on the global stage is not only acceptable, but more in line with a liberal platform than a conservative one.”
O’Reilly Code Search beta, “Enter search terms to find relevant sample code from nearly 700 O’Reilly books. The database currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code—all edited and ready to use.”
Science Fiction and the City: An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer , at BLDG BLOG.
I think this brain has thought a lot,
Oh, searching, trying to find the crutch,
I think these ears hear a whole lot of music,
And like me they’ve heard a bit too much.
— The Who, Too Much Of Anything
Unit Testing Your Documentation, by Leonard Richardson, co-author of the Ruby Cookbook. “Thanks to the test framework, on a good day I could proofread, debug, and verify the correctness of 30 recipes.”
Using introspection to get method arguments and other info, Mauricio, you totally rock! (Now, let’s do it right and add it to core.)
Haskell for Maths, an awesome resource: “Code can be a way to make maths concrete—so that instead of just proving theories about various mathematical objects, we can actually manipulate these objects and experiment with them.”
07sep2006
Rush to Rails 1.2 Adds Tons of New Features, Bob Silva made a list.
JRuby Steps Into the Sun, “The two core JRuby developers, myself and Thomas Enebo, will become employees at Sun Microsystems this month. Our charge? You guessed it…we’re being hired to work on JRuby full-time.”
Dirk, the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. “Dirk currently knows of 1883 things with 3109 connections.”
call_stack 0.1.0, making ruby-breakpoint/Rails’ breakpointer work with Ruby 1.8.5. Mauricio rescues the breakpoint-using world.
All I did was have a bit too much to drink
And I picked the wrong precinct
Got picked up by the law
And now I ain’t got time to think
— The Who, My Wife
Sigh, so right, Patrick.
Magic is a simple web application framework inspired by web.py, Ruby on Rails, Emacs, and Apache. Magic is written in Scheme, a Lisp dialect, and serves pages through any web server that supports SCGI, such as Apache or lighttpd.
Powerpoint bullet numbering trivia, who’d have thought that.
Things I’ve learned in law school, part 1 of… well, a lot, “Fear is a wonderful motivator.”
Why do we keep on using C++?, true honesty: “I keep on using C++ because Amarok is written in it, which can’t be changed easily. And that’s about the only reason.”
I’m just a dreamer, I dream my life away, today
I’m just a dreamer, who dreams of better days, OK
I’m just a dreamer, who’s searching for the way, today
I’m just a dreamer, dreaming my life away
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah
— Ozzy Osbourne, Dreamer
My Most Important C++ Aha! Moments… Ever, chosen by Scott Meyers. My favourite: “Understanding what problem Visitor addresses”.
Massiver Serverausfall beim CCC, RAID ist halt auch kein Panazee.
CouchDb: document oriented persistence, by Harry Fuecks. Good review.
Cistern, “McMillan Reservoir, in Washington D.C., is one of the largest undeveloped tracts in a capital invaded by convoys of construction cranes.”
Kidnapper’s retro computer offers scant clues, terrorists, use a C64 too!
06sep2006
Transterpreter is a small (2000 lines of code), portable (strict ANSI C), open-source runtime for a growing family of massively concurrent programming languages, including Occam.
Programming Languages & Perl, A Meditation on Perl’s Place in the Programming World. By Dave Cross. Good talk.
I’m gonna give you every inch of my love,
Gonna give you my love.
Yeah! All right! Let’s go!
— Led Zeppelin, Whole Lotta Love
Typisch deutsche Annäherung an Weblogs, Nico Lumma über einen PC-Welt Artikel: “Jetzt liesst auch noch der Chef mit, wer weiss, was der dazu sagt. Ob der andere Meinungen toleriert? Bin ich gefeuert, wenn ich etwas sage, was er nicht mag? Muß ich ihn immer und ewig lobpreisen?”
Scheme and Functional Programming 2006, in Portland OR, affiliated with ICFP 2006. Schedule with links to papers.
Poincaré Project, “I am currently working through the mathematics required to understand the Poincaré Conjecture and the possible solution recently proposed. I want to blog my journey and I’m starting out summarising the basic foundations of pure mathematics necessary to get to the conjecture-specific parts.” Should be fairly understandable.
IronPython 1.0 released today!, worth a mention. “My initial motivation for the project was to understand all of the reports that I read on the web claiming that the Common Language Runtime (CLR) was a terrible platform for Python and other dynamic languages.”
Why We Bought Kiko.com, the Tucows guys explain.
:symbol.is_a? String, at least in Ruby 1.9. Probably a good choice.
I’m touched with desire
What don’t I do?
Through flame and through fire
I’ll build my world around you
— Bob Dylan, Beyond The Horizon
Three Reasons to Port to Perl 6 now, by Mark Stosberg.
Container Home Kit, livin’ in a box.
8 Iraq War Hours, what a monetary unit.
6 Ways To Organize: Your Mail Application, by Glenn Wolsey.
05sep2006
How to read the information on a beer can in Japan. Very useful.
Announcing Tesseract OCR, Google open-sources OCR software. Probably useful, gotta check that out. Licensed under the Apache License.
Is a computer like a bicycle for the mind?, worth alone reading for the Alan Kay quotes.
DiamondWiki, an experimental Wiki clone with an emphasis on metadata and faceted navigation. A simple but useful idea, shame I didn’t come up with it. :) (Wikipedia needs this!)
Well they call me the hunter, that’s my name.
They call me the hunter, that’s how I got my fame.
Ain’t no need to hide, Ain’t no need to run.
‘Cause I’ve got you in the sights of my…gun!
— Led Zeppelin, How Many More Times
Designing Away Preconditions, by Michael Feathers. Good idea in theory, but I wonder if it holds up in practice.
Resume pitfalls every programmer should avoid, filed for reference.
Why I don’t like shared memory, by Joe Armstrong. Good points.
If WWII was an MMORPG, WJW.
RSpec cheat sheet, yum!
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for
Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven
— Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven
sd.rb: Episode 003: mkmf, “Kevin Clark takes us through some of the work he’s doing on mkmf for his Summer of Rails project. We also get a quick preview of Kevin’s RailsDay app, Advisr.”
Spotlight On Glark, by Martin DeMello. I mentioned the Ruby grep already, but it’s worth another look.
CGI::App to Perl 6: A plugin system in one line of code, it doesn’t work yet, but sure sounds nice.
04sep2006
Guide: Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing In Rails, by Kevin Clark. Looks good, especially if Rails moves faster than you can follow. Read this.
MSIE 7 RC1 Second Acid Test Results, WJW.
Low Pro: Unobtrusive Scripting For Prototype, really useful.
Developing a Rails model using BDD and RSpec, Part 1, by Luke Redpath.
Lucky Button: Search the web’s best search engines from one place!, nice for a start page.
How to get users to RTFM, by Katie Sierra. Must read.
FreeDOS 1.0 has been released. Oh wow.
Winter’s gone, the river’s on the rise
I loved you then, and ever shall
But there’s no one left here to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
— Bob Dylan, Nettie Moore
Impromptu is an OSX programming environment for composers, sound artists, VJ’s and graphic artists with an interest in live or interactive programming. Impromptu is a Scheme language environment, a member of the Lisp family of languages.
Factor 0.84 is now available.
How 9/11 changed America: In statistics, “Five years after the 11 September attacks, how has America changed?”
“Did You Hear the One About Hitler?”, some mildly amusing jokes.
Learning GNU Make Functions with Arithmetic, ouch.
Death by Google Calendar: How I Identified you to rob you, be careful about what you provide to the public.
CDfs is a file system for Linux systems that `exports’ all tracks and boot images on a CD as normal files.
Perl6::Perl5::Differences, Differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6. Worth a read for outsiders, too.
CouchDb to do list, why no “port to a real OS”?
Beyond the horizone, the night winds blow
The theme of a melody from many moons ago
The bells of St. Mary, how sweetly they chime
Beyond the horizon I found you just in time
— Bob Dylan, Beyond The Horizon
SGML turns 20, Rick Jelliffe noticed it. I just don’t agree with the “SGML has succeeded by abandoning the Wiki-like markup feataures”-part.
To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus with Animated Reduction, by David C Keenan. Classic, just redisovered. Must read.
How the Macintosh interface didn’t keep up with itself, by Andy Oram. He claims a single menu bar doesn’t work in a multi-tasking environment. NACK.
RESTy Routes in Rails: Drinking DHH’s KoolAid, Theodore Polonsky Presented to Rubyists of Second Life August 31, 2006.
Using RubyInline for Optimization, tutorial by Eric Hodel.
Catching up with Unicode 5.0, by Rick Jelliffe. “There are only 1369 new characters compared to Unicode 4.1.”
Topology in Programming Language Semantics, a bunch of links for you.
03sep2006
rsnapshot is a filesystem snapshot utility for making backups of local and remote systems.
The Setting for DSL Development, Program, Model, Artifacts, Actions.
CouchDb has been released, under GPL.
Half-Wright, using the Half-Life engine for architecture.
Geometric Algebra for Free!, isn’t Haskell great?
Improved Perl6 Documentation available, useful.
Author Interviews: Hal Fulton – The Ruby Way, interview by Pat Eyler. “The newsgroup hadn’t been approved yet. The mailing list had perhaps 10-20 messages a day if I recall correctly.”, those were the days.
A 1.6km-long carbon ribbon in the skies above Arizona, “step into a small airtight box, push a button marked ‘space’, and ride an elevator all the way up a cable reaching far into the sky.” Hmm hmm.
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
Through the world mysterious and vague
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
Walkin’ through the cities of the plague.
— Bob Dylan, Ain’t Talkin’
Complicating simplicity, Matt Linderman cites: “An investigation of the essence of simplicity must necessarily get involved with the psychology of human-machine interaction.”
MasterView is a Ruby/Rails optimized HTML/XHTML friendly template engine. It is designed to use the full power and productivity of rails including layouts, partials, and rails html helpers while still being editable/styleable in a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
An Edwards-Venn diagram with 6 sets, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Most Important C++ People… Ever, chosen by Scott Meyers.
Alternative Energy Sources, by agavero. “Even common hay bales are being used in construction of buildings for insulation.”
Interviewing Gregory Brown, interview by Pat Eyler.
Roles: Composable Units of Object Behavior, by chromatic. “A role is a named collection of behavior – a set of methods identified by a unique name.”
Unfolding the Web, by Bruno Pedro. Look at the last DabbleDb video, and answer the questions…
IEDs at FOO Camp. “If there’s a man-in-the-middle attack on a teledildonic session, is that rape?”
Shinto ritual for pruning our Shii Tree, by Joi Ito. “The priest first called the spirits with a chant and opened the sake and other offerings. We then did a ritual where we were blessed, the tree was blessed and we paid our respects to the spirits.”
Bob on Bob, on interviewing Bob Dylan. “Mr. Dylan, how would you define folk music?” — “As a constitutional re-play of mass production.”
Digg into Dabble, new screencast about data import and integration. Very impressive.
The Sandbox is Loading Gems and Acting Less Freaky, more on why’s sandbox.
Review of e-slate voting systems, by aphrael. “At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well.”
Apache Abdera is a project to build a functionally-complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications.
I wanna be with you in paradise
And it seems so unfair
I can’t go to paradise no more
I killed a man back there
— Bob Dylan, Spirit On The Water
DSLs Rehashed Again, by Mike Loukides. “What makes a working language?” Also relevant to sublanguages, of course.
The U.S. Army Permafrost Tunnel, “dug entirely within frozen ground on the north slope of Hill 456 near Fox, Alaska.” Chilly.
Nuclear Ambition, “the cooling towers of nuclear power plants could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases.”
The creator of Ruby is Japanese, the Rubist magazine is in Japanese, and a great many users of Ruby are Japanese, yet I can’t understand a word they are saying. That’s not their fault. It’s my French teacher’s fault. — Dr Nic, Spy on the Japanese Rubists
meineTapete.de ist ein Münchner Unternehmen, das sich auf die Gestaltung und das Bedrucken von Tapeten und Vertikallamellen konzentriert.
upstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system. Now used in Ubuntu. Sounds nice.
The PracTeX Journal, issue 2006/03. Includes articles on KOMA-Script, memoir and ConTeXt.
Snakebite is a stand-alone BitTorrent server that works on both Windows and Linux, written in Python.
Introducing ErlyDB: The Erlang Twist on Database Abstraction, by Yariv Sadan. Looks good.
Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer, “I constantly find myself wanting to use idioms from these languages, or noticing how much less code I’d be able to write if I was using one of these languages…”
The Extreme Sport of Origami, very complex paper art.
Evangelist drowns trying to walk on water, Darwin, I hear your calling.
We tell ourselves so many many many lies,
We’re not pawns in any game, we’re not tools of bigger men,
There’s only one who can really move us all,
It all looks fine to the naked eye,
But it don’t really happen that way at all.
— The Who, Naked Eye
Page-crunch allows to elaborate documents with several sheets on the same page, conveniently resizing and rotating the original sheets, or to output a book ready to print from source Postscript or PDF files.
Do-It-Yourself Documentation? Research Into the Effectiveness of Mailing Lists (Part 3), by Andy Oram. “How much noise is on the lists?”
Der Staat wird nicht “abgeschafft”, er stirbt ab. — Friedrich Engels
Daikon is an implementation of dynamic detection of likely invariants; that is, the Daikon invariant detector reports likely program invariants.
Lightweight Static Capabilitites, this time with slides.
Now with perly goodness, Tornado 0.04 has been released.
Dwelling in an age of aeromodernism, nice against rain too?
RubyConf*MI in review, by Pat Eyler. Reminds me a bit of Euruko: “It was a well attended conference. There were 58 people there, including the organizers and speakers (an overlapping group).”
Foozles: a retrospective (PDF), or: Anatomy of a programming languages fad, by Todd Veldhuizen. Great, sad and true at once.
Using Rake as a Library, updated, ah neat, it seems FileList is niftier than find.rb.
Why Processes Scale Better Than Threads, “Scalability is not performance. Scalability is getting from small to big (and back).”
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