Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31dec2006
Neue Nummern für alle Bücher, ISBNs werden drei Ziffern länger und die Prüfziffer ändert sich auch. Was dabei wieder alles kaputtgeht…
Pretty Slow Privacy, PGP on the cheap, implemented in a bunch of shell scripts. All crypto in dc(1), nice redirects in/from FIFOs. Awesome!
Von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben,
behütet und getröstet wunderbar,
so will ich diese Tage mit euch leben
und mit euch gehen in ein neues Jahr;
noch will das alte unsre Herzen quälen,
noch drückt uns böser Tage schwere Last.
Ach Herr, gib unsern aufgeschreckten Seelen
das Heil, für das Du uns geschaffen hast.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben
Inflationary Spaces of the Aero-Gothic Future, “In the summer of 2005, a Swiss architecture firm called Instant designed an inflatable addition to the Berlin art space KW.” Neato.
Peano curve weaves of whole songs, interesting results.
On Programming and Mathematical Methodology, “I believe that making clear the algorithmic nature of problems can help students understand what’s going on, and more importantly, they will be able to solve new problems more effectively.”
Deutschland unsicher im Netz: Reloaded “Deutschland auch 2006 weiterhin unsicher im Netz”. Wer hätte was anders erwartet.
2006 Darwin Awards, “Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”
Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!), by Ryan Tomayko. It’s against the web, but such a nice idea. :-)
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!
— Auld Lang Syne
23c3 Videos, a few are on Google Video. Yum!
RESTful Web Services, “An introduction to building Web Services without tears (i.e., without SOAP or WSDL)”, very good talk by John Cowan.
Dinner For One: Part 1, Part 2, ein must-have an jedem Silvester.
30dec2006
Martus is a secure information management tool that allows you to create a searchable and encrypted database and back this data up remotely to your choice of publicly available servers. The Martus software is used by organizations around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses.
Mixing Memory: Coolest… Experiment… Ever, that’s a really good one.
Geschichte der Bluttransfusion, sehr geil: “Laut preußischer sanitärer Dienstvorschrift von 1870/71 sollte einem Lamm die Carotis freigelegt und mit Kanülen versehen werden. Ein Soldat musste das so vorbereitete Tier auf den Tornister geschnallt—als lebende Blutkonserve—in die Schlacht tragen!”
Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq, that was a bad idea.
Ulmer Statistik, einige interessante Fakten.
Ach komm
Oh komm
Komm mit
Ins Wasser
Weil du
Und Sex
Und Wasser
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im Wasser liebst
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im Wasser liebst
— DAF, Sex unter Wasser
“Commercial” is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS), David A. Wheeler says, and he’s right.
A Fine Time, Oh Yes!, the year in Ruby, summarized by _why and lots of other rubyists. Very neat.
rcodetools: TDD/BDD++, automagic assertions, 100% accurate completion, doc/code browsing…, Mauricio Fernandez gives us a bootload of new tools.
With love we sleep
with doubt the vicious circle
turn and burns
without you I cannot live
forgive, the yearning burning
— Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, Because The Night
Patti Smith, Happy 60th Birthday.
svnsync is a tool for creating and maintaining read-only mirrors of subversion repositories. It works by replaying commits that occurred in one repository and committing it into another.
29dec2006
15K people per hour, by transport mode, “From Vuchic’s Transportation for Livable Cities, what does it take to move 15,000 people/hour using different modes of transport.”
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is an American political neo-conservative think tank, based in Washington, DC co-founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The group was established in early 1997 as a non-profit organization with the goal of promoting American global leadership.
sipsak is a small command line tool for developers and administrators of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) applications. It can be used for some simple tests on SIP applications and devices.
One last thing before I shuffle off the planet
I will be the one to make you crawl
so I came down to wish you an unhappy birthday
someone call the ambulance there’s gonna be an accident
— Placebo, Infra-Red
Java 7.0 language feature considered harmful, that’s the most tasteless feature I ever saw. :-P
Lighttpd powers 5 Alexa Top 250 sites, nice.
A Semantic Solution for Presenting NSFW Content, by PJ Doland and Jack Shedd. An interesting problem. SFW.
How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won’t say, “In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. WJW.
GMail Disaster, Google confirmed the Mass Email Deletions. Even back up gone?, Hari K. Gottipati wonders. Looks like only 60 people are affected. Hardly a “disaster”. And yes, I POP my mails daily.
Why PUT and DELETE?, a Conversation with Elliotte Rusty Harold. REST 101.
The Siphoning Splat, _why says: “The splat is such a wildly devious little asterisk.”
2006: The Year in Construction, awesome shots.
The grass is high, it could use a trim
But it s so hot and dry
It might just turn brown and burn
— Dan Bern, Grownups
Going behind that door, enter Downing Street 10 online.
Hung Over, Damien Katz feels worse than I do. And a nice pun in the comments.
Identifying Hierarchical Structure in Sequences: A linear-time algorithm, by Craig G. Nevill-Manning and Ian H. Witten. “Sequitur is an algorithm that infers a hierarchical structure from a sequence of discrete symbols by replacing repeated phrases with a grammatical rule that generates the phrase, and continuing this process recursively. The result is a hierarchical representation of the original sequence, which offers insights into its lexical structure.”
28dec2006
multi touch console, ein Project der c-base, Raumstation unter Berlin Mitte.
2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist, WTF cares for Paris Hilton?
etherrape is a microcontroller board with Ethernet, featuring TCP/IP in 2kb of RAM.
Hot or Not: Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew, by Steven J. Murdoch. Nifty, nifty.
Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were fin’lly delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
But where are you tonight, sweet Marie?
— Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie
Garbage Island, “In Japan, Tokyo Bay, there are being made large artifical islands with airports and skyscrapers on them…”
A New Approach To Debugging, an omniscient debugger based on valgrind for Mozilla development. Wow.
Predictions for 2007, by Scrymarch. “Here, then, is a fresh chance for you, the reader, to survey our litany of prognosticationary errors and compound them with your own up to the minute misreadings of the zeitgeist.”
How To Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Ruby, by Elizabeth Wiethoff.
10 reasons I won’t make you a website, bad luck with Aria. :-)
But in the space of everything is time
And there may be too much empty space to hold
And maybe we will dwindle on forever
There may be too much black for it to catch
— Dan Bern, Trust
ruby-trunk as Mercurial mirror. Unfortunately, without any history.
Update on the documentation project, rather sad the caboosers can’t find a documentation author, given all the money they collected.
Tying Knots Generically, circular datastructures with help of recursive combinators.
27dec2006
Strong earthquake strikes off the coast of Taiwan, “The Internet Storm Center is reporting a 100% packet loss on certain routers. A sample ping test from Singapore to Wikinews came up with a 380 millisecond average round trip at 50% packet loss.”
SCCS is an implementation of the POSIX standard Source Code Control System. Gaaanz toll, Jörg!
Edo-period illustrations by Kurimoto Tanshuu, squids and other watery wildlife.
Set honor in one eye and death i’ the other
And I will look on both indifferently;
For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honor more than I fear death
— William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Julius Caesar
How To: Disable Your Passport’s RFID Chip, very useful to know.
Google Maps adds India, wow.
Blending an iPod, WJW.
When the doors of the earth slam shut, “Imagine if plate tectonics stopped tomorrow.”
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials, lots of interesting stuff.
Love American Style: Web 2.0 And Narcissism, “What he’s getting at is that this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self—a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.”
But then we’d have to rush back
To the town’s best baker
To get the first bread of the morning
There’s more to life than this
— Björk, There’s More To Life Than This
The best Christmas present, Edd Dumbill got twins!
Holy Bible 14, _why is back, he even has The Best Things!
Fortran 2007 Anyone?, Patrick Logan ponders. “I think the 2007 language breakthroughs are still clouded. On the other hand its very post-modern. They won’t be neat breakthroughs.”
26dec2006
We Got Giftbombed, _why unwrapped the Ruby gifts of this year.
The Umasphere, a new ruby-flavoured blog by Uma Geller.
On the palm of your hand, from the tip of your tongue
To the curve of your back I want to
Press my lips on your skin, that’s what I wanna do
Keep dreaming about places to kiss you
— Boris, Places To Kiss You
Scrooge and intellectual property rights, “A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations”, Joseph E. Stiglitz says.
Suutei Tsai, is tea with milk and salt. Umm… eech?
Mom offers $250 and a blowjob for a Wii, WJW. NSFW.
Black rose, be my light in the darkest of days
Be my heart in the darkest of nights
Be my heart
— Converge, Grim Heart/Black Rose
Why I Never Pay For “AAA” Batteries, ever seen a 9V-block from the inside?
25dec2006
Ikea instructions for making Dick in the Box, PNSFW.
tuProlog is a Java-based light-weight Prolog for Internet applications and infrastructures. For this purpose, tuProlog is designed to be easily deployable, minimal, and configurable.
The Hindley-Milner Algorithm, implemented in Perl5 by Nikita Borisov.
You know that I’ll be waiting
To hear your footsteps saying
That you’ll be coming home for Christmas
— Kate Bush, Home For Christmas
10 Best Self Made Christmas Trees, neato.
James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured “Godfather of Soul,” whose revolutionary rhythms, rough voice and flashing footwork influenced generations of musicians from rock to rap, died early Christmas morning. He was 73.
BLDGBLOG Redesigns…, “BLDGBLOG got a much-needed facelift today. It’s now sporting three columns; it’s got more links, divided up into better and more accurate sub-headings; the gigantic “previous posts” list is back, allowing you to read everything that’s ever been written here (broken up by month); the fonts and colors are slightly different; and there’s a bit more room for ads (hint-hint).” Well done!
arXiv Policy Statement?, John Baez got a very good question.
And I stopped taking dope
and I quit drinking whiskey
and my old man plays the trombone
and works out at the track.
— Tom Waits, Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis
The economic value of user contributions to Internet sites, by Andy Oram. “User contributions may help to bulk up every business that depends on information, but they also force the painful exercise of new muscles.”
Wii-diculous (YouTube), Playing the Wii in a Movie Theater. Whoo.
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so. — Bertrand Russell
The Blasphemy Challenge, by Eloquence. “So far over 350 people have been willing to exchange their soul for a free DVD. Some of these videos are quite clever, though most simply contain the plain catchphrase, “I deny the holy spirit.””
24dec2006
Merry Christmas! (Or what ever you happen to celebrate.)
Stille Nacht phonetic version, created by Frank Petersohn. Lovely! Sing with us.
Stille Nacht! Heil’ge Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hoch heilige Paar.
Holder Knab’ im lockigen Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
— Joseph Mohr, Stille Nacht
Prosthaphaeresis was an algorithm used in the late 16th century and early 17th century for approximating products using formulas from trigonometry. For the 25 years preceding the invention of the logarithm in 1614, it was the only known generally-applicable way of approximating products quickly.
GF(2**32-5) is a finite field, I need to polish my discrete maths.
Doing some n-gram analysis over Ruby’s docs, Maurico’s search engine gets faster and faster.
Teppich & Co., “Es ist immer wieder amüsant, wie Informatiker und andere Leute diverse Sonderzeichen und Tasten nennen. Eine nicht mehr ganz so kleine Sammlung…”
Flowers for Seymour, “Seymour Papert was involved in a bad accident that happened in Vietnam. He is now recovering slowly and Infobourg, an education news website, invites you to participate in the creation of the largest virtual bunch of flowers to support him and his family.” Great idea.
Bugle is a collection of search queries which can help to identify software security bugs in source code available on the web. Yum.
Gravity-Defying Page Corners, by Dan Cederholm. A nice trick and a great poem.
Liebknecht-Luxemburg-Demo, am 14. Januar 2007: “Das Geschäft gedeiht auf Trümmern. Städte werden zu Schutthaufen, Dörfer zu Friedhöfen, Länder zu Wüsteneien, Bevölkerungen zu Bettlerhaufen, Kirchen zu Pferdeställen; Völkerrecht, Staatsverträge, Bündnisse, heiligste Worte, höchste Autorität in Fetzen zerrissen; … Elend und Verzweiflung überall.”
So here it is merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun
— Slade, Merry Xmas Everybody
Tag um Tag, ein Weblog der nächstes Jahr täglich Texte KD Diedrichs veröffentlicht. “Dieses abschnittsweise Vorgehen kommt dem Kompositionsprinzip Diedrichs entgegen, der sein Leben nicht fortlaufend-chronologisch erzählt, sondern dem Prinzip der Collage folgt.”
Using Types to Parse Natural Language, by Mark P. Jones, Paul Hudak, and Sebastian Shaumyan. “We describe a natural language parser that uses type information to determine the grammatical structure of simple sentences and phrases.”
Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen, or at least good ink.
23dec2006
Der Enzensberger-Stern, gefunden beim Schockwellenreiter.
More A than R: reconsidering the “new” AR object, David A. Black on ActiveRecord constructors.
The Joins Concurrency Library, by Claudio Russo. “With Generics available in C# 2.0, we can now provide join patterns as a library rather than a language feature. The Joins library extends its clients with an embedded, type-safe and mostly declarative language for expressing synchronization patterns.” Wow.
Mutter kriegt Toilettenseife,
die sie zum Toilettenwaschen braucht.
Vater kriegt eine neue Pfeife,
weil er schon seit Jahren nicht mehr raucht.
Ja Weihnachten ist eine schöne Zeit.
— Georg Kreisler, Weihnachten ist eine schöne Zeit
Ozzy Osbourne Wanted a Bar at Rehab, very bright.
The Cocotron is an open source project which implements an Objective-C API very similar to that described by Apple Computer’s Foundation and AppKit framework documentation. It runs on Windows!
A Mathematician’s Apology (PDF), public domain e-text by G. H. Hardy.
How to do Research At the MIT AI Lab, by a whole bunch of current, former, and honorary MIT AI Lab graduate students. Contains useful hints for everyone.
Unplanned Freefall?, some survival tips by David Carkeet.
Cheating Color, by Jason Santa Maria. Very nice trick I noticed myself already.
Hey, ein neues frohes Fest.
Keine Angst, es wird vorübergehen.
Hey, ein neues frohes Fest.
Nur Mut, wir werden es durchstehn.
— Die Roten Rosen, Frohes Fest
Iran Holocaust Conference: Duping the Credulous?, by cDiss. “The conference attracted a predictably controversial group of attendees, including former Klu Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, French ex-lecturer and Holocaust revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson, and Adelaide Institute founder Fredrick Toben.”
Jon Udell got a new blog.
22dec2006
Matrix URIs, “Just as the slash separated set of elements is useful for representing a tree, so a set of names and equally significant parameter can represent a space more like a (possible sparse) matrix.”
Decoding URI-escaped characters… with sed, neat hack by Aristotle Pagaltzis.
Are long names slower to parse in XML?, by Rick Jelliffe. Micro-optimization hooray.
(Here’s to you) raise a glass for everyone
(Here’s to them) underneath that burning sun
Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?
— Band Aid, Do They Know Its Christmas Time?
Photographic Palettes, by Dave Shea. “How many times have you seen a colour combination that just worked, a match so perfect that it just seems obvious?”
Architectural Sci-Fi, “it’s part boatyard, part aeroponic farm for the cultivation of ‘disease free cloned plants.’”
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew,
Tangled up in blue.
— Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue
130 Vorträge, 20 Workshops: Der Chaos Computer Club lädt nach Berlin, ich schaffs nicht. “Die Keynote hält dieses Jahr John Perry Barlow. Ursprünglich als Musiker in der berühmten Band “Grateful Dead” bekannt geworden, hat Barlow sich als Mitbegründer der EFF in der Netzwelt einen Namen gemacht.”
Fuzzy Auroras, Why The Lucky Stiff is going to become a freelance professor (at an unaccredited school called The University of Mininova).
Lectures on Classical Mechanics, by John Baez, Blair Smith, and Derek Wise. Available in PDF and Postscript formats.
Mary was only a virgin…, I really gotta get that t-shirt! PNSFW.
21dec2006
Real world Nitro example, George made parts of cull.gr public.
Comparing Approaches to Generic Programming in Haskell, by Ralf Hinze, Johan Jeuring, and Andres Löh. Generic Programming is the template engines of Haskell.
Ruby is Off CVS, anonymous access is not yet available.
Using Java Classes in Perl, by Andrew Hanenkamp. The best of two evils?
Don’t know what you’re doing, don’t really care
School’s just a miss-hit going nowhere
You’re running for your life while the scandals
are burning the stairs
There’s a fire in the western world
— Dead Moon, Fire In The Western World
Tools of Change for Publishing is going to be held in San Jose, June 18–20, and the call for participation is now available. We’re looking for proposals on all facets of technology and change in publishing, with a particular emphasis on promising new ideas. Sounds exciting.
A Theory of Compatible Versions, by David Orchard. “Making versioning work in practice is a difficult problem in computing.”
99 problems in Perl 6, enjoy and help solve more of them!
Considering Closures for Java, a Conversation with Neal Gafter.
Ocsigen is an OCaml programming framework providing a new way to create dynamic web sites.
The Dumbest Deaths in Recorded History, WJW.
Technical Overview of CouchDb. “This overview is intended to give a high-level introduction of key models and components of CouchDb, how they work individually and how they fit together.”
1000 patches!, kudos to the Yhc people.
Research Blogging, by Clifford V. Johnson. “Some time ago I spoke about the idea of using blogging as a sharper tool for exchanging and even developing research ideas.”
An ashen fingerprint melts into the sea
And we’re doing fine now yeah we do
We don’t feel sad or bad or blue and you know
We ain’t never defeated
— Beth Orton, Daybreaker
Advanced Chess is a relatively new form of chess, first introduced by grandmaster Garry Kasparov, with the objective of a human player and a computer chess program playing as a team against other such pairs.
Representational State Transfer (REST), talk by Erik Wilde.
20dec2006
Wau Holland hätte heute 55. Geburtstag.
A Millwall brick is an improvised weapon made of a manipulated newspaper. Damn useful.
Imponderables, Derek Abbott. Sapere aude.
Baby is sent through X-ray machine at LAX, WJW.
The crisis of unspecified specificity, “Photographer Frank van der Salm beautifully captures architecture on the edge of surreality: uninhabited and lit from within, it’s a world before its people arrive – or half a second after they’ve left.”
You go, you saw the wave
And you go, you’re stuck in the land
You go, too many are yours
You go, you saw the wave
— Mates of State, Lower
Parabola, by Steve Yegge. Very nice.
Intricate Fluid Layouts in Three Easy Steps, by Nate Koechley. A YUI Grid tutorial, nice. I fought with it a bit recently.
10 Years of CSS, “In 2006, the World Wide Web Consortium proudly celebrates the ten years of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the technology designers use to create attractive, economical, and flexible Web sites.” Time to finally implement it?
Galileo told us, this world is not the center of the universe
The sun don’t go around us
We go around the sun
And the sun is actually really very small
— Dan Bern, Comme Vous Le Faites Tous
Book Review: SQL Hacks, by Andrew Cumming and Gordon Russell. Reviewed by Cameron Laird. Isn’t every SQL book about hacks? ;)
Evaluating cellular automata is comonadic, “[W]henever you see large datastructures pieced together from lots of small but similar computations there’s a good chance that we’re dealing with a comonad.”
19dec2006
Red light debut for exotic ‘metamaterial’, Jeff Hecht says: “The race to build an exotic material with a negative refractive index for visible light has been won by a team of researchers in Germany.”
The gift right out, about the paradoxical “deadweight loss of Christmas”.
Ask a Paedophile, by floridasun. “No, the subject is not a catch-line. I really mean it.”
A system is composed of components; a component is something you understand. — Howard Aiken
Teaching Discrete Mathematics via Primary Historical Sources, an interesting approach.
Leaving empty space behind, have a look at these photos. I was amazed when I saw what they really were.
Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique, by Marc van den Dobbelsteen at A List Apart. “[W]hy don’t we just define layout and appearance for a series of screen-width ranges, then find a way to match these layouts with the user’s viewport size?” Fantastic idea!
Then I’ll stop my dreaming
I don’t do too much scheming these days
These days
These days I sit on corner stores
And count the time in quarter tones to ten
Please don’t confront me with my failures
‘Cause I have not forgotten them
— Jackson Browne, These Days
Making Compact Forms More Accessible, by Mike Brittain at A List Apart. “Tightly designed forms can look great on paper, but they often ignore accessibility issues altogether.”
Rails Rubyisms Advent, 2539 days of
ActiveTrickery. By Chris Wanstrath.
Google Deprecates Their SOAP Search API, let SOAP die.
Everybody go pillow fighting, “The first rule of Pillow Fight Club? Tell everyone.”
Baby put your best dress on
You know the one I mean
The one you wore on the beach
The day the sky turned green
— Dan Bern, Dress
A Force from Empty Space: The Casimir Effect, “This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever.” Scientific support for transpantheism!
Demonstrating the Consequences of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerabilities, by Nitesh Dhanjani. “BeEF is the browser exploitation framework. Its purposes in life is to provide an easily integratable framework to demonstrate the impact of browser and cross-site scripting (XSS) issues in real-time.” Oy.
The supershape equation is an extension of the both the equation of the sphere and ellipse. Very nice shapes.
18dec2006
Prozessorkühler als Drogen-Versteck, sehr geil.
ZFS File System Makes it to Mac OS X Leopard, it seems. Time to get a new Mac…!
Topology and Verb Classes, “The topologist René Thom in Topologie et linguistique (1970) proposed that the small number of elementary sentence types corresponds to the small number of topological structures underlying events in the exterior world.” Huh.
Trippin’ down that old Hippie Highway
Got to thinkin’ ‘bout you again
Wonderin’ how it really was for you
And how it happened in the end
But I guess I’ll never know the truth
If you were really all alone
— Neil Young, Roger And Out
FreeImage is an Open Source library project for developers who would like to support popular graphics image formats like PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and others as needed by today’s multimedia applications.
I take it all back! Send me your money!, Steve Yegge is still alive.
Blood Red and the Cadaver, by mybostinks. PNSFW.
Boost Your Hyperlink Power, by Jeremy Keith. For those that never heard of rev= or rel=.
Grand Canyon’s Glass Walkway to Open Next March, WJW.
Lots of love just keep it comin’
Making something out of nothin’
These are the best that I
I don’t know how to say
— Red Hot Chili Peppers, Death Of A Martian
Tech t-shirts aren’t sexy enough, Kathy Sierra complains. “You’d think–just once–they’d give me a show shirt that didn’t hide the fact that I have, say, breasts.”
Every LEGO instruction, now if the page would include the missing pieces…
17dec2006
Rich Prosecco in a can, … simply mind-blowing! WJW.
BadVista.org, FSF launches campaign against Microsoft Vista. “The campaign will organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users’ rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense.”
But you, you’re not allowed
You’re uninvited
An unfortunate slight
— Alanis Morissette, Uninvited
Happy Birthday, Common Lisp Directory, it turns one year and never needed to be restarted.
An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming, by Tony Hoare. A true classic.
The Invent-a-Micronation Contest: Results, exciting.
Heaven knows if there’s a ceiling
Come so low with the kneeling
Please know that I got all the friends I’m needing
Before my light go out
As the doors are closing now
— Pearl Jam, Parachutes
Accountant Wanted, Patrick Logan is shocked because Balmer doesn’t know how much money Vista cost. Rightly so.
Why they deny the Holocaust, “On top of nearly constant anti-Semitic propaganda, much of the Muslim world hasn’t even heard of it.” I find that hard to believe, but possible.
Dinge, die man einfach nicht mehr macht…, als Webdesigner.
16dec2006
The 10 most dangerous play things of all time, enjoy.
Food, fuel and land, by Sgt York. “OK, let’s just admit something to ourselves. The use of corn-derived ethanol as a fuel source is non-feasible. The use of soy biodiesel is also non-feasible.”
Luca Cardelli has lots of great slides about OO calculi, pi-calculus and membrane systems online.
Attempto Controlled English is a controlled natural language, i.e. a rich subset of standard English designed to serve as specification and knowledge representation language. ACE allows users to express professional texts precisely, and in the terms of their respective application domain.
It’s a long way down
On this roller coaster
The last chance streetcar
Went off the track
And you’re on it
— Alanis Morissette, Mary Jane
The Banach-Tarski paradox, “A ball can be decomposed and reassembled into two balls the same size as the original.”
Man with no pulse considered a medical breakthrough, “The new mechanical heart, which is powered by batteries located in pouches on Mr. Langevin’s body, provides a continuous flow of blood so the patient has no pulse.”
Does it take much of a man to see his whole life go down,
To look up on the world from a hole in the ground,
To wait for your future like a horse that’s gone lame,
To lie in the gutter and die with no name?
— Bob Dylan, Only a Hobo
Higher-order abstract syntax, by Frank Pfenning and Conal Elliott. “Higher-order abstract syntax incorporates name binding information in a uniform and language generic way.”
15dec2006
Find them, test your eyes.
XRuby is an open source Ruby compiler which compiles Ruby source code (.rb) to Java bytecode (.class).
Free Ryzom!, “We want to purchase the source code, game data, and artwork, so that we can further develop it by placing it under a Free Software license. Once this is accomplished we would reopen the universe of Ryzom to players and have it function and further developed under democratic controlled basis.”
Happy 40th Anniversary of Walt Disney’s Death! No Mouse for You. chromatic has a good question.
rpm.org, “We’re relaunching rpm.org, with a new direction for future development of RPM.” That doesn’t sound very apt. *chuckle*
InteLib is a library of C++ classes which lets you do Lisp programming within your C++ program even without any additional preprocessing. WJW.
Seasons changing round here
You can smell it in the air
Remember that I’m coming
Coming back for you
When you get restless around here
— Dan Bern, Restless
Tinky Winky Damn Near Kills Me, by Uncle AngryHands. “As a Christian, I feel that role modeling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children.”
The dspl (Display List) Korn Shell Script, by Gary Powell. You can’t imagine the fun I have reading such things in 2006.
Fake real-time blog from XML 2006: day one, by Rick Jelliffe. Apparently not too many slides online.
The Google PageRank Algorithm in 126 Lines of Python, by Vincent Kräutler. Neato.
Is Your Database Under Version Control?, a very good question. Which database? ;-)
Iranian Typography Now, breathtaking.
Platform Studies investigates the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. “Forthcoming in 2008: Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost.” Yum.
Five seconds is a very very very long time
Much longer than you think
‘Specially if people want to kill you
Like if you re a chinchilla or a mink
I will promise publicly to undress
If you will ask these questions of the waitress
— Dan Bern, Questions For The Waitress
Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited, by Bill Walton and Curt Hibbs. The last edition was from two years ago, wow.
The Century Giant Lamp Tower, ouch.
A Message To You, Rudy: CSS Production Notes, by Andy Clarke. “In the absence of notes or conversation elements in XHTML you need to make an XHTML compound that will effectively add meaning to the conversation between designers and developers.”
The year in errors, annual fun.
14dec2006
I remember Leslie Harpold, my eulogy.
My Little Cthulhu, looovely!
Mauritian Sunset, by Sandy Smith. Walls of computers and monitors.
Semantic Wikis and Disaster Relief Operations, by Soenke Ziesche. “In this article, I’ll first propose using wikis to share information faster and more easily during emergencies, and secondly, I’ll introduce a way to enhance them semantically.”
Non-standard positional numeral systems on Wikipedia.
Google Patent Search, search over 7 million patents.
Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture, “The Customer is Always Right” and “I don’t give respect freely. You have to earn my respect.”
Low temperature SEM magnification series for a snow crystal, nice for xmas.
RedNails is a Ruby data scraping library that uses templates to determine what data to extract from actual data feeds.
Thank you India
Thank you terror
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you frailty
Thank you consequence
Thank you thank you silence
— Alanis Morissette, Thank U
A Slip of the Tongue: Israeli Nukes?, by 1419. News at 11?
Yhc.Core.Html, the YHC people really produce nice stuff.
By indirections, “a series of Texas highways traversing allegorical landscapes”.
Why isn’t ListT [] a monad?, a detailed but understandable analysis.
13dec2006
The Four Pillars of CouchDb, according to Damien Katz.
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication features an open-access archive. Enjoy.
Mountain Dew soda can Christmas tree, WJW.
My Final Prediction, by Bruce Sterling. “The future of the Internet lies not with institutions but with individuals.”
Doomsday: FAZ weiht Menschheit dem Untergang, denn sie verwendet ab 1.1. auch die neue Rechtschreibung. Wer sich darüber noch aufregen kann, hats nicht besser verdient.
If I could tear you from the ceiling
I’d freeze us both in time
And find a brand new way of seeing
Your eyes forever glued to mine.
— Placebo, Blind
Battery Expansion, see James Duncan Davidson’s battery blow up literally.
Object Debugger for DrScheme, it draws UML sequence diagrams!
Communicating Thoughts on the Web, and MathML for mathematicans.
Using metrics for contract variation, by Rick Jelliffe says: “The client thought format and document processing was not exceptional while the developers said the format and processing were more tricky than contracted for, and wanted a contract variation.”
Fault massage, “A few days ago, Swiss engineers “halted an experiment to extract geothermal heat from deep below ground after it set off a small earthquake in the nearby city of Basel.””
Out of the womb and into the void
I wanna try but I get annoyed
Can’t you see these skies are breaking?
cause I’m out of the womb and into the void
— Placebo, One Of A Kind
Google’s own cornershop, discovered by Zach Beane. I wonder how Google will like everyone using it.
Algorithms for calculating variance on Wikipedia.
12dec2006
HoHoHo!, 113 10x10 greyscale icons in .gif format to fill up your stocking with. Too bad there is no cake. Why does no-one do a cake?
The Only Flowchart You’ll Ever Need, it’s so easy!
37signals redesigned their front page, but their new typeface looks a bit too Microsoftish for some reason IMHO…
It’s in the water baby, it’s in the pills that bring you down
It’s in the water baby, it’s in your bag of golden brown
It’s in the water baby, it’s in your frequency
It’s in the water baby, it’s between you and me
— Placebo, Post Blue
VLC 0.8.6 has been released and now supports WMV9 out of the box. Whee.
Digital Mozart Edition, the purpose of this web site operated by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use. Very nice.
L-99: Ninety-Nine Lisp Problems, useful for learning other languages too, e.g. Haskell.
Mylar is a task-focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Looks pretty useful.
Little Premature Xmas Card, “It’s a little premature, but Happy Christmas.” WJW.
CPAN Module Review: XML::Atom, by chromatic. What’s there for Ruby?
Geocaching: Hiking for Geeks, by GhostOfTiber. “From its humble beginings, geocaching has grown into a sport enjoyed internationally and spun off a select few games of its own.”
Haskell in Leipzig, Folien sind online.
Phooey is a functional UI library for Haskell. Phooey (“Phunctional ooser ynterfaces”) retains the functional style, in which outputs are expressed in terms of inputs. In addition, Phooey supports dynamic input bounds, flexible layout, and mutually-referential widgets.
Running your tests automatically with autotest + wmii, emacs and ratpoison, mfp helps you further tuning your environment.
ComicVine is a social encyclopedia for comic book lovers that everyone can edit.
Compose to a Vertical Rhythm, by Richard Rutter. Yay for better web typography.
I wish that I could light the path
That leads to a life of no mistakes
Hold you from the damned be done
That living out of safety seems to take
— Dead Moon, It’s O.K.
Wounded architectures shine, awesome: “[T]he shells of old buildings, damaged by war, become chandeliers”.
Quick list 6 at BLDGBLOG, featuring ambient music and big urbanism.
11dec2006
Resumable exceptions in plain OCaml, by Oleg Kiselyov. “We show a conservative and elementary implementation of resumable exceptions in OCaml: the implementation is a self-contained 100% pure OCaml library; makes no changes to the OCaml system; supports the existing style of defining exceptions; is compatible with the ordinary exceptions; works in byte- or natively-compiled code; uses the most basic facilities of ML and so can easily be translated to SML.”
5, 4, 3… oh wei, Lydia hat den mir ersten bekannten Fall von vergangenem Identitätsdiebstahl. Sachen gibts.
Dynamic Language Support on the JVM, a Conversation with Danny Coward. “According to Danny Coward, Sun’s Java SE platform lead, scripting language support is merely the first step in turning the JVM into the best possible execution platform for any dynamic language.” Ya think?
I gazed down in the river’s mirror
And watched its winding strum.
The water smooth ran like a hymn
And like a harp did hum.
— Bob Dylan, Lay Down Your Weary Tune
Making a Southwestern Burrito from Scratch, by mybostinks. “Dedicated to people who live where they have no kitchen and in particular nostalgiphile.”
Fun with UNICODE and Mirroring Character, Unicode doesn’t stop amazing me.
Code v2 launches, Lawrence Lessigs booki went to print.
20 Days Without a PC, difficult, no?
There’s a point of no return
Where we never seem to learn
We can’t have all we wanted
Oh, you can see it in our eyes
— Dead Moon, My Escape
Amazing flame fractals take your breath away, wow.
YubNub for Programming Language Research, a bunch of handy shortcuts.
Map of the Internet, the IPv4 space in 2006. Lovely.
10dec2006
Grisbi is a personnal accounting application running under GNU/Linux and Windows, released under the GPL licence.
Drop City was a community that formed in the hills of southern Colorado in the late 1960’s, which become a sort of icon of the rural 1960’s communal living that seemed to be blooming at that time. Singled out by the media as exemplary, Drop City was known for its dome-style of architecture, which combined the principles and methods of Buckminister Fuller with inexpensive, found materials, such as sheet metal hacked off of junked car roofs.
Silently Discarding Information?, Curtis Poe and the call for a numeric tower.
Have you ever seen the light?
Don’t you wonder where I hide
I will live, then I will die
I will keep you on my mind
— The Subways, Oh Yeah
Adobe MARS: Looks Interesting, Eliot Kimber says: “MARS is an XML-based format that is intended as a functional replacement for PDF. It’s not really accurate to call it an XML version of PDF because it’s not a simple transliteration of PDF into tags (which could be done easily enough) but a ground-up exercise in designing and XML-based scheme for doing what PDF does.” What happened to XPS, btw?
Computer Science Logo Style, a three-volume series intended mainly for teenagers and their teachers, or for adults who aren’t professional programmers. Full text online.
The Missing Piece meets the Big O. About imperfectness and satisfaction. Must see, really.
Chile’s Gen Pinochet dies at 91, Chile’s former military leader Augusto Pinochet has died at the age of 91.
The Genius is in the Details, Aaron Swartz says: “The smartest people I know disdain abstractions, preferring to speak in concrete specifics.”
We were caught by the light
Held on to the day till it became ours
The minutes went by, the cab is outside
There’s no time to take
— Feist, One Evening
Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, and no mention of Anarchaia! ;-P Good list, though.
Evolving Logo, the Max Plank Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics simply rocks: “[E]verytime the logo is displayed on a website as an animated icon or printed out on a letter, it reflects the current state of the lab as a living organism.”
FAUST is a compiled language for real-time audio signal processing. Its programming model combines two approaches: functional programming and block diagram composition. You can think of FAUST as a structured block diagram language with a textual syntax.
Indexed, a lovely and highly recommended blog where every post fits on an index card. Must read.
09dec2006
Rubinius Interview, Pat Eyler interviewed Evan Phoenix.
Proofs and Types, by Jean-Yves Girard, Yves Lafont and Paul Taylor. Full text available online.
Retired from security@php.net, “I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile.”
The most powerfull gun of all times, WJW.
Can you explain to me now
if you’re stable, whilst
I think you know the truth
there’s a hole in the earth, I’m out
— Deftones, Hole In The Earth
Thinking Out Loud: A Cold Night For Cryptoviral Extortion, by Justin Troutman. “[W]hat I ended up with is a structure that uses a symmetric block cipher and block cipher-based MAC, to satisfy confidentiality and integrity requirements, while sending the keys in—yes, you’re reading correctly—plaintext.”
Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, von Wolf Biermann.
Wir wollen auf Erden glücklich sein,
Und wollen nicht mehr darben;
Verschlemmen soll nicht der faule Bauch,
Was fleißige Hände erwarben.
— Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen
Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, von Heinrich Heine.
Wikis and weblogs for RESTful web services, Pipejects and Plugjects soon come to a server near you…
Marking Up a Tag Cloud, by Mark Norman Francis. “The problem is, everyone’s doing it wrong.”
The Invent-a-Micronation Contest Continues, “There is still one more week to invent your own micronation – and win a free copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations in the process.”
08dec2006
Celebrate CC globally and virtually, Creative Commons’ 4th Birthday Party is on December 15th.
Make your data behave, DabbleDb gains virtual fields. Pretty neat.
Chromaphonoglyphics (CPG) was created by Richard Brodie, a retired computer programmer now involved in translating Middle English poetry. His goal has been to create a writing system that combines the strong points of both Eastern logographic and Western phonetic language representation paradigms. WJW.
MIT technology expert in coma after Hanoi traffic accident, Seymour Papert was severely injured in a traffic accident and remains in a coma, doctors and colleagues said Thursday.
If tonight was a painting
I guess it d be Picasso
‘Specially that period
When all he used was blue
— Dan Bern, Play The Blues
eskimo: experimenting with skeletons in the shared address model , by M. Aldinucci, 2003. “Based on some simple extensions to C, the library allows to work on large distributed structures following compositional functional semantics.”
Common Lisp turns 12, happy birthday.
A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft(!).
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, “American space agency NASA announced plans to put a permanent space station on the moon as part of an eventual mission to Mars. Not to be outdone, China and India have announced ‘lunar intentions’.”
Quilted Quagmire, a cool puzzle.
PeepCode Screencasts Places a $1,000 Bet on Rubinius, I can’t wait for it!
ASM is a Java bytecode manipulation framework. It can be used to dynamically generate stub classes or other proxy classes, directly in binary form, or to dynamically modify classes at load time, i.e., just before they are loaded into the Java Virtual Machine.
Wheels: On Division by Zero, by Jesper Carlström. “We show how to extend any commutative ring (or semiring) so that division by any element, including 0, is in a sense possible. The resulting structure is what is called a wheel.”
For most people, the definition of smart is “Thinks exactly like me but even more so.” — Scott Adams, Acting Smarter Than You Are
My Personal Pet Peeves I See in Other Peoples Code, generally good points.
REST for toddlers, a lovely explanation by Mark Pilgrim.
Winterbells, a very xmasish (but neat!) Flash game by Ferry Halim.
07dec2006
Tetration is iterated exponentiation, the first hyper operator after exponentiation.
Dear XP (YouTube), a song about Extreme Programming.
Google Interview Puzzle: 2 Egg Problem, grind grind.
Flurb, A Webzine of Astonishing Tales.
Fallen Astronaut is an 8.5cm aluminum sculpture of an astronaut in a spacesuit. It is the only piece of art on the Moon. Never heard of it, but a cool idea.
In the city of models
Strip shows and one night stands
City of models
City of perfect tans
— Dan Bern, City Of Models
River Visions of a Midwestern Manhattan, wow.
XQuery, XSLT, and OmniMark: Mixed Content Processing, by Alexander Boldakov, Maxim Grinev, and Kirill Lisovsky. I wonder why I never heard of OmniMark before.
Magritte, Meta-Described Web Application Development for Squeak.
Ten Verses Never Preached On, also featuring god scat.
You could argue that everything would be exactly the same
I can t prove I m right and neither can you
But if one kind heart leads to another kind heart
What do you think one greedy heart can do?
— Dan Bern, If The Dodger’s Had Stayed In Brooklyn
New Light Particle(s) Discovered?, meet the axion.
Olympic instability, “If you imagine overlapping lollypop sticks so that they interlock to form a star shape, then you get the idea for how we started to think about the venue.”
06dec2006
PostgreSQL 8.2.0 is released.
Wordie, Like Flickr, but without the photos. “Wordie lets you make lists of words – practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever.” Sounds fantastic for project names.
DNA Alignment Algorithms in Haskell.
Wii Damage, what a dangerous toy! ;-)
PVS is a verification system: that is, a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. It is intended to capture the state-of-the-art in mechanized formal methods and to be sufficiently rugged that it can be used for significant applications. Now GPL.
Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, my baby shot me down…
— Nancy Sinatra, Bang Bang
WYMeditor is a web-based WYSIWYM editor. WYMeditor’s main concept is to leave details of the document’s visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible (at least as WYSIWYG editors).
Cross-referencing facility for SBCL, very useful.
Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use. The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Lovely.
Now he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
— Bob Dylan, License To Kill
The Contest, by Psycho Dave. “Mostly, we were just marking time until this crappy MTV soap opera called Undressed that Jess was obsessed with came on. The whipped cream bikini contest faded to commercial and that’s when Jess suddenly blurted out, “Dammit! I need some pussy!””
Book Review: Ruby Cookbook, reviewed by Cameron Laird. “RC simply gives a lot of value.”
Kill Java, Patrick Logan says: “Some people apparently want to kill Java. Hey, I am not entirely against that idea, but it should be deliberate.”
Rails podcast with Yukihiro Matsumoto, interviewed by Geoffrey Grosenbach.
The Four Webs: Web 2.0, Digital Identity, and the Future of Human Interaction, the most awesome theory about the web I ever read. “Web 3.0 is when the web stops being about sex.”
05dec2006
A Brief History of Pop Music – In Four Chords, WJW.
Bad bad elevator buttons, how to make people stumble.
Giving It Away, Cory Doctorow on free books.
Warner Music CEO Admits His Kids “Stole” Music, Didn’t Get Sued, made my day.
Credibility, oh people are so easy to trick.
Now it can be told, now it can be spoken
Buildings will fall, records will be broken
You can’t hide the alien sitting in your head
No more secrets, it’s all bein’ said
— Dan Bern, Now It Can Be Told
Good News: Pinochet near death, 1419 says.
User-Proofing Ajax, by Peter Quinsey at A List Apart. “When good web apps go bad, Peter Quinsey’s guidelines and techniques can help you and your users stay informed and productive.”
Avoid Edge Cases by Designing Up Front, by Ben Henick at A List Apart. Designing up front, isn’t that un-agile?
Ruby’s branching plan, a pic worth more than a ML thread, I love hand-drawn diagrams about computer stuff.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Terrestrial weaponization, Defense Tech introduces us to the “earthquake array,” a “focused underground shockwave that amounts to an artificial earthquake.” Plowshares, I say.
Science Fiction and the City, 032c sounds like an awesome mag.
04dec2006
Outperforming Ferret at searching, 3X faster indexing, code online, Mauricio’s latest optimizations.
StepMania is a free dance and rhythm game for Windows, Mac, and Linux featuring 3D graphics, dance pad support, and a step editor.
Vocabulary Widget for the OS X Dashboard.
He looked like a stranger yeah
With the knife he gripped tight in his hand
So I pulled out a 45
And shoved it straight up his fucking arse
— William Elliot Whitmore, Listed
BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. Essentially, del.icio.us for BibTeX.
Unsuggester takes “people who like this also like that” and turns it on its head. Anti-social software?
Vertical Centering with a Shiv Div, useful CSS trick.
Antigravitaattori is a multiplayer flying saucer racing game, made for Assembly 2006 game competition.
I’ve seen you more now
More than you’ve ever looked at me before
Don’t care about me now
I’m on the ceiling
Don’t pull me back down to the floor
— William Elliot Whitmore, On The Ceiling
Anti-Wahlcomputer-Petition endet mit großem Erfolg. Weltweiter Trend gegen Wahlcomputer. Schön.
Intelligent design sort is a sorting algorithm based on the theory of intelligent design. *g*
Consistency Management in Optimistic Replication Algorithms by Yasushi Saito. “The use of optimistic replication has grown explosively due to the proliferation of the use of the Internet and mobile computing devices, but its systematic study has begun only recently.”
03dec2006
PiMonad is a library for functional programming language Haskell providing a lightweight implementation of the Pi-Calculus.
How to give a good research talk, by Simon L. Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury.
Franz Josef Degenhart, alles Gute zum 75. Geburtstag!
All Gates cash to be spent within 50 years of death, WJW.
I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home
I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare at all the millions here
We must have died along, a long long time ago
— David Bowie, The Man Who Sold The World
AOP Haskell, yum.
A Yonedic Addendum, more theorems for free.
do they know it’s christmas time at all?, Lydia aus der Rubrik “Wenn Männer Kartons beschriften”. Muha!
That’s why you’re drinkin in this bar
well only suckers fall in love
with perfect strangers
— Tom Waits, I Never Talk To Strangers
Project Road Map for CouchDb. The things that interest me are currently joins and validation.
When the GC is doing its job, but your app still needs too much RAM, Mauricio Fernandez has hints on how to optimize your applications memory usage.
02dec2006
OmniVapor, John Gruber on vaporware. Also shows why my main blog is a bit silent at the moment. ;-)
RESTful Security, that is SSL and HTTP Basic/Digest, provides a stable and mature solution that addresses transport level credential passing, encryption, and integrity.
the night i became an atheist, “Being an atheist in America often means being the outcast. It’s hard to be different, and churches are full of really nice people and potential new friends. Superstition and boring rituals are a small price to pay for acceptance, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that there are plenty of people out there that belong to religions they secretly think are foolish, simply because they get acceptance out of it.”
Heart of mine so malicious and so full of guile,
Give you an inch and you’ll take a mile.
Don’t let yourself fall Don’t let yourself stumble.
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime
Heart of mine.
— Bob Dylan, Heart Of Mine
Google Mondrian, web-based code review and storage. “Guido van Rossum unveiled his first Google project, Mondrian, tonight during a Python tech talk at the Google campus in Mountain View. Mondrian is a web-based code review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end.”
The Polonium Restaurant, in Sheffield, UK. Be careful.
Recursion Parallel Prolog, “Reform Prolog is a recursion-parallel implementation of Prolog. By executing all invocations of a recursive predicate in parallel, data-parallelism can be exploited.” That’s a great idea, really.
2006 Perl Advent Calendar, neato.
Trip report: Kazakhstan, “Kazakhstan has probably had more Google hits in the last month than ever before in its short existence as a republic independent of the Soviet Union.”
Well I know what’s right, I got just on life
In a world that keeps on pushin’ me around
But I’ll stand my ground and I won’t back down
— Tom Petty I Won’t Back Down
The Compleat Gentleman: MMM’s Guide to Bitches, Buddies and Booze , by MotorMachineMercenary.
Streitende Zimtsterne, sorry, muss sein. :-P
URI Templates are strings that contain embedded variables that are transformed into URIs after embedded variables are substituted.
01dec2006
World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the global AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history.
EuroForth 2006 proceedings, featuring some interesting papers.
Open Firmware is now free, most of it is available under the BSD or MIT license.
The people will survive
In their environment
The dirt, scarcity, and emptiness
Of our South
— The Minutemen, Corona
A reflective functional language for hardware design and theorem proving, by J. Grundy, T. Melham, and J. O’Leary.
Keva Apostolova: Pergammon, a free play. PNSFW.
Digitaler Mathe-Adventskalender, yum.
Der artikelfreie Sonntag ist eine Wikipedia-Aktion, bei der die Teilnehmer auf das Anlegen neuer Artikel verzichten. Termin ist der 10. Dezember 2006.
LAMP and the Spread Toolkit, by Jason R. Briggs. Gotta play a bit with that some day.
War/Photography: An Interview with Simon Norfolk, “His photos reveal half-collapsed buildings, destroyed cinemas, and unpopulated urban ruins in diagonal shafts of morning sunlight – from Iraq to Rwanda, Bosnia to Afghanistan – before venturing further afield into more distant, and surprising, landscapes of modern warfare.”
Plat_Forms is an international programming contest. It aims at comparing different technological platforms for developing web-based applications: Java EE, .NET/ASP, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby-on-Rails.
Ruby Advent Calendar 2006, at rubyinside.com. Day 1: “An Easy to use Amazon S3 Library for Ruby”
Catalyst Advent Calendar, 25 days of Catalyst tips! Where’s the Rails calendar?
ObjectivePerl, an Objective-C style syntax and runtime for perl, by Kyle Dawkins.
24 ways to impress your friends. Day 1: “Tasty Text Trimmer by Drew McLellan”.
Haskell Communities and Activities Report, Eleventh edition, dated November 30, 2006.
I live sweat but I dream light years,
I am the tide—the rise and the fall
the reality soldier, the laugh child,
the one of the many, the flame child
— The Minutemen, The Glory of Man
When Linux Runs Out of Memory, by Mulyadi Santosa. OOM!
Never Enough Tabs, WJW.
pandoc converts files from one markup format to another. It can read markdown and (with some limitations) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, RTF, and S5 HTML slide shows. It is written in Haskell, using the excellent Parsec parser combinator library.