Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
26apr2007
AbiLog: Gestern Biologie und morgen die ganze Welt, after finishing my exams, I’m taking a few days off.
This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 250), by John Baez. Featuring the Tale of Groupoidification.
Vonnegut Day, “I, Mark Andrew Pilgrim, being of sound mind and body, and acting in my official capacity as… no one of any consequence, do hereby designate February 29th to be “Vonnegut Day.” The day shall be a vacation away from the busy, busy, busy. It shall be a holiday whose only commandment is to be kind to one another, God damn it.” I support.
Inkjet Printed Film Process, Video frames printed onto transparency film and cut down to Super 8 or 16mm film dimensions. Cool hack!
Faster laziness using dynamic pointer tagging, by Simon Marlow, Alexey Rodriguez Yakushev, and Simon Peyton Jones. “We propose two tagging strategies: a simple strategy called semi-tagging that seeks to avoid one common source of unpredictable indirect jumps, and a more complex strategy called dynamic pointer-tagging that uses the spare low bits in a pointer to encode information about the pointed-to object.”
WSGIDispatcher, Selector alternative by Joe Gregorio.
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
Learning From Sudoku Solvers, Ron Jeffries vs. Peter Norvig.
Very Earth-like Body Discovered Close By, circletimessquare writes. “The obsession of all of human civilization has just been fixed for the next few centuries.” Only 20.5 light years away.
The 10th ICFP Programming Contest takes place July 20–23, 2007.
Decidability of Higher Order Matching, by Colin Stirling.
Breathing Poem, from Thich Nhat Hanh.
Adobe to Open Source Flex, under the MPL. The best step possible against Silverline?
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.
— Bob Dylan, My Back Pages
Arc: Now Conses Less, John Wiseman found some news about Arc.
Singvögel in Städten werden nachtaktiv, mögen sie mich nicht wecken.
fliegender wechsel, hey, ich werde auch alt.
Phaux is a stateful, callback-based PHP5 web framework that allows you to easily build highly reusable and complex web applications. Considered heretic.
Hackety Hack, the coder’s starter kit. By _why.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. — R. A. Heinlein
Capistrano 2.0: Not Just for Rails, Timothy M. O’Brien says. I’ll have another look.
Tunnels, mines, and the “upwardly migrating void”, scary somehow.
Ancient Lights, the right to light.
24apr2007
Coda, John Gruber reviewed panic.com’s latest app. I fear it wouldn’t work for me, but it’s a cool and well-done idea certainly.
Boy, Pigeon, Crushed Firebox, what a lovely shot.
The Web Design Survey, 2007, by ALA Staff.
Hey desert wind
Carry me away
Someplace where I know what to do and what to say
And hey, when I’m sleeping
I dream of a camel sleigh
And a desert wind to carry me away
— Dan Bern, Desert Wind
The Long Hallway, by Jonathan Follett at A List Apart. “You’ve heard of the long tail and the long walk home. Now, for all those micro design firms looking to grow to the next level, there’s the long hallway—the distance between the physical working spaces of the individuals that comprise virtual companies—which may be as short as a few miles across town or as long as thousands of miles across continents and oceans.”
Contrast and Meaning by Andy Rutledge at A List Apart. “Design is largely an exercise in creating or suggesting contrasts in an effort to convey meaning.”
DisTract is a Distributed Bug Tracker, currently only for Monotone but more to come.
Basics of Compiler Design, by Torben Mogensen. Full-text online.
Pantheonic Astronomy, “A testament to Roman architecture and engineering,” NASA writes, “the Pantheon’s dome is said to symbolize the vault of the heavens.”
TAP, the Test Anything Protocol, is a simple text-based interface between testing modules in a test harness.
XML Versus TAP, by Curtis Poe. I wish TAP was more popular among Rubyists.
Sturm and Ruger, GhostOfTiber on the Mini-14.
Lisp and Python Syntax, John Wiseman thinks Python is easy to read. I have a hard time actually.
I found a liquid cure
From my landlocked blues
It’ll pass away like a slow parade
It’s leaving but I don’t know how soon
— Bright Eyes, Landlocked Blues
XML Becomes Pervasive on the Web, by Kevin Farnham, says. “In a sense, you can no longer put “XML” on your resume in the list of technologies you understand.” That ever worked?
Goplan is an online project management solution. It allows teams and individuals to collaborate through tasks, file management, real-time chat, online calendaring, and many other features.
23apr2007
Ostrava On Rails is the first Ruby On Rails conference in the Czech Republic, 22. and 23.06.2007.
Repetition, Generativity, and Patterns, I didn’t yet read this undated piece by Richard P. Gabriel.
Welcome to Dot-Com Bubble 2.0, Jeff Atwood says. I wonder when it pops.
Gotham Ruby Conference 2007, a full summary by Gregory Brown.
99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.
— 99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall
Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty “essentials.” To be printed out and hung on the wall.
Mit UProm.TV startet heute auf Astra der erste TV-2.0-Sender in Deutschland, dessen Programm sich ausschließlich aus von Zuschauern erstellten Inhalten zusammensetzt. Super Idee, hatte ich auch schon.
Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw the Soviet Union’s demise and became Russia’s first president, has died aged 76, the Kremlin says.
pen, a load balancer for “simple” tcp based protocols such as http or smtp. It allows several servers to appear as one to the outside and automatically detects servers that are down and distributes clients among the available servers. This gives high availability and scalable performance. Single line configuration!
Tomorrow’s New Yorker today, an evil trick discovered by Jason Kottke.
Der “Tag des deutschen Bieres” erinnert an den Geburtstag des Reinheitsgebotes am 23. April 1516. “Über 5.000 verschiedene Biermarken können auf dem deutschen Biermarkt verkostet werden – ganze 13,5 Jahre lang jeden Abend ein anderes Bier!” Na dann mal Prost!
Mursi Tribeswoman with iPod and AK-47, WJW.
Report-Back on BMC, by Bruce Barlett, featuring a slide with the lagrangian for the Standard Model. Damn.
Is This a Bad Idea?, why doesn’t Jim Weirich simply pass the descriptions as a second task parameter?
Hol mir ma’ ne Flasche Bier, Flasche Bier, Flasche Bier
Hol mir ma’ ne Flasche Bier, Flasche Bier sonst streik ich hier.
— Stefan Raab, Hol mir ma’ ne Flasche Bier
Kiddie Porn: The New McCarthyism, by sudogeek. “The ongoing high profile arrests for possession, distribution, and manufacture of child pornography in the US and Britain raise a number of troubling issues. It’s a object lesson in prosecutorial misconduct, political grandstanding, sensationalist press coverage, incompetent experts, and a politicized justice system.”
The Great Modern Glucose Poisoning Epidemic, by localroger. “There is about a one in three chance that you are seriously ill and don’t even know it. It’s not a disease caused by a pathogen but a chronic long-term poisoning that starts with your pancreas and nervous system.”
Quick list 9, at BLDG BLOG. Among these, UPS and left turns.
22apr2007
Theseus and the Zipper, functional programming in old Greece.
Algebraic Geometry, 227 pages CC lecture notes by J. S. Milne.
Dual numbers are a particular two-dimensional commutative unital associative algebra over the real numbers, arising from the reals by adjoining one new element ε with the property ε2 = 0.
He said you are my Earth girl
You are my Earth girl
You are my Earth girl
You are my Earth girl
— Dan Bern, Earth Girl
Guantanamero, a song by RMS.
YEurope is like YCombinator for European startups. And it’s just around the corner. ;)
xmonad: a tiling window manager, version 0.1 has been released.
The JANE Guide to Breast Health: Perfect Breasts, NSFW.
Self-referential pizza formula, WJW.
Esotouric does Bus Adventures into the secret heart of LA. “Our routes veer off into fascinating, neglected neighborhoods. Our expert guides are passionate, brainy and hilarious. Our tour themes are provocative and complex, but never dry, mixing crime and social history, rock and roll and architecture, literature and film, fine art and urban studies into a simmering stew of original research and startling observations.”
It was that summer
We started feeling older
Played more ball
Drank more beer
Sat out by the pool
Talked about Gorbachev
We talked about second hand smoke
We talked about whether we belong in Saudi Arabia
— Dan Bern, That Summer
From abstract interpretation to small-step typing, “A program denotes computations in some universe of objects. Abstract interpretation of programs consists in using that denotation to describe computations in another universe of abstract objects, so that the results of abstract execution give some informations on the actual computations.”
Why don’t namespaces support DTDs?, by Michael Day wonders. Why are there people that still use DTDs, I wonder.
Discovering drawing, Joi Ito starts drawing. Reminds me that Feynman painted, too.
Solar Organ / Sky Piano, “Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun’s atmosphere behave like a musical instrument,” the BBC reported yesterday.
21apr2007
“Stasi 2.0” und die Vorratsdatenspeicherung: erste Ergebnisse, da mach ich mit!
“Certain feelings aren’t expressible by words”, it’s proven!
Super-tough material mimics metal and crystal, hardcore.
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.
— John Wesley’s Rule
Interview with Jérome Louvel about Restlet, by Stefan Tilkov.
The Flip Language, “The architecture of Flip is a two-dimensional grid of squares, in each of which can be placed an object. The source code of a program is simply a map of this space. The program execution is performed in Flip by one or more balls, which move around and interact with the objects.” WJW.
Minimal ZTD: The Simplest System Possible, Zen To Done sounds really good.
All a-Twitter, how David Pollak would implement Twitter in Erlang.
Subverting git, a short git-svn tutorial. Useful thingy. A more detailed intro.
The TLCA List of Open Problems aims at collecting unresolved questions (and other relevant information, e.g. about solutions and related results) in the subject areas of the TLCA (Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications) series of conferences.
Banksy Graffiti, must see. Very cool.
Well, take my wallet, take my fingerprints
Take my license that I’ll no longer need
Take my belt in case I want to hang myself
For a nickel bag of weed
— Dan Bern, Jail
Google Web History: Good and Scary, analysis by Anil Dash. I really don’t want it remotely. Locally, it could be useful, though.
Perplexing Parrot’s Parser, chromatic generates Perl with Markov-Chains. I think wrt Perl, the probability that the output does something useful is a lot higher than for other languages. Except maybe TECO.
Custom Rake Applications, by Jim Weirich. Honestly, this is a classical make(1)-usecase.
gem_mirror_only, more animated sources.
20apr2007
Test-First Word Wrap in Erlang, hell is EUnit ugly.
Building houses 2 is a nice Java applet to exercise your spatial thinking.
libketama: a consistent hashing algo for memcache clients, “Ketama is an implementation of a consistent hashing algorithm, meaning you can add or remove servers from the memcached pool without causing a complete remap of all keys.”
They look for the missing link
There ain’t no missing link
They’re never, ever going to find the missing link
There’s no missing link
We’re not something you can figure out with an equation
We are the genetic mutation
— Dan Bern, No Missing Link
How rich are desktop apps anyway?, Manuel argues that in certain aspects “desktop apps SUCK BIG TIME compared to most web apps.”
Compiling Join-Patterns, by Luc Maranget and Fabrice Le Fessant. The Join calculus should be a lot more popular, I feel.
The Gender Genie recognizes that Anarchaia is written by a male, but thinks chris blogs is written by a female. It has a 50% chance, anyway. ;-)
Church’s Thesis and Functional Programming, “David Turner gives a condensed summary of the lambda calculus and functional programming in this paper on Church’s Thesis and Functional Programming.”
Ooh–I’ll protect you from the wind
Ooh-I’d listen to your stories ‘til my head spins
‘Round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and
— Dan Bern, Dress
Of Cars, Dogs, Golf, and Bad Feng Shui: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba at BLDG BLOG.
Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails, a nice, non-buzzword intro by Gregory Brown.
Geschichtsstunde mit Dr. Oettinger I, II und III sind es meines Erachtens wert, die taz zu abonnieren.
19apr2007
On GC and finalizers in Ruby, corrected weak hash table implementations, by Mauricio Fernandez (who else?).
Ubuntu 7.04 Release Notes, it’s officially out now. (And Mr Dell uses it, if anyone cares.)
The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost.
Wir gehn bloßen Leibs
durch Wohnungen türenlos schattenlos
Sind wir allein weil keiner uns folgt niemand
Das Lager versagt: stumm
Sind die Hunde sie wehren nicht
Den Schritt mir zur Seite: ihre Zungen
Aufgebläht ohne Ton sind taub
— Sarah Kirsch, Dann werden wir kein Feuer brauchen
acts_as_sphinx plugin for Rails.
Sphinx is a free open-source SQL full-text search engine.
Urban Drift is a transcultural platform for new tendencies in Architecture, Design and Urbanism.
Greybeard, by sudogeek. “I’m so old my Social Security number is 2. I’m as old as that joke.” NSFW.
der teufelskreis, jaja die Frauen.
Fortress Europe, turrets on the maginot line.
Maginot line, maginot line,
why didn’t some smart fellow say:
Maginot line, maginot line,
your guns are pointing the wrong way.
Your guns are pointing the wrong way.
— Geoff Berner, Maginot Line
Nostrils, _why puts code into animated .gifs, WJW!
Twitter, Rails, Hammers, and 11,000 Nails per Second, while I agree that using a relational database may be wrong for Twitter, using a flat-file database is the most idiotic idea I heard for some time (unless you maybe use ZFS).
Amazing Advertisements, these are really good.
18apr2007
jrm-code-project, loads of old code. A treasure.
Mathematician suggests extra dimensions are time-like Discussion at PhysOrgForum, by Lisa Zyga. A nice idea.
No need for public thanks. It’s the least I can do given that you’re blog is the only one I read every single day. You do as much to keep me informed as CNET does. Please keep up the good work. — David Pollak, after donating for my new disk
Atom Publishing Protocol Interop a Success, Keith Fahlgre says. But where is his code? My Atom server already is 80 LOC. :-)
Steal a little and they throw you in jail,
Steal a lot and they make you king.
There’s only one step down from here, baby,
It’s called the land of permanent bliss.
— Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You
Pathway is an app designed to help you discover Wikipedia without having to worry whether you’ll have enough time to read everything you want, or if you’ll get lost. I use a rather complicated tab scheme for that, but this is niftier.
Interactive Computer Theorem Proving, materials for a Coq course. Wow.
Blood Puddle Pillows, bloody awesome!
Natural Docs is an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator. Has a bit verbose syntax, though…
If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
— Bob Dylan, Tomorrow Night
TechStars and YCombinator: Summer camp without the girls, uncov rocks. :-)
Precambrian Motorways, neat diagram.
simplefold: better vim folding (Ruby, Objective Caml, Perl, PHP, Java), Mauricio Fernandez improves vim.
17apr2007
Zipster: A Hipster clone, “This is a short guide to transforming a spare Zip-disk into a mini-archive.” Finally a use for these old disks.
Waltzing Ma~, by Keith M. Taylor. Best joke I saw in a while.
xmpp4r-simple, makes it dead-simple to send and receive Jabber messages with Ruby.
In that house Hemingway is boxing in the back
I go down to the library and check out all the facts
Nowadays it’s hard to write a line my own thoughts bore me
I found me an island kid who says he’ll do it for me
I’m wiping all my tears away so no one has a clue
That I need you
— Dan Bern, I Need You
The π-Calculus Storage Cell, by Mark C. Chu-Carroll. Nifty calculus, but I think there are better alternatives/subsets, e.g. the Join calculus.
FlexMock 0.6.0 Released, for some reason I prefer mocha.
Oberstufen-Rechner, wer’s grad braucht.
rCache is a powerful tool that lets you archive data from many unrelated sources. Kind of “Google Browsercache”, seems very useful.
Must-see Haskell talks at OSCON ‘07, Bryan O’Sullivan says: “Simon Peyton Jones will be giving two Haskell-related talks at OSCON in July!” Oooh!
Web Service, MySQL, myhttp_engine, you expected this right?, let this not be MegaData, let this not be MegaData…
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Rails Developer David Heinemeier Hansson’s Response to Alex Payne’s Interview, thanks Mark Pilgrim.
Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
— Bob Dylan, Everything Is Broken
Two Kinds of Judgement, essay by Paul Graham. “Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there’s a second much more common type of judgement where it isn’t.”
On what GEB is really all about (twenty years later), Hofstadter tells. One of the best books I know, btw.
Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality, tasty, eh?
16apr2007
Innovative Idea : Magnetic Clothes Hangers, now that’s cool.
Now she puts the kid away, and she’s gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she’s done to it
There’s one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.
— Neil Young, Rockin’ In The Free World
Lamport’s bakery algorithm is a computer algorithm devised by computer scientist Dr. Leslie Lamport, which is intended to improve the robustness of multiple thread-handling processes by means of mutual exclusion.
Magic Multi-Connections for ActiveRecords, by Dr Nic. In case you need to deal with 11,000 req/s.
How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors (and also how to cheat), essential knowledge.
What’s your text to code ratio?, Jonathan Wellons wonders. Far too much IRC and too less code here…
Don’t fall apart on me tonight,
I just don’t think that I could handle it.
Don’t fall apart on me tonight,
Yesterday’s just a memory,
Tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be
And I need you, yeah.
— Bob Dylan, Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight
Extended FlexMock Example Using Google4R, Jim Weirich mocks on.
Debian redefines itself with new release, The philosophy behind the release is best summarized on the home page for the Debian on the Desktop subproject, which states, “We will do everything we can to make things very easy for the novice, while allowing the expert to tweak things.”
15apr2007
Werewolf, a mind game.
Talmud and its Shape, “Considered from the standpoint of typography alone, the printed page of the Talmud is an amazingly complex text with many intertextual connections representing fifteen centuries of discussion.”
Going UTC, Joi Ito goes UTC. I should too.
The Euler Archive is an online resource for Leonhard Euler’s original works and modern Euler scholarship. This dynamic library and database provides access to original publications, and references to available translations and current research.
Leonhard Euler was born today 300 years ago.
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
— Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone
Mark Dominus gratulates too.
The Two Things about Computer Programming, I think we had that before…
Data Structures, a blog. Easily understandable.
To hold each other tight
The whole night through
Ev’rything is always right
When I’m alone with you.
— Bob Dylan, To Be Alone With You
Turtles need Speed, Avi says. But don’t forget what Smalltalk does with ifTrue: or it’s ByteArray. It’s the same ballpark.
Other Landscapes, “a one-year exhibition of more than 30 large-format photographs of Earth’s planetary neighbors,” opening soon at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The curious rotational memory of the Electron, Part 2.
Atom Returns to Socialtext, neat, but IMHO there is a big lack of Atom clients and servers somehow.
14apr2007
Fecal bacteriotherapy, also known as fecal transfusion, fecal transplant, or human probiotic infusion (HPI), is a medical treatment in which bacteria from feces of a healthy person are transferred into the large bowel and rectum of a patient. ))<>((
Balloon Pirate Radio, a really good hack.
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. — Benjamin Franklin
Synthetic HDR is a technique that generates extra dynamic range in photographic images by trading off detail for bit depth. By Sarah Thompson.
Cutest Hitler look-alike, great comments too.
Dungeon map (big JPEG), “You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door…”
How I Became a Socialist, by Helen Keller.
Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom?—
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.
— Bob Marley, Redemption Song
mod_wsgi is a Python WSGI adapter module for Apache. But the code runs inside Apache, no? Is that what we want?
Stylin’, Time Magazine included BLDGBLOG in its “Style & Design 100” list for 2007.
The blue field entoptic phenomenon is the appearance of tiny bright dots moving quickly along squiggly lines in the visual field, especially when looking into blue light (such as the sky). The dots are due to the white blood cells that move in the capillaries in front of the retina of the eye, near the macula. When I was very young, I thought these were radio waves. ;-)
Lines of Test Code, a good observation.
The first rule of teaching is to know what you are supposed to teach.
The second rule of teaching is to know a little more than what you are supposed to teach. — George Polya, How To Solve It
Factor Clock, lovely little XKCD-inspired hack.
Trivial Scripting with Ruby, by Gregory Brown.
For people that know sed: sed 's/&/\&/g;s/</\</g;s/>/\>/g;s/"/\"/g;s/'\''/\'/g', not as nice, I admit.
My Ajax Nightmare, “The entire app adhered to Dojo’s widget framework in a completely asinine way.” Yum. :-P
13apr2007
Postal Trick, how to get stuff from the US to Russia.
The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun.
At night the birds rest easy
It s the dreamy of sleep of birds
In the morning wash their dreams away
With television words
— Dan Bern, Ostrich Town
Opera releases 9.2 browser, adds “Speed Dial”, won’t take long until there is a Firefox plugin for it, I bet.
All Models of Learning have Flaws, this is about machine learning.
Overloading Haskell numbers, part 1, symbolic expressions, very cool stuff.
Version Control System Shootout Redux Redux, Mozilla goes Mercurial. Neato.
Structure and Pseudorandomness, David Corfield writes: “Terence Tao has written three delightful posts […] detailing his views delivered at the Simons’ lectures at MIT on the relationship between structure and pseudorandomness in mathematics.”
Ruby Central and the Google Summer of Code, Austin Ziegler has some numbers and a list of chosen projects. Really looking forwards to the Atom stuff.
Cops will stop you coming into town doing a buck over 35
Saturday night is karaoke night
You kill ‘em with the Lovesick Blues
Hard times on the desert plain and the wind is stronger than you
— Dan Bern, Hard Times
Link Dump, by Avi Bryant. Has some interesting stuff, esp. related to his ETech talk.
Architectural Weaponry: An Interview with Mark Wigley, Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.
12apr2007
evil.rb wants love, Mauricio digs up some evil stuff.
Lightning Strikes Four Times, by Shlomi Fish, Bob Free, Mike Friedman, and brian d foy. Four short articles, of which two are cool.
A Prairie Home Companion, I like it. Hear A Prairie Home Companion in Your Time Zone.
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC — Kurt Vonnegut’s desired epitaph
Softies on Rails has a pretty good introductory REST tutorial. Check it out.
Five Ways to Improve Your Perl Programming, brian d foy. No “Switch to Ruby”? ;-)
reingeschmissen, Lydia hat nette Quotes.
One grin and wink like the neon on the liquor store
We were sixteen, maybe less, maybe a little more
I walked home smiling, I finally had a story to tell
— Iron And Wine, Sixteen Maybe Less
Family Tree of Schema Languages for XML: now takes A3 page!, Rick Jelliffe says.
A Smoother Change to Version 2.0, by Marc de Graauw. SOAP is dead. HTTP has negotiation.
Rock vs Tree, Joi Ito and nature metaphers.
Mellow mood has got me, darlin’.
Let the music rock me, darlin’.
‘Cause I got your love, darlin’.
Love, sweet love, darlin’.
— Bob Marley, Mellow Moods
Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, by Philip A. Bernstein, Vassos Hadzilacos, and Nathan Goodman. Full-text online now.
What is the opposite of absolute zero?, another thing learned: “The highest possible temperature, called the Planck temperature, is equal to 10^32 degrees Kelvin.”
Autumn leaves to black flowers, “The greenery on other planets may not be green”. Pretty logical, but I didn’t think of it.
Megadata Follow-up, I don’t think the name is that bad. But I badly want the implementations.
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
So it goes, indexed on Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, NY, after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible brain injuries. RIP.
11apr2007
Ruby code that will swallow your soul!, Daniel Berger on evil.rb.
Functional Test Matrix, Ryan Davis splits tests into aspects and combines them in a great way. Really good idea.
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby, a nice and thick ebook by Bruno R. Preiss.
Happiness is a mental illness, by gndn. “Life consists of suffering, followed by death. It is illogical to expect any creature in those circumstances to find anything but the most fleeting sense of pleasure.” Very optimistic.
Can’t Knock It Down, self-balancing objects.
I’m as free as I want to be
That’s because I chose to be
I didn’t do nothing today
I just lay around
— Dan Bern, Free As I Want To Be
Die Schneidekennlinie ist ein Maß für die seitliche Auslenkung einer Rille bei einer gegebenen Umdrehungsgeschwindigkeit der Schallplatte und gegebener Frequenz ist die Bewegungsgeschwindigkeit der abtastenden Nadel.
Text File Strip Calendar, a wonderful idea by David Shea.
JavaScript mode for Emacs, by Karl Landström. So far the best I’ve found.
JSLT, a javascript-based XSLT alternative. Nice idea, but I prefer JSONT.
A Simple Code for Posting on the Web, yes yes yes. Full ack. Please spread the word.
SCM is a GPL front-end to revision control systems, able to work with Bazaar, BitKeeper, CVS, Mercurial, and Subversion repositories on a variety of operating systems. Great naming…
And the sky was gray and it looked like it might rain
And I decided that I was only eating rice from now on
— Dan Bern, Rice
Category Theory as Esperanto, David Corfield wonders: “How many mathematicians speak category theory as a native?”
Quick list 8 at BLDG BLOG. (Do we get a BLDG TMBL some day?)
))<>(( forever.
Photographing strangers, Joi Ito’s experiences.
10apr2007
Bomb Iceland instead of Iran, awesome idea by Uwe E. Reinhardt.
From Pixels to Plastic, Matt Webb’s ETech 2007 slides. Must see, as usual.
ETech 2007 SmugMug Amazon Slides are Up!, pretty nice how much boxes Amazon can save you.
Body Hacking slides from ETech 2007 by Quinn Norton. Contains blood.
Why Kids Do Drugs, insightful…
And she weeps on my arm
Walking to the bright lights in sorrow
Oh drink a bit of wine we both might go tomorrow, oh my love
— Jeff Buckley, Grace
Demonstration gegen ausufernde Überwachung, “Am kommenden Samstag, den 14. April, ruft unter anderem der Chaos Computer Club zur Beteiligung an der Demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst” in Frankfurt am Main auf.”
Pi Is Wrong!, Bob Palais wants pi to be actually two pi. Seems sound.
Gambit Scheme got a wiki.
Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA, by Martin Kliehm at A List Apart. “Web 2.0 applications often have accessibility and usability problems because of the limitations of (X)HTML. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations.”
Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid, by Wilson Miner at A List Apart. “Let’s face it: it’s easier these days to embed a video on the web than it is to set type consistently or align elements to a universal grid.”
How To Tell Stuff To A Computer: The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation, great read.
I Canceled My Basecamp Account Today, but their elitism is the best about 37signals!
Don’t be like the one who made me so old
Don’t be like the one who left behind his name
‘Cause they’re waiting for you like I waited for mine
And nobody ever came…
— Jeff Buckley, Dream Brother
Save a web page as an image, Firefox 3 can do it. Neat.
The Peter Principle is a colloquial principle of hierarchiology, stated as “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” So true.
Russian craft docks with space station, safely delivering two cosmonauts and American space tourist Charles Simonyi. Let’s hope, no, pray, that he doesn’t come up with Extraterrestrial Notation.
09apr2007
XCL, more details and a link to the source. (Sucks I only have a PPC.)
Design in Test-Driven Development, learn something new everyday: “TDD really has its roots in the Toyota Production System (TPS).”
Schnurers Schöne Hemden, au backe.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, …
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Tracks is a web-based application to help you implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like.
Slimbox is a 7kb visual clone of the popular Lightbox JS v2.0 by Lokesh Dhakar, written using the ultra compact mootools framework. (I think modal websites suck, tho.)
Blogger’s Code of Conduct, nice try, but these are unacceptable for me (I will link anything, and have anonymous comments).
I saw the best of my generation playing pinball
Maked up and caked up and looking like some kind of china doll
With all of Adolph Hitler’s moves down cold as they stood up in front of a rock’n’roll band
And always moving upward and ever upward to this gentle, golden promised land
— Dan Bern, Wasteland
Felix Klein’s Erlangen Program, translated into English.
The Solution to Piracy, by chromatic. Truly brilliant, must read.
How to Write a Spelling Corrector, Peter Norvig did a simple one in Python. It’s pretty easy actually…
Heresy and turtles (all the way down) with Avi Bryant, by Mike Pence. Description of his ETech talk.
Easter egg in PLT Scheme.
08apr2007
Fisher’s method is a data fusion or “meta-analysis” (analysis after analysis) technique for combining the results from a variety of independent tests bearing upon the same overall hypothesis as if in a single large test.
Scribes and Programmers, an analogy by Ravi Mohan.
One time Johnny tried LSD
Had a great revelation, but he
Found he couldn t put it into words
So he started drawing pictures of birds
With ten eyes
Men with 50 arms
— Dan Bern, Runaway
cyberbullying, danah boyd says: “i’m unbelievably frustrated by how most of those adults emphasize the CYBER rather than the BULLYING. It’s as if the internet is the cause of the bullying. The internet does not cause bullying, but it does MIRROR and MAGNIFY bullying.”
Instant ratings, nice JS thingy, but then, I dispise rating.
Jumping Around: My Inevitable Demise, by Robert Deaton. Oh I know that…
XCL is a new, native-code CL implementation that features a kernel written in a very restricted subset of C++ and an optimizing compiler, written in Lisp, with backends for x86 and x86-64. Nifty, nifty.
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 released, this is Etch! Gratulations to the team and everyone involved.
And the world turns
Everything goes round
And the prostitutes
Swing around and round
— Dan Bern, I Don’t Know Who I Am
Cforall extends the C type-system using overloading, parametric polymorphism, and type generators. This would be really cool if it was a preprocessor.
Yesno is an inconsistent and complete programming language, and that every program returns a value. Take that, Gödel!
Jaiku vs Twitter, Joi Ito on the difference. I’m fully satisfied with Twitter, I just wish I could send SMS for free.
07apr2007
Which way is the bus traveling, you’ll slap yourself for not answering that puzzle.
Call Girls With A Mission, PNSFW. Made me ROFL.
The “figurative system of human knowledge”, sometimes known as the tree of Diderot and d’Alembert, was a tree developed to represent the structure of knowledge itself, produced for the Encyclopédie by Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. The tree was a taxonomy of human knowledge, inspired by Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Knowledge. The three main branches of knowledge in the tree are: “Memory”/History, “Reason”/Philosophy, and “Imagination”/Poetry.
Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you’re chokin’,
Everything is broken.
— Bob Dylan, Everything is broken
noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com, by Miranda July. This is the most creative and captivating website idea I saw for a long time. Must see. (When I had a similar idea, the common bandwidth was way too low.)
Greylisting: The worst thing to happen to email since spam, I’m hating graylisting since 1999.
Microsoft is dead, essay by Paul Graham(!).
Díc hospés Spartae nos té hic vidísse iacéntes,
dúm sanctís patriae légibus óbsequimúr. — Cicero
Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing, Nitesh Dhanjani says. How the fuck is that even possible?
In Jerusalem enemies sang like the cousins they are
In the Congo they laid down their guns and snapped their fingers in the warm
summer air
The Swiss they sang like clockwork
In sweatshops, women stopped work
In Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran they sang
— Dan Bern, The Song That Saved The World
Good Ideas I Have Had In The Past Year, by Maciej Celglowski. Plain lovely.
5 secrets to success, by danah boyd. True and useful.
The Heliocentric Pantheon: An Interview with Walter Murch, “Pantheon still holds its mysteries: Who designed it? How was it used? What does it mean?”
06apr2007
James Clark’s Random Thoughts, he now has a blog! Yum.
hAtom cheatsheet, very helpful.
And mostly you just never know who with
Or where you’re gonna find your bliss
Maybe today your gift
Is listening to Elliot Smith
— Dan Bern, Elliot Smith
Alpha is a new Yahoo search engine interface, beta of course. (Highly reminds me of the Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper.)
ZFS committed to the FreeBSD base, very neat.
Help us pass the “Read the Bills Act”, we need that in Germany too.
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. — Lord Kelvin, 1895
The lighttpd Web Server, an introduction by Bill Lubanovic.
Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism.
Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there’s no time to think.
— Bob Dylan, No Time To Think
Badass origami stuff, whoa.
05apr2007
And the hits keep coming for SimpleBits, this was the best April Fools joke this year.
Nethack Linux is a bootable floppy that only contains nethack and boots into it. Now, where is a floppy drive…
ETech ‘07 Summary: Part 2: MegaData, by Joe Gregorio. “[W]e need a new kind of data store, a new kind of SQL, something that does for storing and querying large amounts of data what SQL did for normalized data.” Yes, yes, yes.
You once talked to me about love
and you painted pictures of a never-neverland
and I could’ve gone to that place
but I didn’t understand
— Elliot Smith, I Didn’t Understand
Warp Speed Introduction to CLOS, good intro. “I found that CLOS is actually one of the simplest and easiest object systems to understand and use.”
My ILC07 rants, by Edi Weitz.
More Messy Thinking, how many Emacses would fit on these screens. Yum.
Fece throwing teacher admits guilt, crappy.
Of jellyfish, loops, site constraints, and canopies, the house is designed “as a mutable layered skin, or ‘deep surface’, that mediates internal and external environments.”
I’m never gonna know you now
but I’m gonna love you anyhow
— Elliot Smith, Waltz #2
Test Your Knowledge of Regular Expressions and Shell Basics, by Emmett Dulaney. This is easy, I only had one of 50 questions wrong.
YAPC::Asia slides day 1 and day 2 by Audrey Tang. Great as usual.
04apr2007
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface, by Bret Victor. Must read, it’s fantastic.
Introducing RDFa, Part Two, by Bob DuCharme.
C extension authors: use rb_scan_args(); don’t count argc, good tip by Daniel Berger.
Dyla 2007: 3rd Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications, takes place July 31 2007 in Berlin in conjunction with ECOOP 2007.
Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0, now a W3C Recommendation. Nice, but somehow overengineered.
I keep listenin’ for footsteps
But I ain’t hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many
— Bob Dylan, Floater
The Java Compiler API, a Conversation with Peter von der Ahé by Frank Sommers. One of the nice things of Java.
Lectures on the Curry-Howard Isomorphism (PDF), by Morten Heine and Paweł Urzyczyn.
Monocular Landscapes, Unmanned Drones, and the Orbital Future of Australian Archaeology, on the first issue of Monocle.
Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life, ETech 2007 talk by danah boyd.
The Narrow Road: Zen and the Art of Mathematics, an understandable math blog.
When I hear beautiful music it’s always from another time
Old friends I never visit, I remember what they’re like
Standing on a doorstep full of nervous butterflies
Waiting to be asked to come inside
Just come inside
— Bright Eyes, Lime Tree
Tracking time using shell scripts, couldn’t we also use Twitter for that?
IDEA in 448 bytes of 80x86, by Fauzan Mirza. Shorter than the patent. :-)
If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics…, “You would probably hate the subject.”
03apr2007
fxp is a validating XML parser written completely in the functional programming language SML. fxp can validate both XML 1.0 and XML 1.1 documents.
The Spirit of the 40s, by oldwinebottle. Rum and Coca-Cola!
So I have become the Middleman
The gray areas are mine
The in-between, the absentee
Is a beautiful disguise
— Bright Eyes, Middleman
PSgoblin.ps a proof of concept irc bot, written in PostScript. WJW.
International Lisp Conference 2007, the blog.
Using C++ template metaprogramming, “I’ll try to solve FizzBuzz by having the compiler output the solution as error messages.” Nasty.
The Museum of Nature, how sad we need a museum for it…
I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got
— Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Bulletproof, supersonic ‘bullets’ of gas.
Which XML technologies are beautiful?, Michael Day wonders. JSON! :-P
Kernel Mode Drivers for X11 on Linux. Lovely…
PyPy 1.0: JIT compiler generator, optimizations and more, how could I miss that?
02apr2007
The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie, I’d wear it without forcing me to!
Run-Time Byte Code Compilation, Optimization, and Interpretation for Alice, thesis by Christian Müller. “A new run-time compiler compiles the Abstract Code to Alice byte code that is executed by a register-based interpreter.”
Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It’s knocking over fences, crossing property lines
Four winds, cry until it comes
— Bright Eyes, Four Winds
Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store , yay!
Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. “It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.”
MINIX: what is it, and why is it still relevant?, an interview with Andy Tanenbaum at the Free Software Magazine.
Slumming, I really liked this movie by Michael Glawogger.
Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
— James Rado & Gerome Ragni, Hair
Piss Christ is a controversial photograph by American photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix supporting the body of Jesus Christ submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine.
Muhammed Smileys/Frowneys, not really new, but I haven’t seen them yet.
01apr2007
Mutable variables eliminated from .NET, I so wish that was true. :-) Yay!
WebKit Shutting Down, “that’s why I am pleased to announce that WebKit will be discontinued in favor of Trident, the engine inside Windows Internet Explorer. Like OpenDarwin before us, we will be shutting down. You may wonder how we can use Trident in Mac OS X browsers like Safari. Fortunately, on Intel-based Macs, there is a solution: running IE under Parallels, and using Mozilla’s XPCOM to bridge the gap. This means we will discontinue the WebKit Objective-C API in favor of a COM API.” Yay!
Leave the ocean’s roar in the turquoise shell
Leave the widower in his private hell
Leave the liberty in that broken bell today
— Bright Eyes, I Must Belong Somewhere
Urgo’s 2007 list of April Fools’ Day Jokes on Websites, you should find everything else there. Yay!
Viewstamped Replication for Highly Available Systems, by Brian Masao Oki. “This dissertation presents viewstamped replication, a new algorithm for the implementation of highly available computer services that continue to be usable in spite of node crashes and network partitions.”
The Cloud, Hollywood burning.
The Curious Rotational Memory of the Electron, Part 1, “There’s a curious and bizarre fact about the universe that is introduced in physics courses without anyone stopping to point out just how curious and bizarre it is.”
Bundestrojaner in ELSTER-Software entdeckt, “Untersuchungen des Chaos Computer Clubs ergaben, dass der Bundestrojaner über die aktuelle Version der Elster-Software verbreitet wird.” Yay!
Little soldier, little insect, you know war it has no heart
It will kill you in the sunshine or happily in the dark
Where kindness is a card game or a bent-up cigarette
In the trenches, in the hard rain, with a bullet and
— Bright Eyes, No One Would Riot For Less
Plans for HTML6, it’s based on OOXML! Yay!
Gmail Paper will print all your mail and post it to you. Yay!
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