Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30jun2007
What if I actually like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?, right, DHH. But, why all these helpers, RJS and the other stuff? *smirk*
iPhone First Impressions, by John Gruber. Also closely look at his logo. “Helvetica has never, ever looked so good on screen.”
I looked at you for the very first time
You’re like a river running through my mind
They say we’re young, we don’t know what we do
But i can’t make it if i can’t have you
— Dead Moon, Over The Edge
Java Framework Round-Up, this is an interesting comparison, because there doesn’t seem to be anything that doesn’t suck. :-P
GPLv3 now is official. Gratulations to everyone involved.
hiccup is a Tcl-like language written in 250loc Haskell. Nice to hack with, I guess.
Transparent Toaster, WJW.
But it’s all I’m doing now
Listening for patterns in the sound
Of an endless static sea
But once the satellite’s deceased
It blows like garbage through the streets
Of the night sky to infinity
— Bright Eyes, Easy/Lucky/Free
iPhone Live Disassembly, kill it!
Pukin’ Frog, what my sister does when she’s bored. Make this an internet classic. :-)
How to calculate the square root of 2, by Mark Dominus.
CMU AI repository, a true treasure trove: “Here you’ll find the Yale Haskell System, a *Lisp simulator for Connection Machine programming, obscure mailing-list archives, and God knows what else.”
29jun2007
Ape Rev, Tim Brays Atom Protocol Exerciser works really well and helped me find a few issues with my secret toys. (Use BugMeNot to checkout from the CVS java.net nazis.)
mod_atom, by Tim Bray. “This is a stripped-down implementation of the server side of the Atom Publishing Protocol as an Apache module, implemented in C.”
Why should I go where everyone goes?
Why should I do what everyone does?
I don’t like it when you get too close
I don’t want to be under your thumb
— Die Toten Hosen, Pushed Again
Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke argues “someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.”
Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration , I always forget how it works.
Why You Don’t Want an iPhone – Yet, Jeff Atwood explains.
Processing Mailbox Files with mailbox.py, by A. M. Kuchling. I got a bit nostalgic seeing the list of supported formats… aaah, Babyl on (virtualized) ITS.
You’re all I believe
I told my best friend
You’re all I believe
So why are you running?
— Juliette & the Licks, Seventh Sign
living with nerds, Top Ten things you deal with/learn when you live with software engineers… a true list.
Compiling Scala for the Java Virtual Machine (PDF), thesis by Michel Schinz.
28jun2007
knowledge access as a public good, by danah boyd. Sounds like a foreshadow of my life: “Unfortunately, eleven years of higher education has taught me that parts of the academy is rife with many of the same problems that plague society as a whole: greed, self-absorbtion, addiction to power, and an overwhelming desire to be validated, praised, and rewarded.”
The Coming Tech Labor Crunch, by Kurt Cagle.
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know
God bless you please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
— Simon and Garfunkel, Mrs. Robinson
Rejecting Software Engineering, by Eric Wise. “For something to be labeled as an engineering science in my opinion, it needs to have known values and be infinitely repeatable. Software development meets neither of these.”
Rails is written in the wrong language, a whiny post about how Rails should be written in Python. Actually I’d be very happy if we had that kind of web infrastructure the Python people have; Rack is only the beginning.
These are pictures I took by hanging cameras from kites, a hobby I’ve played with on and off over the years, by Randall Munroe.
Sweet reunion, Jamaica and Spain
We’re like how we were again
I’m in the tub you on the seat
Lick your lips as I soak my feet
— Amy Winehouse, You Know I’m No Good
Accessing AFS through the Web with Waklog, I believe in an AFS revival, really.
The Classe 10 is an innovative espresso machine of the highest class. Yum yum yum.
27jun2007
Rare “Smiling” Bird Photographed for First Time, I wouldn’t want to be photographed if I looked like that, either.
A magnified view of the tropical beach sand, bet you never saw that before.
jsonstore is a RESTful Atom store using a JSON representation, using WSGI.
I just want to scream…hello…
My god its been so long, never dreamed you’d return.
But now here you are, and here I am.
Hearts and thoughts they fade away.
— Pearl Jam, Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
What The Buddha Did Not Teach, by Geoff Hunt. “Sometimes his teachings have been misunderstood and sometimes have been presented in a way that causes confusion.”
Rhino on Rails, Steve Yegge on BarCamp and his Rails to Javascript port.
Carnap is a general purpose programming language for the next generation of many-core devices, many many-core systems and their applications. It introduces a process oriented programming model that allows programmers to seperate the concerns of data structures and the concurrent processes that act upon them.
The Deck, I love such houses.
I’ll swallow poison, until I grow immune.
I will scream my lungs out till it fills this room.
How much difference…?
How much difference does it make?
— Pearl Jam, Indifference
BoostCon’07 Trip Report, by Eric Niebler.
Lilu is an approach (and tool) that allows to keep Rails views untouched without all that Erb soup inside. Really great thing, I think. Also look at the slides, by Yurii Rashkovskii.
Google as predicted in 1964, pretty much awesome.
26jun2007
The Unporny Valley, PNSFW.
Weeki Wachee Springs is a natural tourist attraction located in Weeki Wachee, Florida, where underwater performances by “mermaids”, women dressed with fins about their legs as well as other fancy outfits, can be viewed in an aquarium-like setting in the spring of the Weeki Wachee River.
The DIY Guide to Becoming a (Real) Cyborg, yikes.
Saw things…saw things…saw things…saw things…
Clearer…clearer…
Once you were in my rearview mirror.
— Pearl Jam, Rearviewmirror
On The Horizon: Ten Things I like about Ruby 1.9, collected by Gregory Brown.
woah…. omg. reflections on mega-viewership, danah boyd feels what I got to know too: “When I post a well-thought out, well-written analysis, I get a few thousands hits and maybe a BoingBoing mention. So far, I’ve received 90K hits for this latest piece, the most problematic of essays I’ve ever shared publicly. Figures.” If you haven’t read it yet, read it now.
Testability Costs Too Much, by Gian Sampson-Wild. “The problem with testability is that even the most reasonable of success criteria can be non-testable.”
Human-to-Human Design, by Sharon Lee at A List Apart. “A good website is built on two basic truths—that the internet is an interactive medium and that the end user is in fact human.”
Constructors Considered Harmful, I really like Gilad Bracha’s recent writings.
tagdb is a small, embeddable tagging database using QDBM as a backing store written by Steve Dekorte. Must try it.
It’s a long road out of here
When you love me like you do
It’s too hard for me to leave you
— Juliette & the Licks, Long Road Out of Here
10 Useless or Even Dangerous First Aid Myths, good to know.
Git for Computer Scientists, is a good quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph.
25jun2007
Sake is system-wide Rake. It works pretty much like how you’d expect it to work: use it to install then run Rake tasks.
The World Needs More Dialog Boxes Like This, yay yay yay!
Lyon Italique currently features already more than 130 alternates, ligatures and swash characters that give an artistic expression to the text, all of which are automatically replaced through intelligent Opentype routines that also help to avoid most collisions and incorrect usages like a long s at the end of a word, or overlapping swashes. Damn lovely.
I never got to tell you
What I wanted to
And I cry about it now
I never got to tell you
What you meant to me
And I cry about it now
— Juliette & the Licks, I Never Got to Tell You What I Wanted to
Vor 40 Jahren: Was diese Welt braucht, ist Liebe, ist heute nicht anders. Aber wir haben mehr Satelliten.
Products Are People Too, Matt Webb’s talk from reboot 9.0. Recommended.
Google Scalability Conference Trip Report: MapReduce, BigTable, and Other Distributed System Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets, notes by Dare Obasanjo.
Steve Yegge ported Rails to JavaScript, WJW.
The Day the Web Goes Silent, “Not a moment of silence, but a full day of silence is planned by US-based webcasters, lots of them, in protest of the Copyright Royalty Board’s increase in royalty rates.”
Do you dream in color?, Mark Dominus wonders whether dreamt hallucinations are real.
If these reefs are islands, “The BBC revisited an amazingly interesting story last week when they explained that Japan is now growing coral reefs in a bid to extend their territorial sovereignty into the Philippine Sea.”
Ja, was ich hier geschrieben habe, macht im Einzelnen überhaupt nicht den Anspruch auf Neuheit; und darum gebe ich auch keine Quellen an, weil es mir gleichgültig ist, ob das was ich gedacht habe, vor mir schon ein anderer gedacht hat. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Rich Programmer Food, Steve Yegge on writing compilers.
Getting Productive with XMLMind, by James Elliott and Marc Loy. Interesting to see the current state of art in technical book publishing.
10 Sales and Marketing Tips I learned from Strippers, I think I saw that before somewhere, but it’s neat.
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace, by danah boyd.
21jun2007
In Praise of Pic, by Philipp K. Janert. Good old times.
How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord, Gregory Brown shows how AR can be used without Rails.
I see the world, feel the chill.
Which way to go? Windowsill.
I see the words on a rocking horse of time.
I see the verse in the rain.
— Pearl Jam, Release
A solstice occurs twice a year, whenever Earth’s axis tilts the most toward or away from the Sun, causing the Sun to be farthest north or south at noon. For example, today.
The quater-imaginary numeral system was first proposed by Donald Knuth in 1955, in a submission to a high-school science talent search. It is a non-standard positional numeral system which uses the imaginary number 2i as base. I came up with that myself, but later of course…
Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days, okay, I admit that it is impressive what the Mono guys are doing here.
The Labyrinth and the Stairway, “a vast fictional topography that exists within the walls of a mythological Roman city.”
What is MVC?, short intro by Curtis Poe.
I will walk with my hands bound…
I will walk with my face blood…
I will walk with my shadow flag…
Into your garden, garden of stone.
— Pearl Jam, Garden
XML, meet InDesign, by Simon St. Laurent. “I think most people who think of InDesign think of it as a better-supported QuarkXPress, rather than a FrameMaker targeted more at graphic designers.” Pretty interesting, there are not many FrameMaker “alternatives” out there…
The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare.
MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilet and gives you entertaining reading material once you get there. WJW.
20jun2007
Safari brings color-managed browsing to Windows, sorry, I read “Safari still fucks up PNGs”?
Results from Plat_forms 2007, e.g. “The Perl solutions are smaller than the Java and the PHP solutions”.
TDD Anti-Patterns, compilation by James Carr.
Hear my name. Take a good look. This could be the day.
Hold my hand. Walk beside me. I just need to say.
— Pearl Jam, Porch
Bundesregierung bestätigt die Unsinnigkeit von biometrischen Ausweisdokumenten, es geht doch: “Die Bundesregierung bekräftigt in ihrer Antwort die zentralen Argumente, die der CCC in den letzten Jahren gegen das Biometrie-Großprojekt vorgebracht hatte und entkräftet somit den Verdacht, biometrische Merkmale würden die Sicherheit von Ausweisdokumenten erhöhen.”
Apple Sees XSLT Light, Adds Javascript Invokable Client-side Transforms to Safari 3, M. David Peterson says. Not bad, not bad.
Twin Oaks is an intentional community in rural central Virginia, made up of around 85 adult members and 15 children. Since the community’s beginning in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality, and ecology.
This Woman is Supposed to Disgust You, didn’t work. “Fuck low-fat yogurt. All hail chili cheese fries!”
A distress signal is an internationally recognized means of obtaining help. Distress signals are commonly made by using a radio, displaying a visual object, or making noise from a distance.
Even flow, thoughts arrive like butterflies.
He don’t know so he chases them away.
Someday yet he’ll begin his life again.
Whispering hands gently lead him away…
— Pearl Jam, Even Flow
Python 3000 Status Update, Guido is an idiot: “reduce() is gone.”
Guide On How To Keep A Girl For Gamers, “Sometimes gamer guys spend too much time studying game strategies and forget how to keep their girlfriends.”
19jun2007
Sitali pranayam, “Curl the tongue and protrude it slightly past the lips. Inhale deeply and smoothly through the tongue and mouth. Exhale through the nose.” Has a chilling effect.
Coders at Work, site for Peter Seibel’s latest book.
Required Reading: the next 10 years, Lawrence Lessig says: “I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues. Why and what are explained in the extended entry below.” I kind of guessed it already, and wish him good luck.
Now take me dancing
At the Disco
Where you buy your
Winniebago
I wanna ride on a white horse
I want to ride on a white horse
— Goldfrapp, Ride A White Horse
Humuhumunukunukuapuaa, also known as reef triggerfish, is endemic to the salt water coasts of various central and south Pacific Ocean islands. The name is longer than the fish.
The Original Sushi Pillow, “Finally you can purchase a giant sushi in the form of a soft and comfortable pillow! Our pillows are each handmade and come in a variety of styles: rolls, nigiri, and appetizer styles.” WJW.
Enabling the debug menu on Safari for Windows, good to know.
Bike activists going guerrilla, “Cycling ‘repair squad’ takes to the streets over slow expansion of bike lane program.” Good stuff in Toronto.
Here we go again
We’re going round and round
Here we go again
We’re going round and round
— Goldfrapp, You Never Know
How to Test if a Plant Is Edible, I’d say: 1) try it, 2) if it’s yummy, eat more.
Thank You, Callgrind!, by chromatic. “To make the most of my available time, I need a good profiler.”
18jun2007
Six months of veganism, Joi Ito summarizes.
The SDF Public Access UNIX System Celebrates 20 Years!, “SDFers pride themselves on the fact that theirs is one of the last bastions of “the real INTERNET”, out of the reach and scope of the commercialism and advertising of the DOT COM entities.” Big congratulations! (I’m trying to remember my account…)
Blue Electric Manifesto, verdient eine genauere Analyse und Kommentar, nicht zu vergessen eine englische Übersetzung.
onetrip.org is a web^WiPhone app to help you shopping.
Spherical Designs, by R. H. Hardin and N. J. A. Sloane. A library of putatively optimal spherical t-designs: How should one place N points on a sphere for use in numerical integration with equal weights? Includes many ready-made solutions. Great. (Been searching for this for months, literally.)
It is our function as artists to make the spectator to see the world our way,
not his way.
— Le Tigre, Slideshow at Free University
SCVT is a executable FORTRAN90 program, using double precision arithmetic, which places N well-separated points on the unit sphere in 3D.
Handy Mathematics Facts for Graphics.
Mistakes in Experimental Design and Interpretation, by Peter Norvig. “By scrutinizing experiments against the checklist provided here, you have a better chance of separating truth from fiction.”
More Mysteries of the Number 24, by John Baez. “I’ve always dreamed of writing a book called My Favorite Numbers. In this book, chapter 24 would be longer than most.”
More crackers please, more crackers please
You want what you want but you don’t wanna be on your knees
Who does your… who does your hair?
— Le Tigre, Deceptacon
The Chinese telegraph code is a four-digit decimal code for electrically telegraphing messages written with Chinese characters. Easy to pick up, I guess.
10 Things We Can Learn From Apple, “The most common reason given is Apple’s rabid devotion to design.”
Flopping again! Japanese trail the world in sex once more, “Results of this year’s Durex Global Sex Survey have come out and once again the Japanese have come dead last when it comes to sex among over 26,000 people from 26 countries across the world.”
17jun2007
A series of very small lists, by Mark Pilgrim.
List of German expressions in English, at Wikipedia.
Advice for presentations: It happens!, by Joe Clark. This is the ultimate post on presenting and what can go wrong. Read it.
You were my oxygen
The thing that made me think I could escape
This is a thank you song for Les and Ray
— Le Tigre, Les and Ray
On Your Desktop is a new blog where Internet celebrities show off their desktop. Not utterly exciting yet, but the idea is definitely interesting.
Elevator Trek: The Next Generation, by Khoi Vinh. “We Had to Break the Elevator in Order to Improve It”
How a Motherboard is Made, with many pictures.
Yould is a generator for pronounceable random words. It uses Markov chains trained on a large body of prose. Yould generates good domain names.
Come in tower
All our data’s wrong
Research inconsistent
We misread it all
— Le Tigre, Phanta
The Day You Became A Better Writer, Scott Adams: “I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.”
How to write tolerably efficient optimzation code without really trying…, or: The (freely generated module over the (min,+)-semiring)-monad.
Stupors, mmmmh, food.
Different Space Shuttles, lovely post by _why. Must see.
10 Ways to Make Laziness Work for You, “Here’s an observation: often the smartest people are the laziest ones.” Just look at me!
Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Fanny Trollope. First published in 1832. Full text online.
16jun2007
Are Computer Keyboards Dishwasher Safe?, not if they’re attached to an iBook, I guess.
Buckytree is an implicit data structure for O(NlogN) spatial sort and O(logN)? spatial search of dimensional objects. Because the data structure is implicit, no spatial index is required. When present, the spatial index can be a simple array without pointers. Sounds very neat.
Chairs. Many of them.
git.debian.org, lots of repos there.
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— P. B. Shelley, Ozymandias of Egypt
US time capsule yields rusty car, “A car buried in Oklahoma in 1957 as a time capsule to mark the US state’s 50th anniversary has caused some dismay after being finally unearthed.” IMO, this is a very serious problem: imagine what’s left over of today in 250 years?
The Octopus: Building Distributed Systems by Centralizing Everything (PDF), by Francisco J Ballesteros, Pedro de las Heras, Enrique Soriano, and Spyros Lalis.
Pyramus und Thisbe, deutsch und lateinisch.
Sleep Tracker, how do you move at night?, Anita Lillie wondered.
The Monolith Game, by Julius Yang. “Required pieces: One giant steel monolith, 1x4x9 feet. Two or more teams of people. One or more referees, mutually chosen by the teams.”
The Storm Room, “Instead of TV, it seems, you can watch 3D reconstructions of ancient storms – hopefully in surround-sound.”
RESTify DayTrader, Joe Gregorio says: “Why build a RESTful web service for DayTrader? Because I frequently hear that REST can’t be applied to complex situations. I also want to use the example as motivation for talking about some of the idioms that are available to handle more extensive requirements.”
What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?
What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?
What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?
What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?
Misogynist? Genius?
Misogynist! Genius!
Misogynist! Genius!
Misogynist! Genius!
— Le Tigre, What’s yr take on Cassavetes
I Guess Matz Will Not Be Retiring, and there was much rejoicing.
Everything is dynamically typed, “Static typing feels a lot like Aristotelian categorisation: one and only one type for each variable.”
See Dog Run, by daqron. “Behavioral observations on the introduction of autonomous motility to a digitally-entrenched corporate whore.”
Incident No. 34: A Magic Milk, by _why the lucky stiff.
15jun2007
Distel = Emacs erlang-mode++, Bill Clementson shows off a really cool tool for Erlang developers that use Emacs.
9ne (pronounced “nine”) is an online code editor based on Emacs. Wow.
A tech junkie’s dilemma, Andrew Lim goes without gadgets.
And you can struggle all your life
Or make it overnight
Baby you got the talent
But we re looking for a different type–
— Dan Bern, Company Town
Pluto status suffers another blow, hail Eris!
Jottin’ to the Fullest, vJot is “a simple note-taking app inspired by a sweet OS X jotter called Notational Velocity.” Neat, really.
strace -c is worth gold.Aerial Conversationalists, David Maisel rocks.
Why Do People Write Free Documentation? Results of a Survey, by Andy Oram. “A unique survey ran on O’Reilly’s web site during the first three months of 2007, aimed at people who contribute free documentation to online mailing lists, web sites, and other forums. The survey garnered 354 responses, which in itself indicates the thriving state of free documentation and the dedication of the people who write it.”
Katahdin is a programming language where the syntax and semantics are mutable at runtime. Uses PEGs.
HTML5 differences from HTML4, hosted at w3.org. Required reading, actually.
That when the rain comes down
And the first-born-son is taken
And the clouds darken the town
They will pass over
— Dan Bern, They Will Pass Over
Chaos Computer Club ruft zum Boykott der biometrischen Vollerfassung auf, “Freitag letzter Woche wurde das neue Passgesetz im Bundesrat durchgewunken. Damit werden ab dem 1. November zusätzlich zum digitalen Gesichtsbild die Abdrücke zweier Finger in den Reisepass aufgenommen.” “Der Chaos Computer Club ruft daher alle Bürger auf, die Abnahme der Fingerabdrücke zu boykottieren. Bereits wenn sich ein kleiner Teil der Bevölkerung der erkennungsdienstlichen Behandlung verweigert, kann die Totalüberwachung noch verhindert werden.”
You said it, an overview of how Dabble DB is used.
Worst 007 Gadgets, a Phone Booth Trap?? WJW.
14jun2007
Highly Efficient 4 Way Merging, eeeevil hacky code. WJW.
The Minister of Information, New York Magazine on Edward Tufte.
A Holiday Gantry Web Application, by Phil Crow. Scaffolding for Perl.
So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
— Bob Dylan, With God On Our Side
Death deity, comprehensive list on Wikipedia.
Real World Haskell, a short ToC and some FAQ is already up for the book.
Test Libraries for Erlang, an overview by Bill Clementson. I’m not yet satisfied with these… I’d love if there was something test/spec like.
A Simple, Lightweight JavaScript Templating Engine, ERB inspired.
Fantasy Press Releases, by Rick Jelliffe. “Here are the press releases I’d like to be reading…”, personally, I’d love to read “ODF and OpenDoc abanoned in favor of XHTML2”.
Ich hab Abitur
Ich bin so stolz dafür
Ich hab mich jahrelang so durch geschwitzt
Doch jetzt ist die Sache voll geritzt
Ich hab den Beweis, dass ich nicht blöd sein kann
Wer hätte das je von mir gedacht?
— Die Toten Hosen, Abitur
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a critique by Mark Dominus. “But The Goblet of Fire has been bothering me for years now, because its plot is so very stupid.”
A New Identity for Web Services, by Jason Levitt. How to do authentication and identification in web services.
13jun2007
The Church Code, in Ruby by Logan Capaldo. Good stuff.
Llama (notable list), is gone. :(
Six Essential Language Agnostic Programming Books, selected by Scott Hanselman. Knuth is missing IMO.
Well it’s Ninth and Hennepin
All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill
— Tom Waits, 9th & Hennepin
ZFS on a laptop?, damn is that hot! Want have.
Home Again, Home Again, “an “undisclosed billionaire” has paid $475 million for a private Airbus A380 passenger jet.”
LOLPG, WJW.
Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial (aka: How rake turned me into an alcoholic), by Gregg Pollack.
Uncle Phil can’t live without his pills
He has emphysema and he’s almost blind
And we must find out where the money is
Get it now before he loses his mind
— Tom Waits, Cemetery Polka
Creating a Legendary Coat, by why the lucky stiff.
How to calculate binomial coefficients, why, of course you cancel the factorials…
Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering, I vastly prefer the Apple approach and consider Microsoft’s thing plain ugly.
12jun2007
Folds and continuation-passing-style, I’ve come up with CPSing folds myself, really.
Some interesting Islands and Lakes, with recursion!
That Old Marshmallow Maze Spell, by Steve Yegge.
Slip him a picture of our Jesus
Or give him a spoon to dig a hole
What all he done ain’t no one’s business
But he’ll need blankets for the cold
— Tom Waits, Walking Spanish
You Are Not a Robot, by Jonathan Kahn at A List Apart. “Ever worry you’ll arrive at work to find that your swivel chair has been replaced by a super-intelligent software appliance that can create seven user-centered websites in a single CPU cycle?”
Frameworks for Designers, by Jeff Croft at A List Apart. “Learn to harness the power of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices to focus on what is unique about the project at hand.” What’s there for CSS beyond YUI?
Thank You, It’s All Text!, chromatic tells about a plugin that let’s you edit textareas with real editors.
Drank with all the Chinamen,
walked the sewers of Paris
I danced along a colored wind,
dangled from a rope of sand
You must say goodbye to me
— Tom Waits, Singapore
Lucida Grande On Windows!!, everybody please do that.
WWDC 2007 Keynote News, John Gruber thinks it was a lot less spectacular than I thought it was. But then he has more detail.
11jun2007
sitening@twitter, “Apple’s WWDC 2007 Keynote will be broadcast here!” Great, because I don’t have time tonight.
For the record…, Olympia Logo by Johnson Banks. Nice one.
Tent camping for the city dweller, awesome hack.
Here come the Big Black Mariah, here come the Big Black Mariah
Here come the Big Black Mariah, I seen that big black Ford
Cut through the canebrake, oh yeah
— Tom Waits, Big Black Mariah
Why was Paris Hilton released?, “Paris Hilton’s billionaire grandfather donated money to the election campaign of the sheriff who released the 26-year-old American hotel heiress from jail, it has been revealed.” WJW.
The Unix Power Classic: A book about the Unix Way and its power , “This is my evolving hacker-oriented version of the Tao Te Ching (literally “way power classic”).”
TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is far superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks. Uses a scripting language(!).
Said roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never coming back here no more
The moon in the window and a bird on the pole
We can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands, clap hands, clap hands
— Tom Waits, Tom Waits Clap Hands
Sudoku solver in PostScript, neato.
People can’t be bothered to make easy energy savings, I hardly can believe that “Lighting, for instance, accounts for some 19% of the world’s electricity use.”
10jun2007
twoticketsplease.de, truly awesome site. (Can we have a site that does that with Twitter?)
splendor in the grass, Lydia bei Hochzeiten. Köstlich.
Namespaces diagram for Open XML, by Rick Jelliffe. “[T]he schemas are quite complex, with about 27 namespaces organized into about 86 different schema documents.” This is fucking nuts.
nowMap is a simple organisation tool—just a single sheet of paper. Looks very good.
‘Bout four in the morning on a Sunday
Sacco drinking whiskey in church
Half pint of Festival brandy
That boy ‘bout to fall right off his perch
— Tom Waits, Union Square
iconlet searches for icons. It found a cake, so it’s good.
The AfterEllen.com Hot 100 List, selected by lesbians. They have good taste. :-)
An Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal Interface Theme Shows Up for the WWDC Preview Build of Mac OS X Leopard, by John Gruber. I love it.
A Quick Overview of Basic CoreData Concepts, “Somebody asked me today about how to go about creating a Cocoa app which allows Rails-style object-relational mapping. In other words, how do you model a schema in a data store without having to re-model all of it in code? This is exactly what Core Data is designed for.”
Someone’s Selling The Poignant Guide, “This shopkeeper is totally within rights to do this.”, but _why would prefer a different approach.
My head is spinning round, my heart is in my shoes, yeah
I went and set the Thames on fire, oh, now I must come back down
She’s laughing in her sleeve boys, I can feel it in my bones
Oh, but anywhere I’m gonna lay my head, I’m gonna call my home
— Tom Waits, Anywhere I Lay My Head
Manipulierbarkeit von Wahlcomputern gutachterlich belegt, “Eine Untersuchung des Chaos Computer Club beweist, dass die in Deutschland eingesetzten Wahlcomputer einfach zu manipulieren sind. Die Zulassung der Computer für deutsche Wahlen muss schnellstmöglich widerrufen werden.”
A Collection of Funny Signs from Around the World, has some nice stuff.
50 signs you’re a blogaholic, by Jonathan Deamer. I apply for #1, #5, #15, #17, #27, #41, #48… not that bad yet.
09jun2007
APP on the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely, good points by Bill de hÓra. But read the critique by Dare Obasanjo linked there first.
Anger Management, pretty mean but fun.
JRuby 1.0, “The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.0!” Big congratz to everyone involved.
There’s a hole in the ladder, a fence we can climb
Mad as a hatter, you’re thin as a dime
Go out to the meadow, the hills are a-green
Sing me a rainbow, steal me a dream
— Tom Waits, Diamonds & Gold
Treadmill Bike (Video), cool idea.
ECMAScript Edition 4 Reference Implementation, now in SML. A pre-release is available.
Solving a Sudoku with 1 SQL-statement: the Model-clause, by Anton Scheffer. Eeeevil.
Driving for Maximum Fuel Efficiency, by Liar. “I’m strange. I love to measure things. I’ve used a GPS receiver to find the optimal parking situation at work, I measure the costs of meetings (based on estimates of what I think people make), and I’ve even measured the effects of different driving techniques and the resulting impact on fuel economy. Yes, I’m strange.”
Must be blind love, only kind of love is stone blind love
Blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh it’s blind love, stone blind love
It’s your stone blind love
— Tom Waits, Blind Love
Phoning glaciers at 3am, WJW. “The Guardian tells us today about a “unique work of art” that “invites viewers to phone a glacier in Iceland – and listen to its death throes, live, through a microphone submerged deep in the bitterly cold lagoon.””
A Functional Description of TeX’s Formula Layout, by Reinhold Heckmann and Reinhard Wilhelm. “In this paper, we present a re-implementation of TeX’s formula layout algorithm in the functional language SML, thereby providing a more readable description of the algorithm, extracted from the monolithical TeX system.” How I wish I had that when I was young, stupid and serious about rewriting TeX.
Counting transitive relations, Mark Dominus puzzles: “For the last week I’ve been trying to find a good way to calculate the number of transitive relations on a set with three elements.”
08jun2007
Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved Scalability, Resilience and Flexibility by Alan Shieh, Andrew C. Myers, and Emin Gun Sirer. This sounds really awesome.
JoCaml is Objective Caml plus the join calculus, that is, OCaml extended for concurrent and distributed programming. Completely rewritten.
The blind leading the blind, PHP code as WTF.
Wbox aims to help you having fun while testing HTTP related stuff. Looks like a highly useful tool.
Egyptian Ratscrew is an unusual, extremely fast-paced game vaguely reminiscent of slapjack, spit, speed, stress, nurse, etc. for two or more players. It can get pretty hot. Anyone can play, but to be good requires quick thinking, fast reflexes, and tough hands.
Banging on the table with an old tin cup
Sing I’ll never kiss a Gun Street girl again
Never kiss a Gun Street girl again
I’ll never kiss a Gun Street girl again
— Tom Waits, Gun Street Girl
The Last Calligraphers, “The newspaper employees three full-time calligraphers who painstakingly handwrite and manually typeset the paper the same way they have since 1927.” Awesome.
The CIA’s favorite form of torture, “Sensory deprivation, as CIA research and other agency interrogation materials demonstrate, is a remarkably simple concept. It can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs.”
Deputy is a C compiler that is capable of preventing common C programming errors, including out-of-bounds memory accesses as well as many other common type-safety errors. It is designed to work on real-world code, up to and including the Linux kernel itself.
Rails Testing: Not Just for the Paranoid, by Gregory Brown. Good article about a thing I never really got around doing.
Better Code Through Destruction, by Igor Gariev. Perl5 really can’t detect circular references? Heck, even the Python guys manage that.
1A Zaun, Standort Heiligendamm, nur an Selbstabholer, WJW.
Multicore Hardware and the Future of Ruby, by David Fayram. “It isn’t surprising that many Ruby libraries prefer to scale at the process level. The argument for process-level concurrency is a good one: It’s dead simple.”
So hang down your head for sorrow, hang down your head for me
Hang down your head, hang down your head, hang down your head Marie
— Tom Waits, Hang Down Your Head
Scala impressed Patrick Logan more than he thought a priori.
One first senses a disquieting buzzing sound, “The gallery it’s displayed in looks a bit like an empty room. You do see a series of copper plates hanging above you in space, and there’s a triangle, attached to wires, hovering alone in the center, like a Modernist chandelier.”
07jun2007
The Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance is an interdisciplinary research database containing documentation centering on the reception of antiquity, a focus of Renaissance studies.
MovableType 4 goes GPL. Great thing.
It’s True-gle!, “FeedBurner has been acquired by Google.”
The LightHive: Luminous Architectural Surveillance, seriously cool shots.
Do we need WADL?, Joe Gregorio says no.
Ruby and methods with weird names, 100 points for Tomasz Węgrzanowski: “Every use of text-based runtime code generation is a failure of language’s reflection model.”
The long goodbye, “Today, we look back at 25 years of other changes in our lives.” I don’t miss most…
Was wir wollen, können wir erreichen.
Wenn wir wollen, stehen alle Räder still.
Wir haben keine Angst zu kämpfen,
denn die Freiheit ist unser Ziel.
Denn die Freiheit ist unser Ziel.
Alles, was uns fehlt, ist die Solidarität.
Alles, was uns fehlt, ist die Solidarität.
— Ton Steine Scherben, Solidarität
The blob, “The largest oil spill in American history is apparently: 1) in New York City, 2) nearly a century old, and 3) beginning to re-surface under Greenpoint, Brooklyn.”
XQuery, the Server Language, Kurt Cagle offers an interesting perspective on the future utility of XQuery as a server-side development language.
Announcing Gecode/R, Andreas Launila says: “Hello, I’m working on Gecode/R, a Ruby interface to Gecode, allowing constraint programming in Ruby.” Cool stuff.
EmacsHaiku, “A place for haiku of a decidedly Emacs bent.”
The Global Oh Noes, uncov on global warming.
Tasty hashes, Adriano Ferreira on renaming Hash to Dict in Perl6. “Well, after this, the discussion gained a gastronomic dimension and Perl got a new slogan: “At least nobody can say that Perl is bad taste!””
Apple to use Sun’s ZFS in Leopard, Woooot!
WikiCharts: Top 1000, Sex ranked #17.
Thank You, grep!, chromatic is soo right.
Perlcast #042: Curtis “Ovid” Poe talks about Perl testing and TAP::Parser.
There are no mistakes in life some people say
It is true sometimes you can see it that way.
But people don’t live or die, people just float.
She went with the man
In the long black coat.
— Bob Dylan, Man In The Long Black Coat
One year with Linux, summary by Mark Pilgrim.
Merging Functions, Modules, Classes, the whole nine yards…, a kind of clever idea.
HOPL III: Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991–2006, call me naive, but I didn’t know the real world was that ugly.
Amazing Tales From The True Life Of Rachel McAdams, by Why The Lucky Stiff.
Starting a new “Rails Project Spotlight” series, by Jeremy McAnally. “The idea is that I’ll post an entry once or twice a month about a new and active Rails project that’s looking for more exposure.”
Recapping this week in Manhattan, Postopolis! summary at BLDG BLOG.
June Blogging Contest, “the sixth, and final, month of the On Ruby/Apress blogging contest.” This time: “Other than Rails, what is your favorite Ruby Gem, and why?” I may give that a try.
Trends in Functional Programming 2007: Draft Proceedings, 435 pages cool stuff.
Comapping is a flash-based collaborative mindmapper. Looks usable.
We live in a political world,
Where peace is not welcome at all,
It’s turned away from the door to wander some more,
Or put up against the wall.
— Bob Dylan, Political World
DataMapper is an alpha Ruby O/R Mapper based on the DataMapper pattern.
rubystammtisch.at got a tumblelog.
list of non-english social network sites, compiled by danah boyd.
rubyrockstars.com helps find freelance developers, contractors and full-time employees for Ruby and Ruby on Rails Jobs.
Emacs 22 has been released, to quote #emacs: “Lucifer selling ice skates”.
01jun2007
Edlin is still available in Microsoft Windows operating systems up to and including Windows Vista since NTVDM’s DOS support was based on MS-DOS version 5.0. Yikes!
Analysis of Casino Design, “A prodigious amount of thought goes into the design and layout of a casino’s gambling floor. The layout of slot machines and card tables is carefully designed in order to maximize the casino’s profits and lure customers into the games.”
Water figures, WJW.
I and I
In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.
I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives.
— Bob Dylan, I and I
Dzen is a general purpose messaging, notification and menuing program for X11. It was desigend to be scriptable in any language and integrate well with window managers like dwm, wmii and xmonad.
The Compcert back-end is a compiler that generates PowerPC assembly code from a low-level intermediate language called Cminor and a slightly more expressive intermediate language called Csharpminor. The particularity of this compiler is that it is written mostly within the specification language of the Coq proof assistant, and its correctness — the fact that the generated assembly code is semantically equivalent to its source program — was entirely proved within the Coq proof assistant.
Inches Too Tall for Tunnel, Rig Plies It Anyway, pwned. I’d so love to see a video of that.
7568, by Sgt York. “First, they came for the smallest of us, and I did nothing for I was large.”
CAS+: Single Sign-On with Jifty (Part 1), by Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp.
And them Caribbean winds still blow from Nassau to Mexico
Fanning the flames in the furnace of desire
And them distant ships of liberty on them iron waves so bold and free,
Bringing everything that’s near to me nearer to the fire.
— Bob Dylan, Caribbean Wind
Planet Emacsen, for people living with the extensible, self-documenting text editor. Cool.
Interview and Book Excerpt: RESTful Web Services, “Stefan Tilkov had a chance to talk to the authors about their motivations for writing this book and their views on REST and Web services.”
Apple’s DRM-Free AAC Files Contain More Than Just Names and Email Addresses, the EFF says. Whoa.
Top 15 Google Street View Sightings, I love #2, Crime in progress.
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