Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31aug2007
Tools of The Effective Developer: Personal Logs, I’m starting one soon too.
View PDF/PS/DVI files in an Emacs buffer, Bill Clementson shows a cool Emacs package.
But she smiled sweetly
She smiled sweetly
She smiled sweetly
And said don’t worry
Oh, no no no
Oh, no no no
Oh, no no no
— Rolling Stones, She Smiled Sweetly
Chaos Computer Club veröffentlicht Entwurf des BKA-Gesetzes, “Wenn das BKA-Gesetz in der vorliegenden Fassung verabschiedet wird, entsteht de facto eine Geheimpolizei, wie sie in Deutschland zuletzt in der DDR existierte.” Ich hoffe es ist ein Witz…
unchan is an image board for fans and haters of web 2.0 alike. it was created strictly for the lulz, and should be used accordingly.
The TeX Gyre (TG) Collection of Fonts, standard OpenType faces for TeX.
Bell’s going to ring
Hear the alarms
Better tell the fire chief
To quit playing cards
— Rolling Stones, Sparks Will Fly
Superators: neat Ruby hack, tricky tricky.
Blueprint 0.5: The Experiment, back to pixels (eech!), but now with 24 columns. (Yay.)
30aug2007
How Not to Die, essay by Paul Graham.
Defunc’ed Join Calculus, now in Haskell, “This module defines alternative semantics for join calculus (JC) by means of providing an interpreter.”
Ratification Results, “The Steering Committee therefore ratifies the draft numbered 5.97 as the official “Revised6 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme”. The Editors are directed to prepare the final text of the document, correcting only minor errata.” I really wonder what R7RS will look like..
Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Pornography Downloads, by j1mmy. PNSFW, enjoy.
No matter where I go baby, no matter what I do
I spend my whole life honey, just thinking of you
Yeah it don’t seem to matter, who’s right and who’s wrong
I want to tell you how I feel now, in the words of this song
— Rolling Stones, Keys To Your Love
Introducing TrimPath Junction, by Jack Herrington and Steve Yen. “Junction is an all JavaScript framework that closely models the Ruby on Rails model-view-controller design pattern and implementation. And with the help of the Helma JavaScript web server, it runs the same code both on the client and on the server. Exactly the same code, in fact.”
Robot City, “South Korea plans to build a whole new city dedicated to the robotics industry.”
That diagram (Let me ring your bell), Rick Jelliffe shows Rob Wier’s 2006 diagram comparing the number of pages of various standards versus the time they spent in committee.
CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing, by Håkon Wium Lie at A List Apart. I’d totally love custom typefaces on the web.
Put Your Content in My Pocket, by Craig Hockenberry at A List Apart. First part of a series explaining how to make iPhone-friendly sites.
CouchDb updates, Jan Lehnardt has more details on the recent changes. (Yay for killing XML and Fabric.)
New Squeak UI Enhancements Released, Vista look != Enhanced IMO.
Ruport 1.2, everyone’s favourite Ruby report generator, has been released.
‘average rainfall in the UK’ poster, this is cool.
In another land where the breeze and the
Trees and flowers were blue
I stood and held your hand.
And the grass grew high and the feathers floated by
I stood and held your hand.
— Rolling Stones, In Another Land
Wild Contemporary Furniture, crazy.
Full of Ambition, a new Ruby query language for databases. “Ideally, this thing could turn into something like Rack for databases.”
Re: clarification on git, central repositories and commit access lists, Linus on why decentral development works well for big projects too.
27aug2007
Fill-in-the-Blanks, been using that UI design technique in some small webapps already.
Online-Durchsuchung bei der Bundesregierung, “Andy Müller-Maguhn, Sprecher des CCC, sagte hierzu: “Die Behauptung des BMI, die Sicherheitsbehörden und das Bundesministerium des Innern (BMI) verfügten “grundsätzlich über genügenden Sachverstand”, erscheint angesichts der Unfähigkeit, Spionage-Trojaner selbst in sensibelsten Bereichen wie im Kanzleramt zu verhindern, als Pfeifen im dunklen Wald.””
Translations, “what we want to show you is a nice perspective we learned here last week that relates multiple ways to interpret natural and programming languages.”
Don’t you know you’ve got it in for me
I knew it right from the start
I’m still learning my lines baby
Since you’ve rewritten my part
— Rolling Stones, Infamy
My Favorite Books, danah boyd’s list.
Exploring Erlang, slides by Bob Ippolito from C4[1].
Emacs markdown-mode, I wish it could refactor links and was optionally a minor mode.
Meta means that you step back from your own place. What you used to do is now what you see. What you were is now what you act on. — Guy Steele, Growing A Language
Kindergarten Quantum Mechanics, by Bob Coecke. “These lecture notes survey some joint work with Samson Abramsky as it was presented by me at several conferences in the summer of 2005. It concerns ‘doing quantum mechanics using only pictures of lines, squares, triangles and diamonds’.”
GNU Cim is a compiler for the programming language Simula that compiles to C.
Introducing Fieldnotes, could these finally have a pocket-appropriate size?
26aug2007
Tumblelogging: don’t think about it, just write, we made it into the Daily Telegraph!
Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings, I really like this idea.
Gambit-C v4.0.0 is now available. “Version 4 also marks the beginning of the Gambit source code repository managed by Mercurial.”
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the hotel california
Any time of year, you can find it here
— Eagles, Hotel California
buzhug is a fast, pure-Python database engine, using a syntax that Python programmers should find very intuitive.
Java needs an overhaul, by Russell Beattie. Full of awesome quotes: “the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, it’s going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.”, “But in general Java is yesterday’s technology.”, “I just don’t want to waste my server’s resources on a bloated JVM.”, “There’s something about the Java culture which just seems to encourage obtuse solutions over simplicity.”
A functional correspondence between evaluators and abstract machines, by Mads Sig Ager, Dariusz Biernacki, Olivier Danvy, and Jan Midtgaard. “We bridge the gap between functional evaluators and abstract machines for the lambda-calculus, using closure conversion, transformation into continuation-passing style, and defunctionalization of continuations.”
VamOz is a visual abstract machine executing kernel language programs as defined in the book Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. The idea is to give students a tool with which they can increase their understanding of how the abstract machine computes.
CouchDb, big changes coming, great news: “Jan and I have been doing a bunch of work converting CouchDb over to use JSON instead of XML and Javascript instead of a custom query language.”
Hello. Welcome to my squash cave. “A Roman bath, a cinema for two dozen friends, even a subterranean tennis court – the super-rich are transforming their London homes, even if it means digging dozens of feet undergound.”
I done my traveling
I done my traveling
From now on, it’s just gambling,
That I’ll be doing here
Be doing here
— Dan Bern, Cowboy
compiling ruby for the iphone, Courtenay tried but I doesn’t yet really work.
Simon Cozens’ Books, put into a wiki.
Jack Kerouac Book Covers, “A selection of front covers of various editions of On the Road.” I have Penguin 1972 and Rororo 1968.
An Accidental Simula User, Luca Cardelli, very good slides, highly recommended.
23aug2007
Holding a Program in Ones Head, essay by Paul Graham. “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on.”
Cubulus OLAP, a 3kloc(!) Python Open Source aggregation engine with slice & dice web interface.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade
Jacl is a self-contained implementation of a Tcl interpreter, written entirely in Java. If one evil is not enough for you…
The 38th Signal, a funny parody blog.
Cardboard Wiggle Stool, want have. I wonder whether it’s comfortable, though.
Searching for Non-Toxic Stimulation, by Noah Gift. Does sex count?
Extreme Agility with jMatter, by Eitan Suez. It’s a kind of NakedObjects-like sytem for Java.
Object Initialization and Construction Revisited, by Gilad Bracha. “Below is a standard example – a class representing points in the plane. What’s non-standard is that it is written in Newspeak, an experimental language in the style of Smalltalk, which I and some of my colleagues are working on right now.” It’s an interesting language IMO.
“Haskell Curry? Yes, I dated his daughter.”, WJW.
It’s nice to talk to you today
It’s very pleasant anyway
Is this as far as you go, girl
But I’ll let you guess
You can get me
If you let me oh yes
— Rolling Stones, If You Let Me
What Is Object Oriented Programming?, food for thought.
Introduction to Statistical Thought, a free book using R.
Soup is a new tumblelog hoster. Looks great.
Thoughts on the Social Graph, by Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon. “People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.” Finally a solution in sight!
K Idioms, a huge list.
22aug2007
Seam Carving for content-aware image resizing, this is so awesome. Watch the demo.
AnlgoHaskell: The Aftermath, summary by Neil Mitchell.
Installer.app is a UIKit based package manager for the iPhone. It works by downloading packages over WiFi (wireless networking) or EDGE. It supports installing, updating and uninstalling applications. That was quick.
Get in the groove and let the good times roll
We’re gonna stay here to soothe our soul
It could take all night long
— Rolling Stones, Good Times
Ghazal is a poetic form consisting of couplets which share a rhyme and a refrain. Each line must share the same meter.
Ludwig Feuerbach auf Wikipedia. Hervorragender Artikel.
Sky: The final frontier, Google Earth now lets you look up as well as down.
Search Engine Marketeers are the new script kiddies, …or how Vadim Smelyansky got pwned. Interesting story.
suffixtree is a Haskell library for lazy, efficient suffix tree construction, search, and traversal.
History of Writing, “The advent of a writing system, however, seems to coincide with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement.”
Creating a Personal Research Agenda, “A Research Agenda is a list of questions to focus on – they are the destinations you are tacking towards, the organizing principle around which you work. You might not be focusing on all of them all the time, but just formulating a list and putting it down will cause your mind to roll over them in the background like a kind of background thread.”
Book Review: Forbidden Lego, WJW.
What is a Gerbe?, by Nigel Hitchin. Uhh.
So if you’re down on your luck
And you can’t harmonize
Find a girl with far away
And if you’re downright disgusted
And life ain’t worth a dime
Get a girl with far away eyes
— Rolling Stones, Far Away Eyes
Airborne Geology, “One of several interesting things I’ve found in Alan Weisman’s new book The World Without Us is his rhetorical approach to the industrial burning of fossil fuel. He refers to burning oil and coal as a way of “tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky” – that is, it’s “carbon we have mined from the Earth and loaded into the air.””
Geek birthday, “I am a complete geek, aided and abetted by my lovely wife. She has been slaving for some time on some fingerless gloves, embroidered – in true thug style – on the knuckles with ‘car’ and ‘cdr’, and on the insides of the thumbs with parentheses.” Whoa!
Meanwhile, a fantastic and twisty interactive comic. Heck, I spent hours in it.
21aug2007
Vertical Centering with a Floated Shim, cool trick.
Deploying Rails Applications “is now out in beta. As a founder of Engine Yard, Ezra is one of the most experienced people in the world when it comes to Rails deployment. As the author of nine books (including From Java to Ruby, Bruce brings a wonderful writing style to the book.”
When I hear the drummer, get me in the groove
When I hear the guitar, makes me wanna move
Can you feel the magic, floatin’ in the air?
Can you feel the magic? Oh, yeah
— Rolling Stones, Can You Hear The Music
I love typography, newish typography blog.
Building an Enterprise-Scale Database for RDF Data (PDF), by Andrae Muys. Mulgara RDF store uses Okasakis functional data structures.
Arsebook is an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU HATE. Yay!
redditmedia.com, third-party aggregation with media links only. With previews!
It’s beginning to make me angry
I’m beginning to hate it
You’re a user, you’re a user
I’m gonna shake you
— Rolling Stones, Dirty Work
Diet Coke is 99% Water (And That Is Now a Good Thing), by Steven D. Levitt. Often cheaper even.
Who Knew is an information design network devoted to ‘difficult content’ - ideas and issues that are commonly misunderstood and censored. Every 3 months, students graphically communicate texts considered complex, confusing and/or controversial – things that make us go, “Who knew?”
20aug2007
Helma, the closest thing to a convenient Lisp web app server, at least according to Manuel.
b3rnst3in, “Bernstein / Sendmail brennt / Bernstein / Zonefiles fliegen in der Luft”… mit MP3.
Derinkuyu, or: the allure of the underground city, “what would happen to the Earth if humans disappeared overnight? What would humans leave behind – and how long would those remnants last?”
Don’t drive any faster than the angels can fly
I see you racing around like the speed of light
I see you walking around out there
Wind is flying through your hair
I know you just won’t listen but I try
Don’t drive any faster than the angels can fly
— Dan Bern, Angels
Maffee ist Kaffee, der mit kochender Mate anstatt Wasser aufgebrüht wird. In ihm vereinen sich des Hackers Lieblingsgetränke in harmonischem Zusammenspiel – Kaffee und Mate sind das Yin und das Yang des Maffee. *kotz*
Eigenvalue, eigenvector and eigenspace, really well explained in Wikipedia.
MVC using jQuery, “I’ve developed a jQuery MVC plugin that allows you to bind model values to a view element or a function. So when the value of the element changes the model value is updated. In turn an update to a model value triggers any bound functions to be called and any bound elements to be updated.” Beware: demo crashes Safari.
What happened on August 16, Skype was DDOSed by a huge wave of reboots due to Windows Update. You gotta love it.
US Primaries 2007, “In response to many requests, not only from Americans, The Political Compass has charted the most prominent names in the 2007 US Primaries.” Geez.
You say the city looks different, it s somehow lost its charm
Fire engine fly by with its annoying alarm
Did the angels ever really look this sad and blue?
You say the city has changed, well maybe it’s you.
— Dan Bern, City
Liten: Command Line Deduplication Tool and Library in Python, by Noah Gift. “There are a few scripts floating around in various languages and the problem is not all that difficult to solve, but I went the whole nine yards and wrote a reasonably cool command line tool that uses md5 checksums to detect duplicates.”
Book Review: From Narnia to a Space Odyssey, by Delirium. “From Narnia to a Space Odyssey is a collection of the infrequent correspondence between noted authors Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis. I didn’t even know they had corresponded, so I picked the book up from a bargain shelf for $4, and it turned out to be a fairly interesting if not particularly substantial bit of history, focusing mainly on their disagreements over space travel, and mainly initiated and driven by Clarke’s attempts to engage Lewis in debate on the matter.”
Monadic Parser Combinators using C# 3.0, good idea but ouch.
recbird: An Erlang Dynamic Record Inferring Erlang Parse Transform, seems useful.
Diagram showing all programming paradigms and their relationships, interesting.
Nothing up my sleeve numbers are any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers.
19aug2007
NoseRub itself is a protocol for decentralized social networks. Really good idea.
My Mac Can’t Count, looks like Jim Weirich fucked up a font. Funny.
Now you’ve got some diamonds and you will have some others
But you’d better watch your step, girl
Or start living with your mother
So don’t play with me, ‘cause you’re playing with fire
So don’t play with me, ‘cause you’re playing with fire
— Rolling Stones, Play With Fire
Headhoods, “The iconic faces that adorn the hoods of these sweatshirts are undoubtedly more famous than your own, so why not steal some of their limelight? Snuggle with a gorrilla or a creepy clown.” Cool.
Caveat commentor, Aristotle Pagaltzis says: “In programming, I’ve come to see the urge to comment as a sign of danger.” Very insightful.
Playing with Propositional Logic in Haskell, nice one.
This heart of stone, darlin’. No, no, this heart of stone
You’ll never break it, darlin’. You won’t break
This heart of stone. Oh, no, no, no
You better go, you better go home
— Rolling Stones, Heart Of Stone
Real programmers don’t use refactoring tools, you know, real programmers use languages which don’t have refactoring tools…
Scientists hail ‘frozen smoke’ as material that will change world , “Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.”
18aug2007
Monad tutorials timeline, “This timeline covers not just monad tutorials, but interesting events in monad tutorial history.” Really interesting.
I am the king, the king of the world
It could ve been you, but it s me
I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it
It was on the cover of Newsweek
— Dan Bern, King Of The World
Architectural Sustainability, “Unless a “green” building actively remediates its local environment – for instance, scrubbing toxins from the air or absorbing carbon dioxide – that building is not “good” for the environment. It’s simply not as bad as it could have been.”
Compiling with Continuations, Continued, by Andrew Kennedy. “We present a series of CPS-based intermediate languages suitable for functional language compilation, arguing that they have practical benefits over direct-style languages based on A-normal form (ANF) or monads.”
Fast String Searching With Suffix Trees, well explained by Mark Nelson.
Nordrhein-Westfalen wird 50 Jahre alt. Lange Jahre war Nordrhein-Westfalen das Land mit dem blödesten Namen. Aber dann kam ja Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. — Harald Schmidt (Alles Gute zum 50. Geburtstag!)
Rubber is a program whose purpose is to handle all tasks related to the compilation of LaTeX documents. This includes compiling the document itself, of course, enough times so that all references are defined, and running BibTeX to manage bibliographic references. Automatic execution of dvips to produce PostScript documents is also included, as well as usage of pdfLaTeX to produce PDF documents. (Impossible to google for.)
17aug2007
e, elemental, is a stack for the data web. Totally sick stuff, worth a look.
Informal Survey: Do Rewrites Really Fail?, Curtis Poe wonders.
Yes if ever your travels
Take you this far from home
Consult your map carefully
Steer clear of Rome
— Dan Bern, Rome
Coq and simple group theory, “And after wrestling a LOT with the assistant, I ended up being able to prove some pretty basic group theory results.”
Oceanic “This picture has been haunting me ever since I first saw it back in June: a man, presumably, stands on the coast of Hawaii in 1946, watching a tsunami rush to shore, bringing a wall of debris down upon him – a literal and terrifying experience of the oceanic.”
How To Make a Funny Talk Title Without Using The Word “Weasel”, by Steve Yegge.
Indexing dataspaces (PDF), Xin Dong and Alon Halevy show how to index semistructured data in such a simple way I could slap myself the whole night.
HyperShoes, Shoes goes linky linky. Woohoo.
Her eyes told me things I d only but dreamed
Her hair was strawberry golden
When silence did reign I was simply amazed
That mine was the hand she was holding
— Dan Bern, I’ll See You Someday
Free e-texts on typography, including publishing, research, standards, and TeX.
LaTeX for Logicians, helpful for everyone in need of lots of symbols and diagrams.
Strange Maps, how could I miss that fantastic blog that long?
16aug2007
Hint: How to redesign the Leopard dock so it sucks less, I favor that.
How to write your own ISO Standard!, by Rick Jelliffe.
Waterville, make projects for the renewal of the deserted water and paper mills.
The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing
America breathed a sigh of relief
We knew all about the drugs and the Vegas shows
And there wasn’t much of anything that looked like grief
— Dan Bern, Too Late To Die Young
Bang methods; or, Danger, Will Rubyist!, David A. Black on !-methods in Ruby. This post is five years too late, but maybe it helps.
Foundations of category theory (PDF), slides by Oliver Kullmann.
Archon by Aaron Stump is a new directly reflective meta-programming language. It enables meta-programs to compute directly with unencoded programs. This paper is a revelation.
Call-by-value is dual to call-by-name, by Philip Wadler.
“Dieu a choisi celuy qui est… le plus simple en hypotheses et le plus riche en phenomenes” [God has chosen that which is the most simple in hypotheses and the most rich in phenomena] — Leibniz, “Discours de métaphysique”, VI, 1686
The Origins of Pattern Theory, the Future of the Theory, and The Generation of a Living World, OOPSLA 1996 keynote by Christopher Alexander.
Unix Toolbox: ngrep: easily grep local network traffic, ooh that sounds useful.
Every time a bird flies by
Tears well up in my eye
I can feel the rain from a couple mornings down
Out in the pasture the cow’s in heat
Someone gonna sweep her off her feet
Probably one of them bulls
Wander out here from town
— Dan Bern, Trudy
Emacs visual cheat sheet, “The cheat sheet includes navigation commands, the most common commands for Open/Save/Close, working with buffers, searching, and Copy/Cut/Paste edit functionality.” Probably helpful if it’s not in your fingers already.
How to write a book: the short honest truth, by Scott Berkun. “If you want to write, kill the magic: a book is just a bunch of writing. Anyone can write a book.”
Court acquits allofmp3.com site owner, “A Russian court found the former boss of music download Web site www.allofmp3.com not guilty of breaching copyright on Wednesday in a case considered a crucial test of Russia’s commitment to fighting piracy.” Yay.
15aug2007
MXQuery a low-footprint, extensible XQuery Engine.
Fingers of God is an effect in observational cosmology that causes clusters of galaxies to be elongated in redshift space, with an axis of elongation pointed toward the observer.
Are you gonna follow your soul
Are you gonna follow your soul
Are you gonna follow your soul
Or just the style of the day
Or just the style of the day
— Dan Bern, Soul
DDT as a repellent, “I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity.”
THE THING is an object based quarterly publication. Each issue of THE THING is conceived of by an individual artist, wrapped by the editors and sent to the subscribers. Miranda July takes part in the first issue!
Happy to hold you in my arms too tight
Happy to be your ever faithful knight
Happy to love–you
— Dan Bern, Happy Tonight
How to use Furoshiki, useful.
jQuery for JavaScript programmers, intro by Simon Willison. IMO the best and most useful JS library out there at the moment.
Should architects take the lead in bridge design?, “The bridge collapse in Minneapolis is a warning that architecture must take second place to engineering, says Gordon Masterton, while Martin Knight argues that issues of connectivity and context must be undertood before even the most obvious engineering constraints.”
14aug2007
Numeric Prelude for Haskell. Awesome stuff in there.
People with craters of the Moon named after them.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” Modern classic.
Girl overdoses on espresso coffee, “Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family’s sandwich shop.”
In a notebook that I’m keepin
Beside me when I sleep
So I can write my dreams and like
The stuff that’s really deep
— Dan Bern, Thunder Road
Back To The Future: Hypertext the Way It Used To Be, by Theodor Holm Nelson and Robert Adamson Smith. “Others imitate paper (Word, Acrobat) and the constant 3D world we live in (“Virtual Reality”). Our system instead tries to create documents better than paper in a space better than reality.”
Adventure 0 original source code found again (and read the really fine article too). xyzzy!
PrimeShooter, an arcade game where you need to factorize numbers. Geeky.
How to Talk to a Physicist: Groups, Symmetry, and Topology, a fairly readable tutorial by Daniel Larson.
Bionade, I like it.
A Measure of Sacrifice, by Nick Szabo. Bells, clocks and sandglasses.
Beneath the Neon, “In a recent book called Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, author Matthew O’Brien goes down into that complex of storm-sensitive concrete waterways to document both the occasional flash flood – and the people who have taken up residence there. ”
Staying Motivated, by Kevin Cornell at A List Apart. “Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?”
Design by Metaphor, by Jack Zeal at A List Apart. “Design by metaphor—or, as is often the case, design by simile—happens when a client provides design and development in the form of a reference to another product.”
I done my traveling
I done my traveling
From now on, it’s just gambling,
That I’ll be doing here
Be doing here
— Dan Bern, Cowboy
cassette tape wallet! yay!!!, very cool but unfortunately too small for A6 index cards.
Data Prefetch Support in GCC.
Raining Perseids, and I didn’t see anything. :/
Programming in C, ummm, Haskell, fun with IORef.
Fuck Lisp! is based on brainfuck, but instead of using a single ascii character for each instruction, it uses triplets of parentheses.
13aug2007
ThingDB, a semistructured database layer.
Manticore is a heterogeneous parallel programming language aimed at general-purpose applications running on multi-core processors. Manticore supports parallelism at multiple levels: explicit concurrency and course-grain paralellism via CML-style constructs and fine-grain parallelism via NESL/Nepal-style data-parallel arrays.
Somebody is watching you
Eat and drink and be of cheer
The sky has eyes and the walls have ears
Somebody somebody is watching you
— Dan Bern, Somebody Is Watching You
Wikidbase is an idea that – as the name sugests – combines the functionalities of a database system and a wiki web application. Apps like this are the future.
An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed – not handwritten – before the year 1501 in Europe.
Generational Real-time Garbage Collection: A Three-part Invention for Young Objects, by Daniel Frampton, David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, and David Grove. “We present the design, mathematical model, and implementation of our collector in IBM’s production Real-time Java virtual machine, and show both analytically and experimentally that the collector achieves real-time bounds comparable to a non-generational Metronome-style collector, while cutting memory consumption and total execution times by as much as 44% and 24% respectively.” Hot.
We sold it to the people of Kababa
For the Berlin wall and all the tea in China
For the gross national product of America
For the cash crop of North Carolina
Back when the earth had two moons
— Dan Bern, Kababa
Acoustic Planetology, “There’s a great new article in New Scientist about what the surfaces of other planets – with their variable air pressure and chemical humidities – might actually sound like.”
Lisp Machine operating system with complete source code leaked , now where do I get an Alpha…
North Shore is a mix of mountain biking and a roller coaster, in the woods.
Realistic or Abstract Imagery: The Future of Computer Graphics?, commented slides by Patrick Hanrahan.
12aug2007
The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The shower is visible from mid-July each year, with the greatest activity between August 8 and 14, peaking about August 12. During the peak, the rate of meteors reaches 60 or more per hour. It’s a bit too cloudy today…
DiST: Fully Decentralized Indexing for Querying Distributed Multidimensional Datasets, by Beomseok Nam and Alan Sussman.
Beginning Faking It, a gentle introduction to type-level programming by Uktaad B’mal.
I thought of friends from years ago
In a youth I’d thrown away
And a girl who used to love me so
Though I couldn’t recall her face
— Thin White Rope, The Ghost
How well do you know prototype, “or taking advantage of those extra 100 KB in your page.”
First Look: VIA PX10000 Pico-ITX Motherboard, 10x7.2cm! Awesome.
The Road to Clarity, Joshua Yaffa on highway typography.
Distributed karma, an idea for fixing recommendation systems. This could work out.
Worlds Weirdest Animals and Creatures, WJW.
Guess it’s the sun that shrink
The houses and the streets of the town
Especially my house, which used to have
these hidden lands
— Thin White Rope, Hidden Lands
A History of Erlang (PDF), HOPL-III slides by Joe Armstrong.
Type-level programming involves calculations that are done during compilation time while type-inferring/type-checking.
On Pattern Matching, Patrick Logan acknowledges the usefullness of pattern matching, especially for Erlang. I fully agree, I now consider it an essential feature for a practical(!) language.
11aug2007
MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, maybe we should rethink the way we deal with mail.
SHA-1 Collision Search Graz, if you got a few cycles to spare.
Clipboard and Text Selection : iPhone :: Arrow Keys : Original Macintosh, by John Gruber.
I need lithium and you, you make me feel the same
Some reaction in my blood puts bubbles in my brain
— Thin White Rope, Lithium
50 manifestos, from Icon magazine.
Index of Erlang Enhancement Proposals (EEPs), “The EEP contains the index of all Erlang Enhancement Proposals, known as EEPs.”
Wahlboykott und ungültig wählen, Geldscheine einwerfen gefällt mir.
rspec: always typing it “should”, Courtney shows a nice alias. Maybe that should be in test/spec by default.
loss of context for me on Facebook, danah boyd ponders: “what constitutes a “friend”? Where’s the line?” Maybe social sites need more kinds of relationships.
In this sweaty night some dry heat
May be a good thing howling in the street
It won’t be no lovers who condemn
The perfect heat that fuses them
— Thin White Rope, Atomic Imagery
My Complete List Of Substitute Names For The Maneuver We Now Know To Be Monkeypatching, by _why. I love “duck punching.”
git.rubini.us, Rubinius goes Git. Yay!
10aug2007
Relationally-Parametric Polymorphic Contracts, by Arjun Guha, Jacob Matthews, Robert Bruce Findler, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. “The analogy between types and contracts raises the question of how many features of static type systems can be expressed as dynamic contracts. An important feature missing in prior work on contracts is parametricity, as represented by the polymorphic types in languages like Standard ML.”
Auf, auf zum Kampf, zum Kampf!
Zum Kampf sind wir geboren!
Auf, auf zum Kampf, zum Kampf!
Zum Kampf sind wir bereit!
Dem Karl Liebknecht, dem haben wir’s geschworen,
der Rosa Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand.
Dem Karl Liebknecht, dem haben wir’s geschworen,
der Rosa Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand.
— Bert Brecht, Auf, auf zum Kampf
Finding palindromes in linear time with suffix trees. Literate Haskell.
A Survey of Fast Exponentiation Methods, by Daniel M. Gordon. “In this paper we survey the known methods for fast exponentiation, examining their relative strengths and weaknesses.”
JVM Languages is an interest group surrounding language implementation for the JVM, including static, dynamic, functional, and anything else. Discussions on implementation strategy, pain points, and the future of the platform.
Times there’s a time to make some changes
There’s times that things should stay the same
Times when I can’t seem to tell the difference
It’s easy to make that mistake
— Thin White Rope, Ring
How difficult is it to write a compiler?, not that hard, unless the language is interesting. ;-)
Man Gets $218 Trillion Phone Bill, “A Malaysian man said he nearly fainted when he recieved a $218 trillion phone bill and was ordered to pay up within 10 days or face prosecution, a newspaper reported Monday.” Ouch.
09aug2007
“The Way of Testivus”: Testing and Beautiful Code, by Alberto Savoia. Nice read.
Exploiting Concurrency Vulnerabilities in System Call Wrappers , by Robert N. M. Watson “System call interposition allows the kernel security model to be extended. However, when combined with current operating systems, it is open to concurrency vulnerabilities leading to privilege escalation and audit bypass. We discuss the theory and practice of system call wrapper concurrency vulnerabilities, and demonstrate exploit technques against GSWTK, Systrace, and CerbNG.” Hot stuff.
I’m amazed how the news does travel
Static like ghosts in gasoline
Faster than vision on a wire
Faster than voices overseas
— Thin White Rope, Wire Animals
Tiny PE, the object of the challenge was to write the smallest PE file that downloads a file from the Internet and executes it. Windows is crazy.
How to Make “Cold” From “Heat” – 20th Century Refrigeration, “Or more classically posed, “How can you make ice from fire?” The answer is a classic gas-absorption refrigerator!” I was really curious how that worked.
Passwords: just another bureaucratic annoyance, by Andy Oram. Full ack.
The Veteran’s Charge, Eric Meyer says: “‘This site is for iPhone users only.’ STOP IT. Stop it right now.” Full ack.
A tag system is a deterministic computational model published by Emil Leon Post in 1943 as a simple form of string rewriting system. For each m > 1, the set of m-tag systems is Turing-complete.
Hey, where’s Raquel? Isn’t she here?
No, I haven’t seen her for one million years.
Hey, what’s her problem? She dug that ground?
No, some of us just take a little more time to come around.
— Thin White Rope, Come Around
Portions Censored From Pearl Jam Webcast, “Reportedly absent from the webcast were segments of the band’s performance of “Daughter,” including the sung lines “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush find yourself another home.” WJW.
Unpredictability and Undecidability in Dynamical Systems, by Cris Moore. “We show that motion with as few as three degrees of freedom (for instance, a particle moving in a three-dimensional potential) can be equivalent to a Turing machine, and so be capable of universal computation.”
08aug2007
ASCII Rave in Haskell, “The idea is to be able to make instrumental sounds by typing onomatopoeic words”. WJW.
Mapping Programming Language IRC Channels, how I spent the day.
Well I hate to see the red red sun go down
I hate to see the red red sun go down
That’s when the hogbone man lay his knuckle down
— Thin White Rope, Red Sun
Experience Report: Scheme in Commercial Web Application Development (PDF), by Noel Welsh and David Gurnell.
Generating Euler Diagrams (PDF), by Jean Flower and John Howse. Damn complicated unfortunately.
Making Perl Reusable with Modules, by Andy Sylvester.
My Rattlesnake Bite-Pictures, holy fuck. Insense and bloody graphics!
Lets drink to the hard working people
Lets think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Lets drink to the salt of the earth
— Rolling Stones, Salt Of The Earth
Sun Enters the Commodity Silicon Business, UltraSPARC T2 goes GPL, nice.
Buckybase: An Autonomic and Continuous Data Storage and Analysis System, “This is an extended description of Buckybase for Netidee 2007.”
07aug2007
Gemstone OODB to support JRuby, Rubinius, sounds very exciting.
Jackson Pollock, National Gallery of Art feature.
Sie nimmt mein Herz und legt es auf den Tisch als wärs ein Buch
Serpentina zu Besuch
— Ernst Molden, Serpentina
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, “Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.”
Beautiful Code, Jonathan Edwards breaks my heart inspite of being right: “I disagree that beauty is a guiding principle of programming. Here is how I responded.”
The “Gömböc”, “A shape whose impossibility might have been an elegant theorem, but whose existence may be much more elegant.” Want have!
Diploma: Posters and Indesign Scripting, very nice stuff. “All posters are technically done with the Indesign Scripting Interface and a with little help of Processing (recursive area tiling, see end of post).”
Dann bin ich dein Labyrinth
bin dein armer Hund der spinnt
schenk dir einen Edelstein
will für immer bei dir sein
— Ernst Molden, Labyrinth
Introducing Dabble Do, the dabblers announce their second product: Dabble Do, a social to-do list.
Different arrangements for standard dice, “But it reminded me of a really nice puzzle, which is to find a nontrivial relabeling of a pair of standard dice that gives the same probability of throwing any sum from 2 to 12. It’s a happy (and hardly inevitable) fact that there is a solution.” Cool exercise.
06aug2007
Notes On Basic Proofs, by Peter Williams.
rsync’s algorithm, explained in Wikipedia.
RWEB is a literate programming environment for Ruby. (Much of it is language-agnostic, but its focus is Ruby.) It is patterned somewhat after Donald Knuth’s WEB literate programming tool, as well as its descendants, but has a couple of added twists in planning. (Boy is that eval icky. That said, support for .lrb analog to Haskell would be plenty fine.)
Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing. Looks very good.
Schau dein Mund ist rot wie Blut;
Schau dein Hals ist weiß wie Schnee;
Schau dein Herz ist schwarz und unruhig,
wie so ein Expresskaffee
— Ernst Molden, Expresskaffee
politics.reddit.com, finally.
Roads, Joe Gregorio on his past commutes.
Nach dem Regen werden wir vielleicht noch ganz normal
fahren in die Stadt, essen im Lokal.
doch bis es soweit ist, werden wir uns kaum bewegen,
denn jetzt kommen wir.
Die Welt kommt nach dem Regen.
— Ernst Molden, Nach dem Regen
The 123456 die, “For some reason I’ve been trying to construct a die whose faces come up with probabilities 1/21, 2/21, 3/21, 4/21, 5/21, and 6/21 respectively.”
OLPC project tests WebKit on the XO laptop, good idea.
The Fauxharmonic Orchestra is totally digital, except for the conductor.
Beyond time, Austin Ziegler looks for experienced Ruby programmers to maintain PDF::Writer, colortools and Transaction::Simple.
05aug2007
More California E-Voting Reports Released; More Bad News, default passwords like “diebold” or “12345678” make these things not vote machines, but fraud machines.
What was it you wanted,
Could you say it again?
I’ll be back in a minute
You can get it together by then.
— Bob Dylan, What Was It You Wanted?
Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog, by Aaron Swartz. “Industry heavyweights O’Reilly, Google, and Nature come together to sponsor a science-focused version of O’Reilly’s runaway success FOO Camp, bringing together top people in the field to eat and gab and plot.”
His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork. — Mae West
Happy Birthday Roseanna Curie Katz!, and gratulations to the parents.
This wheel’s on fire,
Rolling down the road,
Best notify my next of kin,
This wheel shall explode!
— Bob Dylan, This Wheel’s On Fire
Grouping Symmetries, “What we seek is a set of basic algebraic rules that are true for all pattern-algebras; each different pattern algebra may have its own idiosyncratic rules, but hopefully we can find a basic set of underlying rules.”
04aug2007
MobileTerminal.app, a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. This is the first real third-party iPhone app. Yay!
Ye shall be changed, ye shall be changed
In a twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet blows
The dead will arise and burst out of your cloths
And ye shall be changed
— Bob Dylan, Ye shall be changed
Moon Audio/Visual, “Yesterday I wondered what would happen if I stored the raw data from a pixmap image to a WAV file, converted that file to an MP3, then back to a WAV, then finally reconstituted it as a pixmap.” Neat experiment by John Wiseman.
One of the Web’s Little Mysteries, Bob Hutchison asks a very good question: “Why do people think content management is not possible for static websites?” I’m using static CMS since 1999.
Like a poor fool in his prime,
Yes, I know you can hear me walk,
But is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime,
Or is it just solid rock?
— Bob Dylan, Temporary Like Achilles
Using FlexMock to Test Computational Fluid Dynamics Code, by Jim Weirich.
Feeling at home in Ruby (if you’re coming from C), haha.
03aug2007
xml_simple_doctype_fix fixes a DDOS exploit in Rails.
Three years with Ruby on Rails, I’m a bit late because I had to use it this week.
What object is a circle in plan, front and side views? (Besides a sphere), nifty, but I could just imagine it.
One or two nights in the Sodium Hotel, “It’s a hotel made from salt.”
Breaking News: Broken Bridges, by LilDebbie. The ultimate K5 topic.
Oh, there’s changes in the ocean,
there’s changes in the sea
There’s changes in my true love,
ain’t no change in me.
— Bob Dylan, Rambler, Gambler
Infrastructure is patriotic, at BLDG BLOG: “After yesterday’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis – a bridge my sister and her family drove across everyday – the decaying state of American infrastructure is becoming all the more apparent.” More pictures by Tim Davis.
Incident No. 35: Adventure of the Apple’s Mom, by _why.
Java’s Fear of Commitment, “The culture of Java design is to push out commitment to a given way of doing things (an “implementation”) as much as possible. In Java culture, dependencies, esp. conceptual ones, are nasty and to be avoided. They’re taboo, even.”
DNS rebinding attacks subvert the same-origin policy of browsers and convert them into open network proxies. These attacks can be used to circumvent firewalls and are highly cost-effective for sending spam e-mail and defrauding pay-per-click advertisers, requiring less than $100 to temporarily hijack 100,000 IP addresses. Really hot topic.
We all had our reasons to be there
We all had a thing or two to learn
We all needed something to cling to
So we did
— Alanis Morisette, Forgiven
Ant Urbanism, “The movement of ants could help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion, Australian scientists say, and the findings could be used in future town planning systems.”
The Snub Disphenoid, and cool deltahedra.
Russia plants flag under North Pole, that was really needed.
Demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst” am 22. September 2007 in Berlin, vielleicht bin ich da sogar grad da.
Introduction to Haskell, Part 3: Monads, by Adam Turoff. Yummy.
Linux: The 0.02 and 0.03 Releases, the journey goes on.
01aug2007
Net::SSH revisited, Jamis Buck on dependency injection. “I’m rewriting Net::SSH, taking advantage of many of the best-practices I’ve learned in the intervening years. It’s a lot slimmer now. Faster. Cleaner. Better.”
Sphincter uses Dmytro Shteflyuk’s sphinx Ruby API and automatic configuration to make totally rad ActiveRecord searching. The prize for the worst-named Ruby project goes to Eric Hodel.
Stuff, essay by Paul Graham.
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
where every night is just the same you leave me lonely
will I see you tonight on a downtown train
all of my dreams just fall like rain
all upon a downtown train
— Tom Waits, Downtown Train
Playing with Arrows, a whirlwind tour of Control.Arrow. Somehow this is useful stuff.
Pixels Are The New Pies, Anil Dash: “An interesting infographic trend: Square blocks of color are now being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie charts.” Makes influencing the reader a lot easier, IMO.
Object Selection in OpenGL, thanks to GL_SELECT. Learn something new everyday.
How Dedekind Screwed Up a Hundred Years of Mathematics, by Russell O’Connor.
A Taste of Haskell, A Taste of C, chromatic sounds hooked.
cat predicts deaths, web folk LOL.
Monadic Reflection in Haskell (PDF), slides by Andrzej Filinski.
Atlantic City Method For Computing Pi, here’s the slowest, most inefficient method known for computing pi. It really works, though!
Transfinite induction is an extension of mathematical induction to well-ordered sets, for instance to sets of ordinals or cardinals.
List of statements undecidable in ZFC, from Wikipedia.
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