Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30sep2007
RubyEast 2007, conference summary by Gregory Brown.
Calculators and the Gamma Function, “the so-called Gamma function extends the definition of the factorial to the entire complex plane.” Includes very neat numerical approximations.
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
— Bob Dylan, Gotta Serve Somebody
The Physics of Medieval Archery, “Gareth Rees describes from a physicist’s point of view why we believe this simple weapon was so devastatingly effective.”
For most programmers, learning Haskell will be no picnic…, unless they read this tutorial first. By Conrad Barski of lisperati.
Exhaustive search over infinite binary trees, mind-bending.
29sep2007
A kleptocracy is a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats) at the expense of the population.
Witnessing Side-Effects, Tachio Terauchi and Alex Aiken. “We present a new approach to the old problem of adding side effects to purely functional languages. Our idea is to extend the language with “witnesses,” which is based on an arguably more pragmatic motivation than past approaches. We give a semantic condition for correctness and prove it is sufficient.”
Z-A (cont’d.), wow.
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side.
— Bob Dylan, With God On Our Side
Star Wars viewing order, discussion at kottke.org.
Virtual Slide Rule, still the best way to learn how logarithms work.
Rubinius Sprint Interview, Pat Eyler interviewed Evan Phoenix, Wilson Bilkovich, and Brian Ford.
SMLtoJs (pronounced “SML toys”) is a compiler from Standard ML to JavaScript, which allows programmers to enjoy the power of Standard ML static typing, higher-order functions, pattern matching, and modules for programming client-side web applications. Yay!
Seemingly impossible functional programs, by Martin Escardó. “The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “Cantor space” of infinite sequences of binary digits.”
Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin, does content-aware resizing for the GIMP. Sounds awesome.
28sep2007
The Compiler Is Complete, by Charles Nutter. “It is a glorious day in JRuby-land, for the compiler is now complete.”
CK8.0 Curses Tcl Toolkit, “The goal was to have a toolkit for alphanumeric terminals with Tk semantics. This was reached except for the canvas widget and embedded windows in text widgets.”
The moment I let go of it was
The moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it was
The moment I touched down
— Alanis Morissette, Thank You
New iPhone 1.1.1 Features, Which May or May Not Be Old News to iPod Touch Owners, list by John Gruber. (Also: “of course, they no longer activate with non-AT&T SIM cards.”)
Theory behind Hotel, a new language with Self-like prototypical mixing of scope and fields.
Ghost World is a 2001 film by Terry Zwigoff, based on a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, also titled Ghost World. It stars Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson and Steve Buscemi. Although the film was not a box-office blockbuster, it was heavily praised by critics and established a strong cult following. I really enjoyed it.
Saffron Revolution Worldwide, “Source of stencil images for worldwide campaign in support of Burma’s marching monks.”
27sep2007
Idea: The Histogram as the Image, neato.
OMeta: an Object-Oriented Language for Pattern Matching, by Alessandro Warth and Ian Piumarta: “This paper introduces OMeta, a new object-oriented language for pattern matching. OMeta is based on a variant of Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs)–a recognition-based foundation for describing syntax–which we have extended to handle arbitrary kinds of data.” Sounds pretty cool.
The Matrix Cookbook, a free mathematical desktop reference on matrices. Useful!
In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
— Bob Dylan, Chimes Of Freedom
The Factor project switches to git, yay.
Wahlcomputer ausgemustert: Niederlande wählt wieder auf Papier, “Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet”.
A Simple File Based Wiki in Seaside, nice.
A low-bandwidth, high-latency, high-cost, and unreliable data channel, storing metadata in the cent values of credit card bills. WJW and lovely hack.
Pascal Implementation: A Book and Sources, “Included here is the Pascal source of a public-domain Pascal compiler and interpreter, the P4 compiler and interpreter. It is coded entirely in Pascal, and produces a high-level so-called intermediate code as output. The program ‘pint’ is an assembler and interpreter for this language.”
And let’s face it – do you really want the bright sparks who work there now, and manage to break lots of perfectly good working code – rewriting the core calculating engine in Excel? Better keep them busy adding and removing dancing paper clips all day long. — Joel Spolsky, Explaining the Excel Bug
RubyForge vs RAA, by Daniel Berger. “This is a short followup to my last post where I compared library RubyForge statistics against CPAN. This week I compare RubyForge against… the Ruby Application Archive!” Would be nice to see more international action at the RAA.
The Deep Synergy Between Testability and Good Design, “how do you test private methods?”
Huge pipes in the middle of the ocean, “James Lovelock – of Gaia hypothesis fame – has recently proposed using “millions of vertical pipes across the oceans to pump nutrient-rich deep water to the surface.” This would “fertilise the growth of algae, which in turn [would] fix carbon dioxide” – thus helping to assuage the effects of industrial air pollution, reducing global warming.”
26sep2007
Tmesis is a linguistic phenomenon or figure of speech in which a word is separated into two parts, with other words occurring between them.
Calculation Issue Update, the Excel team responds.
I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up,
Analyze you, categorize you,
Finalize you or advertise you.
— Bob Dylan, All I Really Want To Do
The experience stack is a way of thinking about the different levels at which experience design operates. Experience design can be thought of as comprising branding, service design, product design, interaction design and human factors. This presentation highlights products demonstrating different layers of the experience stack, and the rationale for designing for good experience.
ZshMH, hints for using zsh and MH together.
New Wallpaper, topic: Typography. Great.
Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume, by Steve Yegge. Worth reading.
Rails Podcast with Leah Neukirchen, from RailsConf Europe 2007 where I talk about Rack, test/spec, gems and tumblelogging.
25sep2007
An Invitation to Higher Dimensional Mathematics and Physics, by Urs Schreiber. Everyone can understand that.
If I Told You You Had a Beautiful Figure…, by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart. “Let’s face it, images are a pain in the ass. Okay, well, maybe the images themselves aren’t the problem, but laying out images consistently within a design is difficult; especially when you hand the keys over to someone else to fill in the content.”
There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river,
There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky,
But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes.
— Bob Dylan, Tomorrow Is A Long Time
Hat Heads vs. Bed Heads, by Keith LaFerriere at A List Apart. “Calm tension, communicate more easily, and run your projects more efficiently by applying the right relationship management techniques.”
The World’s Longest Novel, “Grossman tentatively plans to print just six copies of the book, each of which will comprise 4,000 volumes of 750 pages.” WJW.
Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica, John Gruber finally did it.
What About the Natural Numbers, by Colin Runciman. Pretty radical, but great for functional languages.
Rails is the new Hitler, by Gregory Brown. Makes my day. (And don’t miss the comments.)
Children—especially young children—do not need to learn about IT and certainly do not need to be fluent users of WORD, EXCEL and POWERPOINT. They are not office workers. However, picking up these skills, having grown up with a laptop, will be readily accomplished. — OLPC
tufte-latex provides Tufte inspired LaTeX classes for producing handouts and papers.
Bug in Excel 2007, it thinks 850*77.1 is 10000. This is unbelievable, as well that an application used to mainly deal with financial data is unable to implement proper BCD. Even COBOL could do this!
24sep2007
Announcing xUnit.net, a small revolutionary shakeup in the xUnit territory.
Pizza Inversion: a Pattern for Efficient Resource Consumption, by Brad Appleton. “Pizza Inversion may sound like a cheesy name for a pattern, but it describes a recurring solution to a problem that is of fundamental significance to most software developers I know. I find myself using it much more frequently than anything in the now famous Design Patterns book[1]. Keep reading and I’m certain you’ll soon find yourself agreeing with me.”
Let me eat when I’m hungry
Let me drink when I’m dry
Dollars when I’m hard up
Religion when I die
— Bob Dylan, Moonshiner
Inhaling 9/11, “On the flight over to Chicago last week I read an intense and frightening article in Discover about the wide range of post-9/11 illnesses that have begun to develop in New York City.”
SparseCheck, A Logic Programming Library for Test-Data Generation.
Mjt is an HTML templating engine that runs entirely in a web browser. It was built for the Freebase service, but it can be used for many other web services. It is distributed as open source.
Tact Filters, “All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it.”
These be seven curses on a judge so cruel:
That one doctor will not save him,
That two healers will not heal him,
That three eyes will not see him.
That four ears will not hear him,
That five walls will not hide him,
That six diggers will not bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him.
— Bob Dylan, Seven Curses
Treedolist, “This is a hierarchical organiser for tasks, notes, lists, weblinks and RSS feeds. You can categorise items, drag and drop stuff, share branches of your tree and more.” (May crash old Safaris.)
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.
23sep2007
Higher-Dimensional Categories: an illustrated guide book, by Eugenia Cheng and Aaron Lauda. Oy.
Combining Logics, extensive coverage at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
— Bob Dylan, Visions Of Johanna
a different approach to medicine, “Jay Parkinson is a doctor in Williamsburg who does e-visits. Think you need stitches? Send him a picture and he’ll advise via video chat/IM/email/etc.” BTDT once. :)
Rolling your own will give you a tool over which you have a feeling of mastery. — Kent Beck, TDD by Example.
Jottit makes getting a website as easy as filling out a textbox.
Perl 6 to machine code via Common Lisp and sbcl, WJW.
Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues
— Bob Dylan, Workingman’s Blues #2
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails, by Derek Sivers. Amazingly, the answer is not “I wanted to punish myself”. (And BTW, he should have used Ruby, not Rails.)
Inside BEAM, the Erlang Virtual Machine, quite interesting.
SSH Tips and Tricks Part 2, by Nick Burch. “In this part, we look at the new ControlMaster/ControlPath feature of OpenSSH 4, and how it allows for persistent connections and multiplexing of interactive connections in one session.” Awesome stuff.
22sep2007
Computations in algebraic geometry with Macaulay 2, full text online.
Das Virtuelle Kupferstichkabinett ist ein von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft gefördertes Kooperationsprojekt des Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museums (HAUM) in Braunschweig und der Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel. Der Schwerpunkt der Auswahl liegt auf Druckgraphik bis zum Jahre 1800.
Don’t ever try to change me,
I been in this thing too long.
There’s nothin’ you can say or do
To make me think I’m wrong.
— Bob Dylan, Got My Mind Made Up
How to Do Philosophy, essay by Paul Graham.
Folding Incremental Averages in Haskell, by Vicent Kräutler.
How to publish a Git repository, summary by Chris Double.
Things Developers Should Know About Leopard, by Scott Stevenson. “Leopard brings a lot of changes for Mac programmers. If you haven’t been tuned in, here’s a cheat sheet of some things you’ll want to be aware of in the coming months and years.”
Is making an AJAXified tool or toy that will likely be used by less than 1% of the people in the richest country in the world the absolute best use of your time and talents right now? Honestly? — Shooter
RailsConf Europe 2007 slides, some already are uploaded.
Rubinius on OS X, step-by-step with Sam Aaron.
Personal unit tests, I love the idea.
21sep2007
PDF Processing with Perl, by Detlef Groth. “This article shows how to use PDF::Reuse, by Lars Lundberg, for combining different PDF documents and adding bookmarks to them.”
GNU Smalltalk web site launched, “The Smalltalk for those who can type” <3
The World’s Biggest SANs, WJW. (What do they have at the LHC?)
I only found out yesterday
I heard it on the news
What I heard really pissed me off
Cause now I got those fucking blues
I got those awesome blues
Babe I got those nothing blues
— Rolling Stones, Thru And Thru
An Intellectual Exercise in Decimalizing the Year, by circletimessquare. Fun.
Observations on Dove Hunting, by GhostOfTiber. “One of my buddies had a brilliant idea I hadn’t thought of: Check Pennsylvania’s maps for what’s called a co-op farm. It’s not a commune, it’s a farm which offers up it’s land to the public for hunting.”
Binary Lambda Calculus and Combinatory Logic, 210 bit is awesome.
Acme SAC aims to package a version of Acme written for the Inferno operating system as a stand alone editor for multiple platforms to compete against other popular editors: emacs, vim, and jedit.
Yet Another Perl 6 Operator: the series, by Adriano Ferreira. Sounds cool.
Are Authors Technological Poseurs?, Charles Nutter says: “Good authors do not have time to be good developers.” Actually, it’s the other way round.
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site, “The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.” [Sep. 18]. “The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.” Great!
The Catsters on YouTube: “Monads” and “Adjunctions”. “I hope this is the beginning of a new trend: higher mathematics on YouTube!”
Probabilistic Logic and Probabilistic Networks, “A probabilistic logic offers a richer formalism, one that combines the capacity of probability theory to handle uncertainty with the capacity of deductive logic to exploit structure.”
I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken, tears must be cried
Let’s do some living after we die
— Rolling Stones, White Horses
RubyForge vs CPAN, by Daniel Berger. “I think, at the very least, it means that the Ruby community is doing very well in terms of library development and releases.”
12 Houses: The Wonderfully Puzzling and Colorful Use of Spatial Volume and Limey. Wonderful architecture.
Help is a combination of editor, window system, shell, and user interface that provides a novel environment for the construction of textual applications such as browsers, debuggers, mailers, and so on. It combines an extremely lean user interface with some automatic heuristics and defaults to achieve significant effects with minimal mouse and keyboard activity. The user interface is driven by a file-oriented programming interface that may be controlled from programs or even shell scripts.
Quipsologies, a division of underconsideration, is bent on keeping the design community aware of as many things as possible through an ever-growing cluster of creative morsels found on- and off-line. Very neat.
15sep2007
Lessons on shutting down a service from Yahoo! Photos, they did that pretty well, I think.
ThingFish is a network-accessable, searchable, extensible datastore. It can be used to store chunks of data on the network in an application-independent way, associate the chunks with other chunks through metadata, and then search for the chunk you need later and fetch it again, all through a REST API over HTTP. Neat.
When the moon peeps over the mountains
Honey, I’ll be on my way
I’m gonna roam this highway
Until the break of day
— Rolling Stones, Key To The Highway
CouchDb views in Ruby instead of Javascript, very cool.
User stories with RSpec’s Story Runner, rbehave merges with RSpec. I’m not convinced.
Set Theory: Should You Believe?, by N J Wildberger. “Set theory as presented to young people simply doesn’t make sense, and the resultant approach to real numbers is in fact a joke!”
The BPG project aims to build a BSD-licensed framework to allow data authentication and encryption using the OpenPGP standard.
Extended XQuery for SOA, by Dino Fancellu, Edmund Gimzewski.
Down with the metre and litre! Long live pints and pounds!, by IHCOYC. “Common sense, æsthetics, and national character have prevailed; the forces of high modernism and weenie rationalism have received a setback. The European Union has chosen to no longer pressure people in the British Isles to convert exclusively to the metric system.”
Well-behaved Homes, “Michael, in full performance mode, explains that building houses using conductive materials (metal, for instance, which is also used to make pots and pans) instead of using insulating materials (he specifically refers to aerated autoclave concrete, used in the majority of European houses) is inherently problematic from the standpoint of energy efficiency and climate control.”
You better stop
Look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown.
— Rolling Stones, 19th Nervous Breakdown
Fire Department Psychiatry, “One of the presenters this morning at Dwell on Design – I believe it was Gwendolyn Wright – mentioned a fire department that had once employed a psychiatrist to help solve mysterious house fires.”
Xen and the Art of System Administration, by Johnny C. Lam. Really an impressive thing I should dig into.
The Wilkins pendulum mystery resolved, how the meter can be defined with a pendulum.
On Social Networks, by Charles Miller.
SCO Group files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and there was much rejoicing.
14sep2007
Squeak by Example can be ordered or downloaded as PDF now.
Arithmetic Game, great for exercising mental math or learning Trachtenberg Speed Math or Vedic maths.
Reflections on Wikipedia, by David A. Black. Well, when I notice something weird, or lacking on a WP page, I of course head to the sources…
This time I’m asking for freedom,
Freedom from a world which you deny.
And you’ll give it to me now,
I’ll take it anyhow
When the night comes falling from the sky.
— Bob Dylan, When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky
FlatAtompub, by Ian Bicking. “A little while ago I decided to whip up a small Atompub server to get my head around the Atom Publishing Protocol. I called it FlatAtomPub because it was just storing stuff in flat files.”
An Introduction to Erlang, by Gregory Brown. “These days, the functional languages are all the rage. You see more and more hackers from the traditionally vanilla languages trying out things like Haskell or Scheme or OCaml. Breaking away from an imperative tradition forces us to think in a different way, which is always a good thing.” Well done intro.
It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable. — Nietzsche
Compositional type systems for stack-based low-level languages, by Ando Saabas and Tarmo Uustalu. “It is widely believed that low-level languages with jumps must be difficult to reason about by being inherently non-modular. We have recently argued that this in untrue and proposed a novel method for developing compositional natural semantics and Hoare logics for low-level languages and demonstrated its viability on the example of a simple low-level language with expressions.”
13sep2007
Morgen. Versprochen!, Sigrid Neudecker über Prokrastination.
Vulcan.NET is the next generation of the xBase family of languages. OMG.
The xUnit Paradox, explained by glyf. “Anyone looking to “fix” xUnit should be careful to create a well-defined structure for tests and document the API and the reasons for every decision in it.”
A smile relieves a heart that grieves
Remember what I said
I’m not waiting on a lady
I’m just waiting on a friend
I’m just waiting on a friend
— Rolling Stones, Waiting On A Friend
Kampf gegen die Ignoranz der “Techies”, Interview des ORF.at mit Ted Nelson.
C++ and the RESTful Web, what a metaphor by Kurt Cagle.
In Memoriam Willi Moser, gestorben am 10. September 2007. Traurig.
I wanna hold you
I gotta hold you
Hold you baby close to me
Close to me
— Rolling Stones, Wanna Hold You
Pagoda CMS, using Python to build a CMS that doesn’t suck. Big claims, but their model seems sound.
Police Find Man’s Body, Guillotine In Wooded Area, “The body of a 41-year-old man was found in a wooded area next to a guillotine he built and used to kill himself, police said.” WJW.
12sep2007
Mortality and the Obsessive Internet Poster, by circletimessquare. “But our concern today is with another new Internet issue: what happens when an obsessive Internet poster dies?” I’m highly interested in such topics.
Helma: JavaScript auf der Serverseite, ein Tutorial von Fabian Bartsch.
Squeezing One Year of Work into Eight, chromatic on the efficiency of openly developed software.
What to do yeah.
I really don’t know,
I really don’t know what to do.
— Rolling Stones, What To Do
Euruko 2007 will be located in Vienna, Austria on Saturday & Sunday 10th and 11th November 2007.
Fishkill is a minimalist functional programming language. Some might call it a toy language. It is based entirely on pattern matching of function arguments. There are no data types (or you might say there is a single data type). Instead, arbitrary constructors can be defined by just using them in a program.
SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python and does not require any external libraries, except optionally for plotting support.
Anwalt Gravenreuth zu Haftstrafe verurteilt, made my day.
iPhone Free Software Unlock Confirmed, Death Star Explodes. Yum.
The Elephants of Rome: An Interview with Mary Beard (pt. 2), “This is Part Two of a two-part interview with Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and general editor of the Wonders of the World series, published by Profile and Harvard University Press.”
Ejal watt ick mach ihr seid eh jemein
Wozu noch freundlich sein?
Nehm voll Rücksicht uff alle
Bin immer die Liebe
Und ‘n Arschtritt is allet watt ick dafür kriege
— Panda, Jeht Kacken
The loophole in the U.S. Constitution: the answer, finally.
Coco de Mer is the world’s most luxurious erotic boutique selling glasswear, whips, shoes, erotic lingerie, furniture and accessories. A place where pleasure becomes the priority. All products are hand crafted by artisans. Coco de Mer celebrates sexual confidence and eroticism and does business in an ethical fashion. NSFW.
Even More Ambitious, news on Ambition: “We’re definitely not slowing anything down—Ambition happily leaves that task up to your app. Zing!” And now they use Git. Yay.
11sep2007
Terrorist organization logos, a great source of inspiration.
Hillary’s Prayer: Hillary Clinton’s Religion and Politics, jesus christ!
jQuery 1.2 has been released. And it doesn’t crash Safari 1.3 anymore, so please update.
The Monad.Reader Issue 8, featuring multiset partitions and type-level computation.
Bad Unix Jokes, still nice.
Don’t you worry try a little harder
Don’t you worry try a little harder
Say goodnight and stay a little longer
Say goodnight and stay a little longer
Have to keep her from cryin’ then you got to try to work pretty hard to keep her satisfied
— Rolling Stones, Try A Little Harder
What might an expository mathematical wiki be like?, Tim Gowers wonders.
How to give your low-end Canon digital camera RAW support, by Nathan Willis. Very nice.
D doesn’t have real closures, I knew it.
SpeedGeeking offers a fully immersive, invigorating and hilarious approach to meeting people … and learning about the cool projects, software tools and crazy ideas that they have been working on. At a SpeedGeek, one group of participants sets up at stations around a room to give 5 minute presentations while the rest of the group migrates in a circle around the room to hear these high-speed raps. The result is an obscene amount of fun, all tied up with a good dose of learning about how technology is being used for social change.
The Wonders of the World: An Interview with Mary Beard (pt. 1) , “Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, where she is a fellow of Newnham College. She also writes a blog for the Times, called A Don’s Life, and she is the editor of an excellent new series of books, The Wonders of the World.”
Get Out from Behind the Curtain, by Sarah B. Nelson at A List Apart. “When used at critical points in the design process, these sessions build strong, respectful relationships. Since clients directly experience the design work, you don’t need to sell clients on an idea—they were with you the whole time.”
Put Your Content in my Pocket, Part II, by Craig Hockenberry at A List Apart.
11.9.2002, KD erinnert an den Putsch in Chile.
PTW National Swimming Centre for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Awesome building.
Subway: A Method to Their Cheesy Madness, WJW.
But baby, I can’t stay,
You got to roll me and call me the tumblin’,
Roll me and call me the tumblin’ dice.
— Rolling Stones, Tumbling Dice
K5 Becomes “Gated Dysfunctional Community”, rusty says. New accounts $5 a piece.
The Sarong Theorem Archive, “This page is an electronic archive of images of people proving theorems while wearing sarongs.”
10sep2007
The hGene microformat allows you to add additional semantic information to web pages containing gene data.
The Announcement or What is wrong with technical books, yay, Jan Lehnardt is writing a book about CouchDb.
mksh, the MirBSD Korn Shell is an actively developed free implementation of the Korn Shell programming language and a successor to the Public Domain Korn Shell (pdksh).
Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams
Oh, can’t you see I’m fading fast?
And that this shot will be my last
— Rolling Stones, Sister Morphine
drawball.com, zoom in there.
When Was The Exact Day Slashdot Jumped The Shark?, Noah Gift wonders. He’s right, but I can’t tell either.
ShootingStar is a high-performance comet server for Ruby: “Our goal is development of practical comet server which will be achieving over 100,000 simultaneous connections per host. On this purpose, we abandon portability and use system calls depending on particular OS such as epoll and kqueue.”
blotchy burns on my legs from my Macbook, but I do want to see danah boyd’s legs…
Hot-Mapping the UK, or: Spy Planes Over Haringey, “Earlier this year it was reported that the London borough of Haringey had used a spy plane to record residents’ energy use patterns.”
Don’t want to be your slave
Baby go, baby go, baby go
Do it yeah
— Rolling Stones, Slave
CouchDb and CouchObjects, an Ruby interface for CouchDb by Johan Sørensen.
Lone Star Ruby Conf: Zed’s Keynote, must read. Brilliant.
binpac: A yacc for Writing Application Protocol Parsers, by R. Pang, V. Paxson, R. Sommer, and L. Peterson. This could turn out very useful.
09sep2007
tetrisconcept.com is the ultimate reference about everything Tetris. Exact desired game behaviours are described.
Categories of categories, by Claudio Pisani. “A certain amount of category theory is developed in an arbitrary finitely complete category with a factorization system on it, playing the role of the comprehensive factorization system on Cat.”
Linus Torvalds on C++, I totally agree: “C++ is a horrible language.”
I was young
I was foolish
I was angry
I was vain
I was charming
I was lucky
Tell me how have I changed
— Rolling Stones, Out Of Control
95 Theses on K5, by BottleRocket.
Tries and their Derivatives, “What I want to show is that this distinction isn’t so clear, and that in fact functions can often be replaced by an isomorphic datastructure.”
The loophole in the U.S. Constitution, “The best solution I have found so far is this: Under Article IV, Congress has the power to admit new states. A congressional majority could agree to admit 150 trivial new states, and then propose arbitrary constitutional amendments, to be ratified by the trivial legislatures of the new states.”
The fields of Eden
Are full of trash
And if we beg and we borrow and steal
We’ll never get it back
People are hungry
They crowd around
And the city gets bigger as the country comes begging to town
— Rolling Stones, Rock In A Hard Place
SSCM is a tool for simultaneously managing multiple version control systems. There are a number of good reasons why you’d want such a beast.
TGM 3 Tetris Arika !!! Invisible Tetris (Youtube), WJW.
08sep2007
An Ode to Olives, or, The Olives Home Page. Yum yum yum yum yum!
RubyConf 2007 Preliminary Agenda, some pretty cool stuff in there.
Diagnostic Styling, useful CSS tricks by Eric Meyer.
Finally Tagless, Partially Evaluated, Tagless Staged Interpreters for Simpler Typed Languages, by Jacques Carette, Oleg Kiselyov, and Chung-chieh Shan. “We have built the first family of tagless interpretations for a higher-order typed object language in a typed metalanguage (Haskell or ML) that require no dependent types, generalized algebraic data types, or postprocessing to eliminate tags.” Yay!
Book Review: Practical Ruby for System Administration, reviewed by Pat Eyler.
RESTful Web Services: A Review, by Kurt Cagle. I guess I really should read it.
I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
— Rolling Stones, Paint It Black
Squeak by Example is an open-source book about Squeak. Cool.
Image Compression: Seeing What’s Not There, “In this article, we’ll study the JPEG baseline compression algorithm… “, good explanation by David Austin.
Families of Scalars, major code smell.
Sound Field, “In 1997, Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda released a CD called Patterns of Plants. The album featured “melodic material” that Fujieda developed using the “surface-electrical potential” of plant leaves. In other words, he transformed leaves into sound.” WJW.
Toward a Higher-Dimensional Wiki, by John Baez. 1) Happy birthday, n-category cafe, 2) I want to read that book, write it!, 3) I need a wiki like that too, more soon, 4) Is there a wiki with “official” and “public” branches?.
The Antidiagonal, advanced type hackery: “In a programming language with constrained types we can construct a type like “the type of pairs of X’s where the two X’s are distinct”. But can we make such a type in Haskell?”
The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite), by Michael Stonebraker, Samuel Madden, Daniel J. Abadi, Stavros Harizopoulos, Nabil Hachem, and Pat Helland. May this be the future of databases.
And his skin is so fair
And it shines like his hair
As he stands so aloof
With an indolent air
And an insolent stare
He just shutters the truth
— Rolling Stones, New Faces
CouchDb strikes a chord, “Apparently the switch to JSON and Javascript is a big hit.” It is, and now make the source compile here! :-P
Hamcrest provides a Java library of matcher objects (also known as constraints or predicates) allowing ‘match’ rules to be defined declaratively, to be used in other frameworks. Typical scenarios include testing frameworks, mocking libraries and UI validation rules.
quote/unquote bookends, by Eric Janssen. Pretty cool.
Git cheat sheet, cool one.
StaticMatic is a Haml and Sass based static website maker.
01sep2007
A new representation of the rational numbers for fast easy arithmetic, by E. C. R. Hehner and R. N. S. Horspool. “It allows exact arithmetic, and approximate arithmetic under programmer control. It is superior to existing coding methods because the arithmetic operations take particularly simple, consistent forms. These attributes make the new number representation attractive for use in computer hardware.”
NSA@home is a fast FPGA-based SHA-1 and MD5 bruteforce cracker. It is capable of searching the full 8-character keyspace (from a 64-character set) in about a day in the current configuration for 800 hashes concurrently. WJW and wanthave.
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea
— Leonard Cohen, Take This Waltz
Lifting Abstract Interpreters to Quantified Logical Domains, by Sumit Gulwani, Bill McCloskey, and Ashish Tiwari. “In this paper, we describe a general technique for building powerful quantified abstract domains that leverage existing quantifier-free domains.”
Python 3000 released as 3.0a1, Guido van Rossum says. The snake is winding again.
Emacs now has multi-tty in CVS HEAD, very nice.
Scaling with memcached, slides by Leon Brocard.
But I’m always alone.
And my heart is like ice.
And it’s crowded and cold
In My Secret Life.
— Leonard Cohen, In My Secret Life
A trellis.Component is an object that can have its attributes automatically maintained by rules, the way a spreadsheet is maintained by its formulas. I should check that out.
Emacs Fingers, cool illustration.
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