Anarchaia

Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)

30nov2007

5984, Damien Katz says: “Yay! CouchDB has an official IANA port number: 5984.”

Pencil Bench, “The seat is made up of 1600 pencils which are individually sprung. Each pencil can be removed and used.” WJW.

GNU PDF aims to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies.

And I rode out to Death Valley
And I laid down naked on the floor
And I said “Hey God”
“How’s it hanging tough guy”
He said “The age of specialization is over.”
I said “Excuse me?”
— Dan Bern, Lightning Jazz

We The Robots, a webcomic by Chris Harding. Starts off very good, then is a bit lame, then becomes good again.

CDF: The common format you’ve never heard of, by Kurt Cagle. I really hope this gets as common as it says.

We got fast food and condoms and hair spray
We got the right to vote to take all of our rights away
We got life and the means to spend it
We’ve even got the bomb in case we want to end it
— Dan Bern, Kababa

The Abduction Lamp, want have.

10 Reasons Why Johnny Cash Owns Chuck Norris, yay.

29nov2007

ruby-wmii updated for use with wmii 3.6, by Mauricio Fernandez.

The Design and Implementation of Typed Scheme (PDF), by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen. “This paper presents Typed Scheme, an explicitly typed exten- sion of an untyped scripting language. Its type system is based on the novel notion of occurrence typing, which we formalize and me- chanically prove sound. The implementation of Typed Scheme ad- ditionally borrows elements from a range of approaches, includ- ing recursive types, true unions and subtyping, plus polymorphism combined with a modicum of local inference.”

Packrat Parsers Can Support Left Recursion (PDF), by Alessandro Warth, James R. Douglas, and Todd Millstein.

Now I see a red rose
I smell a red rose
A red rose
Blooming on another man’s vine
— Tom Waits, Another Man’s Vine

Pure pattern calculus (PDF), by Barry Jay and Delia Kesner. “The pure pattern calculus generalises the pure lambda-calculus by basing computation on pattern-matching instead of beta-reduction.”

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest, “Google is pleased to announce this new effort to get young people involved in open source development. We’ve teamed up with the open source projects listed here to give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development, from writing code and documentation to preparing training materials and conducting user experience research.” Cool idea and there are some pretty advanced projects.

Logic for Philosophy, by Theodore Sider. “This will be a textbook for a “logic literacy” course. It was designed for beginning graduate students in philosophy, but it is also suitable for advanced undergraduate courses. The goal is to introduce students to the logic they need to know in order to read contemporary philosophy journal articles. It emphasizes breadth rather than depth. For example, it discusses modal logic and counterfactuals, but does not contain completeness proofs for predicate logic.”

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids, “Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are.” By Carol S. Dweck. Excellent!

An Interview with Toby Segaran, by Bruce Stewart. Toby Segaran is the author of O’Reilly’s recently-released book, Programming Collective Intelligence.

List of knots at Wikipedia.

And there’s a black tornado, black tornado
Spinning around in my body sometimes
Black tornado, black tornado
Spinning around in my body sometimes
— Dan Bern, Black Tornado

The IO Monad for People who Simply Don’t Care, pragmatic Haskell: “If you simply want to read some input and write some output, and you don’t want to waste time with nonsense like the “monad laws”, you’ve come to the right place.”

Das Bier für Schriftliebhaber, oder wieso das Schöfferhofer so heisst.

A Theory of Templating Languages, by Joe Gregorio.

Fernsehen gives you easy access to the german TV program provided by TVToday as a Dashboard widget.

28nov2007

Holiday Blogging Contest, by Pat Eyler. “So here’s the deal, you write a blog post about a project you’re working on. Load it up with cool how-to information. Make it accessible and exciting to someone new to Ruby, Rails, or the specific domain you’re working in”

Foodpairing, “Food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common.” A NPN-transistor as logo is ultimate geekery.

I’ve heard you’re a dancer
Your legs are so fine
Come dance to my bedside
Come drink up my wine
— Dan Bern, Marlene

DRBD is a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via (a dedicated) network. You could see it as a network raid-1.

World of Nirvana, Nirvana Live Videos on Map and Download.

Functional Web Frameworks, a Google Group for web frameworks in functional languages.

The LED Museum, from the sixties on to today.

Sometimes I think I’ll melt away
And in the sidewalk cracks I’d stay
And who will notice who will call
Whose life would change much if at all
I close my eyes and live
I close my eyes and live another day
— Dan Bern, Live Another Day

Linux Audio Editors: An Overview, by John Littler. “If you’re not familiar with the area of Linux audio editors, you might be totally amazed at just how many there are.”

Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming.

27nov2007

Ruby Survey Results, Tim Bray looked at the editors we use.

Eventlet is a networking library written in Python. It achieves high scalability by using non-blocking io while at the same time retaining high programmer usability by using coroutines to make the non-blocking io operations appear blocking at the source code level.

Rack with JRuby+Servlet, it would be fun if these Java classes became a de-facto standard for Java web development. :P

And the DJ spins his records
From here out to the sun
And he flings them through a big hole
In the ozone one by one
And somewhere beyond Mercury
The wax begins to melt
— Dan Bern, Thanksgiving Day Parade

iPod Notes Feature Guide (PDF), this is amazingly complex.

Hivurt is a content management system powered by a component architecture. It gives you the strength of Zope 3 in an easy to use environment. It allows you to easily switch between ZODB and PostgreSQL data storage and features search and indexes, an easy editor UI, front-end skins, and localization and internationalization. Existing data stored inside an RDBMS can easily be accessed as Zope objects.

LLVM: A native-code compiler for MiniML in ~100LOC, yay!

Using Proof Assistants for Programming Language Research or, How to write your next POPL paper in Coq, tutorial at POPL 2008. I hope they publish their materials after.

Smalltalk and OMeta, implemented in OMeta/JS, great thingy.

Study in Mass, great buildings at the BLDG BLOG.

Rejecta Mathematica, John Baez asks: “Sick of getting your papers rejected? Then publish your rejected papers in Rejecta Mathematica!”

OCaml Light: A Formal Semantics For a Substantial Subset of the Objective Caml Language, they used Ott.

Six birds on a telephone wire, one was Mao Tse Tung
One was Rembrandt, one was Napoleon, another one was Cy Young
One was a guy named Stanley, who had been a clerk in a shipping company
One was Gertrude Stein, I shot ‘em all down bang bang
No more birds on the telephone wire
I shot ‘em all down bang bang
— Dan Bern, Six Birds

Languages categorized by Jean-Claude Wippler.

A Financial Perspective on DRM, by chlorus. “Asking consumers to take on such risks with no prospect of them materially benefiting in return is an incredibly unreasonable proposition and, to me, is the chief mechanism standing in the way of widespread adoption.”

draft-gregorio-uritemplate-02.txt prereleased. It starts getting complex.

26nov2007

Reading the Next Book, by Peter Brantley. “Moving books onto the network and the ramifications for how we define reading, and our privacy.”

The Brand Gap, excellent slides on branding.

GraficaObscura, collected Computer Graphics hacks, curated by Paul Haeberli.

And the wind chimes up above
Dance in the restless desert air
And I feel like I’m supposed to be someplace
But I don’t know where
— Dan Bern, Desert Wind

Napkin Notebook, whoooo.

Equation Bookshelf, is a simple idea of to divide things in priority order… put together the books that you need immediately or more important between (parentheses)! Set others between [square brackets] and {braces}. Want have.

This is a pylon, you better know.

interconnected, Matt Webb writes: “So what I’m advocating is a game-changing, post-revolution environmentalism. Don’t waste resources, sure. But if we’re spending resources to shift the status quo – feeding pandas into a wood-chipper to send a colony to the Moon, if that’s the kind of engine that we invent and that’s what it takes – then I’m behind it.”

libev is new, like libevent, but apparently better.

crunch compiles a severely restricted statically typed subset of R5RS Scheme to C++. It can be used to generate standalone executables or code embedded into Scheme programs.

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, Are You Gonna Follow Your Soul?

Deriving a Virtual Machine, by Shin-Cheng Mu. “I gave myself the following exercise: given an interpreter of a small language, derive a virtual machine and a corresponding compiler.” Very cool technique.

Dein Farblaserdrucker spioniert Dich aus, schrecklich.

Mobile Minimalism, “Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they’re fun to render, and they’re fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cities, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you.”

25nov2007

The PLUMEN low energy light bulb prototype is a reaction to the lack of real diversity, imagination and personality offered by the market today.

10.5: Use Preview to instantly see changes to PDFs, essential for TeX users.

But sometimes
When I get your message machine
I m happy to talk for 10 seconds and hang up.
I don’t gotta answer no questions
Sometimes I need it like that
— Dan Bern, Radio Static

PSA: de-lameify your dock and menubar, by jwz: “Make your Dock be flush against the corner of the desktop, instead of centered vertically or horizontally. This means your icons will stay put, regardless of how many windows are open.”

The (Date-Ink Maximizing) Dream, “A better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card.” I love it.

Open Source Mulberry, available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

RFP: git-svn server, an awesome idea: “The goal is to have the git-svnserver as a “drop-in” replacement for an SVN server.”

And there’s a thing they call an hour
And that’s sixty of those of those
And I don’t know what those are
— Dan Bern, Days And Months And Years

How to configure “Open All in Tabs” in Firefox without closing existing tabs?, absolute requirement for me.

Daniel Weinreb’s Road to Lisp, “How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp? Pretty far. I am one of the designers of Common Lisp.”

Game Development Archeology: Zelda on Game Boy comes with source, that rocks!

24nov2007

24th Chaos Communication Congress: Volldampf voraus!, der Fahrplan ist da.

Going offline without your favourite Subversion repository?, Dr Nic recommends git-svn.

Now the only thing a gambling man needs
Is a suitcase and a trunk;
And the only time he’s ever satisfied
Is when he’s on a drunk.
— House of the Rising Sun

Monad Wars 1: the Prompt, looks like a nice Haskell app.

Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it), by Damien Katz. Good points.

A Simple Probability Puzzle, with surprising results.

Come on baby
Let your love light shine
Gotta bury me inside of your fire
Because your eyes are ‘nough to blind me
— Tom Waits, Fumblin’ With The Blues

What’s all this E8 stuff about then?, Part 2. “As my ultimate goal is talk about physics, it’s time for a paragraph on that subject, just so we don’t lose sight of where we’re going.”

23nov2007

Wisteria is an extremely fast event based web framework for Ruby, designed specifically for writing APIs (i.e. RESTful backends) and handling file uploads.

Learning to speak: Erlang style concurrency in Haskell, part II.

Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Oh, won’t you please take me home?
Take me down to the Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty
Take me home
— Guns’N’Roses, Paradise City

The Factor Attraction, by Phil Dawes. “Factor on the other hand scales horribly both with respect to lines of code per word (function) and the amount of local state (number of variables).”

nhc98-1.20 released, which builds from C only and is a lot smaller than GHC.

What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams?, well, make small teams.

Temperature Monitor, highly useful tool.

Putting fear beside him, he trusts in beauty blind,
He slips into the nectar, leaving his shredded clothes behind.
“With their tongues, they test, taste and judge all that is mine.
They move in a series of caresses
That glide up and down my spine.
— Genesis, The Lamia

A 2007 look at Emacs on MacOSX Tiger/Leopard, featuring a binary that actually runs on Leopard and you don’t need to compile anything (All HEADs are broken atm, it seems).

Skype encryption stumps police, the German police, that is.

22nov2007

X.5 Menu Bar, a long and pointful critique of the Leopard menubar.

CGI Scripts in Fortran, ouch.

Under that apple suckling tree
Oh yeah!
Under that apple suckling tree
Oh yeah!
Underneath that tree
There’s just gonna be you and me
Underneath that apple suckling tree
Oh yeah!
— Bob Dylan, Apple Suckling Tree

Doctors untangle the strange case of the giant hairball, amazing.

Bourne Shell Server Pages, whoa.

The Bridge, a Documentary Film by Eric Steel, by Calalily. “The movie is a hauntingly, beautiful tale of suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.”

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they’ll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.
— Bob Dylan, When The Ship Comes In

An Open Letter to Ron Paul, MD, by nostalgiphile. “So here goes: given that you believe in a Christian interpretation of the Constitution, have the support of the Christian right for your pro-life stance, are being called “the Zionist choice for president” by Israelis, and even have the Stormfront skinheads on your side, I have to ask: why do you hate America so much?”

Cicero treibt “Massenindividualisierung” auf die Spitze, “Jedes der 160.000 Exemplare der Cicero Dezember-Ausgabe ist ein Unikat, denn jedes Heft hat ein eigenes Titelbild.” WJW.

21nov2007

The Simple Truth, what is truth?

Man-sized sea scorpion claw found, WJW.

Demonstration “Freiheit ist Sicherheit” am 24. November 2007 in Köln, der CCC meldet: “Um alle größeren Städte der Republik abzudecken, wird es noch in diesem Jahr eine Demonstration unter dem Motto “Freiheit ist Sicherheit” am 24. November ab 12 Uhr in Köln statt finden.”

The wind blows rain into my face
The sun glows at the end of the highway
Child of the moon, rub your rainy eyes
Oh, child of the moon
Give me a wide-awake crescent-shaped smile
— Rolling Stones, Child Of The Moon

Eschatology is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world.

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), by Mark Pilgrim. The Kindle will flop, the question is is because of what or whom.

DUM, John Gruber on the Kindle.

Amusements in Mathematics, etext by Henry Ernest Dudeney at Project Gutenberg.

Future Snow, 1) Weather control is the future of urban design. 2) If a city wants to attract new residents it should try scenting the snow.

Golf amongst the glaciers, and on an aircraft carrier.

Is this just another day, in this God forgotten place?
First comes love, then comes pain. Let the games begin,
Questions rise and answers fall, insurmountable.
— Pearl Jam, Love Boat Captain

How to Size Text in CSS, by Richard Rutter at A List Apart. “In this article, we will reconcile the designer’s requirement for accuracy with the user’s need to resize text on demand, arriving at a best practice that satisfies designers and users and works across browsers and platforms.”

Understanding Web Design, by Jeffrey Zeldman at A List Apart. “Web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression. Stick around and I’ll tell you which site design is like Helvetica.”

E-book the letter, by Steven Poole. “[I]n the hope of hastening the exciting ebook revolution, I here propose a minimal list of features that any really successful ebook device must eventually have.”

Inductive Synthesis of Functional Programs: An Explanation Based Generalization Approach, by Emanuel Kitzelmann and Ute Schmid. “We describe an approach to the inductive synthesis of recursive equations from input/output-examples which is based on the classical two-step approach to induction of functional Lisp programs of Summers.”

20nov2007

Tokyo Cabinet is a library of routines for managing a database. It’s the successor to QDBM.

How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?, neat test. I knew 45 elements, and forgot stuff like TITLE and all the table stuff even…

We’re gonna live in Century City
Go ahead and give in, Century City
Like modern men, modern girls
We’re gonna live in the modern world
— Tom Petty, Century City

Eliminating existentials, finally, by Oleg.

rcov 0.8.1, with compatibility with Ruby 1.8.6-p11[01], intentional testing with RSpec, etc.

What Would Leslie Do?, a new section at 43 Folders. In rememberance of Leslie Harpold.

Enough With The Lists, by Richard Ziade. Full ack.

Harry Potter and the Order of Typography, by Jon Hicks. “After seeing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix my lasting impression of the film was the gorgeous attention to detail to type style. From Daily Prophets to Weasly products, the loving care with which typefaces where chosen or drawn is to be praised.”

The Mysteries of iCal, Revealed!, “One of the minor yet shiny new features of Mac OS X 10.5 is that iCal’s dock icon now shows the correct date even when iCal is not running. Some assumed this to be hard-coded functionality in the dock, but a few brave souls – well, one, being me – decided to find out.” WJW.

Soft security is not weak security. The idea is to protect the system and its users from harm, in gentle and unobtrusive ways.

HappyGirl, by Roman Kamyk. “Have you ever needed to express your love every minute? If your beloved use computer you can install her this application that will articulate your feeling every now and then (even when you are absent). Makes your girlfriend or wife happy, so it makes you happy :).”

Postmodern Programming, excellent papers by James Noble and Robert Biddle. These are a must-read for every serious developer, but please take your time and read them strictly in order! (And the first section of the 3rd paper deserves to be printed out and framed.)

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
— Tom Petty, The Waiting

Scopolamine, also known as hyoscine, is a tropane alkaloid drug with muscarinic antagonist effects. “When combined with morphine, it produces amnesia and a tranquilized state known as twilight sleep.”

The Vi Gang Sign, and the relationship to “The Shocker”.

The Monad.Reader Issue 9, the Summer of Code special, is now available.

19nov2007

JazzScheme is a programming language based on Scheme. Getting ported to use Gambit now. Includes an IDE and an object system.

NeoVictorian Computing: a personal computing revival, OOPSLA 2007 slides and explanation by Mark Bernstein.

If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.
— Bob Dylan, Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Does perfect code exist? (Abstractions, Part 1).

An ABC of Category Theory, “This course is aimed at potential users of categorical ideas rather than aspiring category theorists.”

A “Psychological” Optical Illusion, “The influence of culture and environment can have an effect on our visual perception.” Pretty awesome.

World Toilet Day has been declared to be on the 19th of November each year. “The purpose of having this day is to have people in all countries to take action, increase awareness of toilet user’s right to a better toilet environment, and to demand for it from toilet owners. As such, it is also the toilet user’s duty to contribute towards its also the toilet user’s duty to contribute towards its maintenance, cleanliness and hygiene.”

a burfday on da beach, danah boyd knows how to celebrate her 30th birthday…

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
— Bob Dylan, Things Have Changed

Cool, but Stupid, Things I’ve Done, by Rick DeNatale.

Squaring Zooko’s triangle, by Paul Crowley. “In this essay I propose a kind of name which is entirely decentralized, reasonably secure, and at least somewhat memorable.”

18nov2007

Open in browser extension, “Have you ever been annoyed when you wanted to see a document and the download popup appears which forces you to select an external editor to view it? This extension allows you to open the document directly in browser.” Damn useful.

Neo Sans/Neo Tech, one sees these fonts often lately.

Ist Newtons Gravitätlichkeit natürliches Gesetz?
Natürlich nicht, eher ein Verbrechen,
denn ich hab’ sie nicht bestellt.
Grad’ gegen seine Apfelfalle hab’ ich mich gewehrt,
sie wurde gegen meinen Willen trotzdem installiert.
Seitdem hat sich mir die Fliegerei um einiges erschwert.
— Einstürzende Neubauten, Newtons Gravitätlichkeit

Simple, portable, asynchronous programming in SML, by Stephen Weeks. Without needing CML, this looks pretty good.

What’s all this E8 stuff about then? Part 1, yum, sigfpe on exceptional simple Lie groups.

… without fantasy one would never become a mathematician, and what gave me a place among the mathematicians of our day, despite my lack of knowledge and form, was the audacity of my thinking. — Sophus Lie

CouchDB version 0.7.0 is now available. “Version 0.7.0 is the first CouchDB release that is intended for widespread use.”

17nov2007

Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games, by Jesper Juul. I love such stuff.

The end of Netinfo, this may be the best change in Leopard.

degenerative, by Eugenio Tisselli is/was “a web page that slowly becomes corrupted. each time the page is visited, one of its characters is either destroyed or replaced.”

Alabaster moonshine
thunder burns at midnight
drinking firewater
with the devil’s daughter
— Lydia Lunch, Cisco Sunset

“Keine schwere Aufgabe”, lesenswertes Interview mit Arthur Fischer.

What Exactly Are You Trying To Prove?, “Certainly no major TDD proponent has ever stated that testing provides proof that your code is correct. That would be outlandish.”

How to demo software, by Joel Spolsky. Good points.

MinCaml, the compiler for a subset of The Programming Language ML. Implemented in less than 2000 lines of ML.

Delirium is just a disease of the night
and I’m just another daughter of darkness
stuck in this psycho-tropic wasteland
another wretched witch entranced
by the voodoo of the living dead
— Lydia Lunch, Disease Of The Night

BDD: Bug Driven Development, by Elizabeth Keogh.

A kind of magic? “Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos. So why do so many sensible people swear by them?”

Why Did Symbolics Fail? , analysis by Dan Weinreb. Includes very readyworthy references.

Texas math books wrought with errors, “Reviewers have found 109,263 errors in sample copies of math textbooks to be used next fall in Texas. Many of the errors, spread out over 164 textbooks and online materials, are blamed on faulty translation from English to Spanish. WJW.

16nov2007

Busicom 141PF Calculator, reverse engineered source of the first 4004 app.

Gaffer Tape Art in Tokyo’s Train Stations, a cool kind of practical typography.

jqCouch is a CouchDB connection plugin for jQuery.

You can make the sun and moon begin to shine
and if you could have your way every day would be fine.
It’s no wonder for as long as I may live
— The Tremeloes, Right Wheel

Ajatus is a revolutionary CRM that runs as a local Ajax web application on your own computer. It uses the CouchDb object database for data storage and enjoys a wide range of plug-in and replication possibilities.

Tiptoeing into Type Theory, by Mark C. Chu-Carroll. I never regarded it as an alternative to set theory, but that’s because I read more CS papers than math stuff, I guess.

Rison, a data serialization format optimized for compactness in URIs. Rison is a slight variation of JSON that looks vastly superior after URI encoding. Rison still expresses exactly the same set of data structures as JSON, so data can be translated back and forth without loss or guesswork. Nice.

Nymbler is the smart baby name guide that responds to your personal taste. Just choose a few names that appeal to you or let Nymbler offer ideas. Ouch.

We take a walk,
The sun is shining down,
Burns my feet as they touch the ground.
— The Tremeloes, Good Day Sunshine

Earthquake Towers, Trapdoors, and other such delights, too bad I’m not in LA: “It will be the single most exciting thing that’s ever happened, anywhere.”

who has a cute new car?, danah boyd does. I’m linking that because of the way she names them, though: “My first car was an old Saab 900 named Cody after the Kerouac character who was always going somewhere but no one could ever figure out where.” (My first own PC was called Paradise for a similar reason, btw.)

15nov2007

algorithms for dumb security questions, a clever trick by danah boyd.

Climate Change Escapism, “The images show us what Spain will look like in the future, in a world transformed by climate change.”

The Long Line is a topological space analogous to the real line, but much longer.

I fell in love the very first night, that I was here
I crashed a party, or a wedding, or a birthday, some Catholic thing; there were priests
I caught her eye, I thought we’d be perfect, but we didn’t speak
Over and over the last three days I’ve been falling in love this way
— Dan Bern, Via Gioberti

“Schlucki”, der Schienenstaubsauger, fährt in der Münchner U-Bahn, und ist 56m lang. (Ich bin ja kein Eisenbahnfreak, aber bei sowas schlägt mein Herz höher. Man beachte auch den Schienenschleifzug Speno.)

Thank you Graphviz, Alex McLean made some awesome graphs.

12 Things I Learned from TV Court Shows, by Calalily.

No pornography exploits women. It exploits men. It’s the men that are made to look stupid, silly and ridiculous, chasing after the golden elixir. Women look beautiful, do what they wanna do and get paid for it. — Lydia Lunch

Antediluvian Unix: A Guide to Unix Fundamentals, probably the best general Unix slide set I ever saw.

Perl 5.10 for People Who Aren’t Totally Insane, it looks pretty nice: all the immediately useful Perl 6 features in a working and proven interpreter.

Integrated issue tracking with Ikiwiki, cool idea.

Is Werewolf Killing the Conference Hackfest?, maybe it will preserve us from future Rubygems. }}:-)

So the world evolved a creature
Infinitely creative
That would make things interesting
And mess the order some
And build towers of buildings
To cut strange lines in the sky
— Dan Bern, Going Fine

Geschenktipp 16: 30 Jahre Computer auf 1,6 qm, “Auf einer 1,8 Meter langen Zeitachse gibt es auf 90 Zentimeter Höhe Infos zu Hardware, Software, Firmen und Technologien.” Sieht super aus.

Multics Source and Documentation, “In order to preserve the ideas and innovations that made Multics so important in the development of computer systems, Bull HN has provided the source code for the final Multics release, MR 12.5 of November 1992 to MIT.” I yay for ITS.

An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, by A. Garrett Lisi. “All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.” And it fits less than 40 pages.

14nov2007

Django Book Update, shipping in December.

my long lost handwriting, by danah boyd. (Serious conclusion: “My ability to communicate without editing has decayed.”)

mimeparse provides basic functions for handling mime-types in Python and Ruby now as well.

Love is vindicated
Love was in the news
Love was on the guest list
Love took off its shoes
— Dan Bern, Trust

rack: rolling your own, tiny like, web thingoes, great slides by Ryan Allen.

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow or white rainbow) is a rainbow produced by the moon rather than the sun.

I shot two men in a military car
On a road in a country I can’t pronounce
I saw their eyes when I pulled the trigger
Then checked the back seat for the body count
— Dan Bern, After The Parade

Showing “age” of code lines in Gvim, by Stephan Walter. Cool blame trick.

Dan Weinreb’s Weblog, pretty fresh but very interesting posts already. Subscribed.

13nov2007

Strip search prank call scam, WJW.

Trendy Topics in Haskell. Thrists sound very powerful.

Thrists: Dominoes of Data, by Gabor Greif. We develop a novel list-like datastructure (which we name Thrist), that is able to capture the typing rule of function composition.

Life comes from within your heart and desire
Life comes from within my heart and desire
Life comes from within you heart and desire
— Pearl Jam, Inside Job

Ascender creates the new Droid font collection for Open Handset Alliance’s Android platform, serif fonts on a mobile screen? WTF.

Waxy.org goes full-time. Yay.

Why Apple Spaces is broken, it switches across screens even if a window of the application is on the active screen. Urgh.

Getting rid of set-car! and set-cdr! , by Matthew Flatt. PLT Scheme makes lists functional again. Nice step.

I have faced it, a life wasted.
I’m never going back again.
I escaped it, a life wasted.
I’m never going back again.
having tasted, a life wasted.
I’m never going back again.
— Pearl Jam, Life Wasted

RANDU is an infamous linear congruential pseudorandom number generator which has been used since the 1960s. It is widely considered to be one of the most ill-conceived random number generators designed.

Tree man ‘who grew roots’ may be cured, by Matthew Moore. WJW disease, dramatic pictures.

Three years with ICANN, summary by Joi Ito.

12nov2007

OpaqueMenuBar is a tool for Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” to make the menu bar non-transparent, so you cannot see through it any more.

Pattern Matching in Ruby, very clever hack.

A Compound Document is the W3C term for a document that combines multiple formats, such as XHTML, SVG, SMIL and XForms. I hope something like that becomes a future Office standard format.

Grok, Repoze, and WSGI beg the question, are webframeworks yesterday’s news?, Noah Gift wonders.

Conclusions about Wide Finder, C++, OCaml, JoCaml, Erlang and friends, by Mauricio Fernandez.

Flying geese, he said, I like that one
What s this about flying geese?
I guess, I said, They were flying overhead
And it frees us from the painting motif
— Dan Bern, Flying Geese

NEXCEL, a Deductive Spreadsheet, by Iliano Cervesato. “One thing spreadsheets are not very good at is manipulating symbolic data and helping users make decisions based on them. By tapping into recent research in Logic Programming, Databases and Cognitive Psychology, we propose a deductive extension to the spreadsheet paradigm which addresses precisely this issue. The accompanying tool, which we call NEXCEL, is intended as an automated assistant for the daily reasoning and decision-making needs of computer users, in the same way as a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft Excel assists them every day with calculations simple and complex.”

Computer Books: Reading Between the Lines: Book publishing has been turned upside-down—and back, by Michael Swaine. “In the topsy-turvy world of publishing, books remain a fundamental source of information for developers.”

A Small Combinatorial Library, “I thought it’d be fun to dig up my first ever Haskell project from about 2 years ago.”

git.caboo.se, the Git repository of Caboose.

1.5, poetry by _why.

puf is a download tool for UNIX-like systems. You may use it to download single files or to mirror entire servers. It is similar to GNU wget (and has a partly compatible command line), but has the ability to do many downloads in parallel. This is very interesting, if you have a high-bandwidth internet connection.

Inside the Vault, BLDG BLOG enters the “international doomsday vault”.

The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results. The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them.

Faster Math Functions, talk by Robin Green. “This lecture explains how to efficiently implement the transcendental functions on modern videogame hardware and the tradeoffs you can make. We cover common floating point “gotchas”, range reduction, polynomial approximation, table and semi-table based techniques and ways to leverage SIMD.”

Development now resumed on PDF::Writer, Gregory Brown and Michael Milner take over.

Dying 13-Year-Old Gets His Wish, Will Pork Janet Jackson (scroll down), the story that almost killed The Onion. (NSFW).

From place to place and town to town,
From red and green and gold to brown
To cash and get it up and down the coast
From face to face and down to down
From gray on green and gold to brown
From where I’ve never been and been the most
— Dan Bern, Running

Finnish School Shooting 7/11 – Translation of Sturmgeist’s Manifesto, by MotorMachineMercenary. “By popular demand, under the fold you’ll find a translation of the rambling manifesto of yesterday’s self-selected Darwinist.”

Real Productivity, by Gregory Brown. “True productivity just involves eliminating apathy from your life, leaving you with nothing left but things you care about, and no choice but to take care of them. What follows is a simple extension of that general idea into software practices.”

08nov2007

Overloading functional references, WJW Haskell typeclass trickery.

The Elements of My Style, by Khoi Vinh. I want to read more of these posts by others!

Stefil, a Simple TEst Framework In Lisp. Easy, but flexible.

I’m only waiting
till the morning comes
Till the morning comes,
till the morning comes.
— Neil Young, Till The Morning Comes

MIT sues Gehry, citing leaks in $300m complex, guess that’s what happens if you design with crumpled paper.

A Chat with Matz, Classs Variable reversion, and A Mystery Explained, by Rick DeNatale.

Stagflation, a portmanteau of the words stagnation and inflation, is a term in general use within modern macroeconomics used to describe a period of out-of-control price inflation combined with slow-to-no output growth, rising unemployment, and eventually recession.

Is The Onion America’s Most Intelligent Newspaper?, Greg Beato wonders, and has good points. (If anyone has a cached copy of that Janet Jackson story, please mail me.)

Disqus, newish hosted blog comment system.

Scripteka, a Prototype.js extensions library.

Es lebe der Zentralfriedhof, die Szene wirkt makaber.
Die Pforrer tanz’n mit die Hur’n, und Juden mit Araber.
Heit san olle wieder lustich, heit lebt ollas auf,
im Mausoleum spü’t a Band, die hot an Wohnsinnshammer d’rauf.
— Wolfgang Ambros, Es Lebe Der Zentralfriedhof

In Peace by Whizard at K5. “I received word from a mutual friend last night that trhurler was found dead in his campsite by some other hikers on Monday, mid-way through his 150-mile hike of the Ozark Highland Trail in Arkansas.”

Squeaky Tales is a series of short tutorial screencasts designed to each people to program with Etoys.

Geniales Meta-Serif-Glyphenposter, wirklich toll.

07nov2007

RSpec impressions from RubyConf, by Pat Maddox.

Quicksilver goes open-source, I don’t use it anymore…

Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written, by Nick Padmore at A List Apart. “Anyone can be a copywriter, but the best copywriters actually think about what they’re writing.”

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
— Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’

Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation, by Roel Van Gils at A List Apart. IMO, I just write my mail address in clear, I get enough spam anyway.

OLPC Moves into Mass Production, pondering to get one. The dollar is so low…

MochiWeb is an Erlang library for building lightweight HTTP servers.

An Analysis of the Excel 2007 “65535” Bug Overview, excellent analysis by Chris Lomont, who actually reverse-engineered and disassembled what’s going on there.

langpop.com, another pointless language popularity site.

Memory, ecstasy, tyranny, hypocrisy
Betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss
In the valley of the missing link
And you have no time to think.
— Bob Dylan, No Time To Think

The Subjectivity of Wine, on giving wine experts red-colored white wine. Lovely.

The Forgotten Ruby Web Frameworks, list by Sebastien Auvray.

06nov2007

It’s official: Google announces open-source mobile phone OS, Android, Jacqui Cheng says. “Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license.”

How To Measure Any Distance With The Pythagorean Theorem, you knew that already, didn’t you?

I saw the girl of my dreams on the subway tonight, must be serious.

Hey, you make me king for a day
Hey, and then you take it away
And there’s nothing I can say
— Dan Bern, Just About The Time

Visualization of Numeric Data: A Brief Historical Overview, by Martin Dittus.

one shot tutorial, “Wanna make a neat, fun zine that only uses one sheet of paper? Of course you do.”

Philiform, the forgotten construction set for kids by Philips.

Brickshelf, a huge Lego resource.

If Social Networking Sites Really Wanted to Interoperate, totally lovely post by chromatic.

12blocks, a dozen new kinds of bricks. Imagine the possibilities!

Cafesterol is an extension of the Objective Caml compiler suite that generates Java bytecode. Cafesterol provides an ocamljava compiler that is the Java counterpart of ocamlc/ocamlopt compilers distributed with the Objective Caml standard distribution.

If you wanna make some dough
You oughta invest in my company
We’re putting bar codes onto fetuses
Using ultrasound and laser technology
We used to do babies, but some of them still got mixed up
This takes care of that
— Dan Bern, Go To Sleep

OCamlTeX is a combination of an OCaml script and LaTeX style file that, together, give the user the ability to define LaTeX macros in terms of OCaml code. Once defined, a OCaml macro becomes indistinguishable from any other LaTeX macro. OCamlTeX thereby combines LaTeX’s typesetting power with OCaml’s programmability.

Dependent Classes, by Vaidas Gasiunas, Mira Mezini, and Klaus Ostermann. “This paper presents dependent classes, a generalization of virtual classes that expresses similar semantics by parameterization rather than by nesting. This increases expressivity of class variations as well as the flexibility of their modularization. Besides, dependent classes complement multimethods in scenarios where multi-dispatched abstractions rather than multi-dispatched methods are needed.”

Aim for the Top! Beating the current #1 Wide Finder log analyzer with the join-calculus, Mauricio Fernandez has too much time on his hands, but at least he does cool stuff.

05nov2007

DIY CPU demo’d running Minix, Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the Minix OS running on his homebrew minicomputer, today at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. Magic-1, built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Ultimate geekery.

hTurtle is a microformat for embedding Turtle, an RDF format that’s easy to write, into XHTML documents. It is compatible with GRDDL via a service which provides an XSLT transform to RDF/XML from any given hTurtle URI.

Waste of time–I’m thunder and you’re lighting
Waste of time–there’s wars we could be fighting
Waste of time–stupid little tragic waste of time
— Dan Bern, Waste Of Time

Self-Reference Jokes: A Collection, “I never make predictions. I never have and I never will.”

JONESFORTH ported to PowerPC and Mac OS X, cool code.

If the words ‘jail’ and ‘bail’
Didn’t happen to rhyme
There’d be 1,437 fewer songs
There’d be 1,437 fewer songs
— Dan Bern, Boll Weevil

Colorization Using Optimization, by Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, and Yair Weiss. Awesome technique.

04nov2007

The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler – version 6.8.1 has been released.

Category Theory for the Java Programmer, “A collection of Java interfaces is the free cartesian category with equalizers on the interface objects and the built-in objects.”

I need a chorus, a theme
Something to make all this tie together and make sense
But for now I got no chorus and no theme
I keep running off to someplace that I’ve never been
To do something quite unimportant, to stay out of sight
So people other places might think that I’m somewhere
Doing something quite important
— Dan Bern, Anger

Phantom types and how to do typesafe fixed-length vectors with them in OCaml.

Vprint is a value printer module for OCaml. It prints any value at running time with a simple generic printer. It can be used for the following purposes: help debugging, inspect data representation, test type casting, runtime dispatch based on type representations and avoid writing pretty printers.

A Blobby Language, “A blobby is simply an isosurface, ie. the set of points that form the solution to f(x,y,z)=c for a function f. The virtual machine is the one on which the function f is computed.”

The bridged architecture of adjacent peaks and “the fallen man of letters”, “[t]he peaks of the Dolomites in Italy are full of bunkers and tunnels of various depths. They come from the bitter fighting that took place over the South Tyrol region in WWI.”

Oh, the only decent thing I did when I worked as a postal clerk
Was to haul your picture down off the wall near the cage where I used to work.
Was I a fool or not to try to protect your identity?
You looked a little burned out, my friend,
I thought it might be up to me
— Bob Dylan, Up To Me

Code reuse through polymorphic variants, by Jacques Garrigue. “Their support for code reuse has made object-oriented languages popular. However, they do not succeed equally in all areas, particularly when data has a complex structure, making hard to keep the parallel between data and code. On the other hand, functional programming languages, which separate data from code, are better at handling complex structures, but they do not provide direct ways to reuse code for a different datatype. We show here a way to achieve code reuse, even when data and code are separated. The method is illustrated by a detailed example.”

03nov2007

“The Whitespace Thing” for OCaml by Mike Lin is an alternative syntax that uses indentation rather than parenthesization to group expressions, like in Python and Haskell. This is a controversial feature that some people will always love and some people will always hate. Now, OCaml lets you have it both ways.

The Things We Did Last Summer, at whygodwhy. “I feel my friendships more acutely these days. I read things online my friends have written and I think: I am going to miss these people when they’re gone. Gone away from the internet or gone dead.”

The original 43 folders already existed in 1934!

My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.
— Bob Dylan, My Back Pages

Continually aim just beyond your current range, Terence Tao on how to become a better mathematican.

CSSpool (pronounced “cesspool”) is a validating SAC parser for CSS. The parser calls methods on a document handler depending on what it has found. CSSPool currently only supports CSS 2.1. CSSPool will not yield invalid properties or selectors.

Bacon Salt, everything should taste like bacon…

Roundabout: A Pattern Language for Recursive Programming, by Eugene Wallingford. “Roundabout presents a set of patterns for writing recursive programs.”

Camping isn’t opinionated. It’s strange. — Nathaniel Talbott

D 2.007 brings full closures to D. “I was tired of D being denigrated for not having “real” closures”, Walter Bright says.

25 Photographs Taken at the Exact Right Time, cool shots.

NKS Outtakes: Your Foot Can Pay Homage, by _why. “Here’s one that got left out of Nobody Knows Shoes. Doing a bunch of true shoe parallels just felt too broad. But, anyway, the idea is to teach stacks and flows by also teaching how to lace shoes in different styles which resemble each box type.”

Decomposing Typed Lambda Calculus Into a Couple of Categorical Programming Languages, by Masahito Hasegawa.

An Implementation of Charity (PDF), by Min Zeng. Features an introduction to the categorical language Charity and how to implement it.

02nov2007

Efficient Interpretation by Transforming Data Types and Patterns to Functions, by Jan Martin Jansen, Pieter Koopman, and Rinus Plasmeijer. “This paper describes an efficient interpreter for lazy functional languages like Haskell and Clean. The interpreter is based on the elimination of algebraic data types and pattern-based function definitions by mapping them to functions using a new efficient variant of the Church encoding. The transformation is simple and yields concise code.” Looks like a nice and simple technique.

NaNoWriMo, two days late, two days late!

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint
— Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison.

A Command Line Interface to Google Spreadsheets, by Brian K. Jones.

From Beyond, “Spanning 10,000 square metres of the Mediterranean seabed, the Antares telescope is designed to tell us about the cosmos by picking up signs of elusive particles called neutrinos, which fly thousands of light years through space. To physicists’ surprise, however, the underwater particle detector is also providing a unique glimpse of marine life.”

Tell me, tell me, tell me, you want me too
Tell me, tell me, tell me, I need you
When I saw you over there
What could I do but stand and stare
Will you, will you, will you be my lover tonight?
— Rolling Stones, Will You Be My Lover Tonight?

Mac OS X runs deleted applications, paradox Time Machine situations. :-)

On the origins of Bisimulation, Coinduction, and Fixed Points (PDF), by Davide Sangiorgi. “The origins of bisimulation and bisimilarity are examined, in the three fields where they have been independently discovered: Computer Science, Philosophical Logic (precisely, Modal Logic), Set Theory.”

Do we Need Dependent Types?, by Daniel Fridlender and Mia Indrika. “Inspired by Danvy, we describe a technique for defining, within the Hindley-Milner type system, some functions which seem to require a language with dependent types.”

01nov2007

Here’s what waterboarding looks like, cruel.

Third time’s a charm, “Over 400 new features, fixes, and improvements. Introducing Tumblr 3.0”.

Someday I ll write a simple song
Someday, someday, someday
Someday I ll write a simple song
Someday, someday, someday
— Dan Bern, A Simple Song

Clean 2.2 Source Distributions, not that easy to find without registration.

Puffy’s Marathon: What’s New in OpenBSD 4.2, by Federico Biancuzzi. (Most important: the song and the ISO images.)

Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Hello Kitty interface for World of Warcraft. Must have!

The Property, “There was an interesting article in The New York Times this week about “161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands” that were purchased this summer by the Nature Conservancy.” Features fantastic stitched shots.

I wish you well on your travels
My friends I wish you well along the way
This is the story of how I came to be
In jail for a night and a day
— Dan Bern, Jail

The Entirety Of The Shoes Family, _why’s Shoes book must be awesome!

Fun with Unicode, Daniel Berger has some cute Ruby hacks.

RSS 2.0 Atom 1.0 Archives: