Anarchaia

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

31jan2008

What text files do you use? , Mitch Wagner wonders. I have a big file called “Notes” (~4k lines) where I dump everything. Think of it as a persistent *scratch*-buffer.

ArcCrossReference is an unofficial wiki site of the reference document of the language Arc.

He’s got a catalogue of crimes
From corporate grimes
And six billion shares in oblivion
Your dividend is a life of hell
With a rotten rope and a broken bell
— Pig, ¡Toxico!

Agile Authoring, write papers with SVN.

Fortpflanzung ohne männliche Spermien?, auch eine Art Singularität. Can’t hurt to link to the S.C.U.M. Manifesto again after two years.

Refunctionalization at Work , excellent slides by Olivier Danvy.

Und in dieser Nacht wird ein Getös sein am Hafen
und man fragt: “Was ist das für ein Getös?”
Und man wird mich stehen sehen hinter’m Fenster
und man fragt: “Was lächelt sie so bös?”
Und das Schiff mit acht Segeln und mit fünfzig Kanonen wird beschiessen die Stadt.
— Bertolt Brecht, Seeräuber-Jenny

Simple reflection of expressions, aah, I always wanted to do that in Haskell.

Toynbee tiles are about 250 messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt in several major cities in the United States and three South American capitals.

tinypy is a 64k implementation of a subset of python. It can bootstrap itself into a single executable that can compile python files to bytecode and run them on a VM. Amazing.

The State of JSON, everything is good.

Red Fox, “ZOMG ITZ ALL WHITE AND COLD!”.

30jan2008

Arc has been released! “Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that’s what we’ve aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.” pg’s own commentary.

The Incompatible Food Triad, by George W. Hart. “Can you find three foods such that all three do not go together (by any reasonable definition of foods “going together”) but every pair of them does go together?”

Und nun, meine Herren, vorwärts mit Gott! — Paul von Hindenburg, heute vor 75 Jahren

You have nothing better to do with your life now
Your life now. Hey!
You have nothing better to say for yourself, yourself, yourself
You have nothing better to say for yourself, yourself, yourself
— Agent Sparks, Make Up Friend

Purely top-down software rebuilding (PDF), by Alan Grosskurth. Presents an implementation of djb’s redo in sh. Interesting concepts and brilliant simplicity.

Kart (key alteration radix tree) is an associative array data structure based on Patricia trees. The main advantage of a kart is to expand the applicability of Patricia trees to more kinds of key sets. Karts retain the ordering, running time, and storage space characteristics of Patricia trees.

tweetmeme, like techmeme for twitter.

A Theory of Hygienic Macros (PDF), by David Herman and Mitchell Wand.

Caboose Conf 2008, “In May, if you don’t want to cough up almost a thousand dollars to go learn things you already know, but want to come to Portland to network with skilled Rails coders from all over the world, instead of hanging out in the lobby at the Lloyd Center like I did last year, come to Caboose Conf.” Great idea, I hope there will be a Caboose Conf Europe as well.

SSD write endurance myths, “To put that into perspective let’s picture the worst case scenario of 100,000 write/erase cycles and an average jpeg at 60KB. Using this logic you would need to download 19,641,600 LOLCats each day for a year straight before exhausting the SSD. And here’s where the tricky part comes in. It turns out there are only 940 million lolcats total on the Internet with an average of 260,000 new lolcats per week (taking into account the caturday spike).”

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.
— Bob Dylan, With God On Our Side

The Census Bureau’s data file, “Data files should contain data. Not metadata. Not explanations. Not little essays. And not footnotes. Just the data.” Ouch.

Free the Music, WJW: “As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.”

Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in China, made my day.

typotransformat, a visualization of recurring words.

29jan2008

Immanent islandry, “Two Chilean scientists believe that the world’s largest tectonic plate, located beneath the Pacific Ocean, is “tearing apart,” and possibly on the verge of cracking in two, New Scientist reports.”

Noch mehr Neues von Nokia, der Schockwellenreiter schreibt: “Die ersten Handys aus Rumänien sind fertig…”

Milk and blood, blood and milk
Family of four, family no more.
Drunken milkmen driving drunk.
— Scatterbrain, Drunken Milkman

kUnit is a simple framework to write repeatable tests for applications written in K or KSQL in the spirit of the Java JUnit framework.

CUSEC 2008 Rocked Hard!, a rave(!) by Zed Shaw.

The YNot Project, “The goal of the Ynot project is to make programming with dependent types practical for a modern programming language. In particular, we are extending the Coq proof assistant to make it possible to write higher-order, imperative and concurrent programs (in the style of Haskell) through a shallow embedding of Hoare Type Theory (HTT). HTT provides a clean separation between pure and effectful computations, makes it possible to formally specify and reason about effects, and is fully compositional.”

I’m a fool for a lonesome train
I’m a fool for a lonesome train
I’d try to say goodbye but I never got your name
I’m a fool for a lonesome train
— Ben Harper, Fool For A Lonesome Train

Soft as a Rock, yay interior.

Open, extensible object models (PDF), by Ian Piumarta and Alessandro Warth. Shows how to implement a reflexive OO model in 140(!) lines of C.

28jan2008

Bytecode interpreters for tiny computers, very detailed post by Kragen Javier Sitaker.

A Principled Approach to Operating System Construction in Haskell, by Thomas Hallgren, Mark P. Jones, Rebekah Leslie, and Andrew Tolmach. “We describe a monadic interface to low-level hardware features that is a suitable basis for building operating systems in Haskell. The interface includes primitives for controlling memory management hardware, user-mode process execution, and low-level device I/O. The interface enforces memory safety in nearly all circumstances.”

Foolishness protected us from the world outside
They could never come between us but we knew they’d try
We remembered living as if there were a way to forever be younger than today
— Ben Harper, Younger Than Today

The Rise and Fall of the Amateur New York Subway Riding Committee, by Peter R. Samson. Find the quickest way to ride all the NY lines.

A nearly one page summary of design rules, by Jef Raskin.

Restoring From Time Machine, it worked well for James Duncan Davidson.

Mungi is an operating system designed to simplify distribution in cluster and grid systems. It does this with a single address space, shared by all nodes in the system. “In addition, we are trying to build Mungi as a very pure SASOS, that is all data (even the systems’) is in the single address space, and no other IPC mechanisms are supported by the OS.”

You can’t just say ‘I love you’
You have to live ‘I love you’
I will forgive every time but the last
— Ben Harper, Heart Of Matters

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits – to You, neat visualization.

Perl Cannot Be Parsed: A Formal Proof, by Jeffrey Kegler. That’s really to bad.

Nokia Acquires Trolltech, soon they’ll fire everyone!

27jan2008

A Scheme Shell, paper by Olin Shivers. Very well written and full of ideas, I regret reading this paper not earlier. (I only read the reference manual before.)

Understanding art for geeks, very funny.

Onigiri (rice balls), overview and introduction.

Lisp in Ruby, Jim Weirich ported Lisp 1.5 from the Manual.

Everywhere Girl, The Book, impressive techniques.

Wanna see the infernal city
Wanna see the ruined city
Wanna see the poisoned city
Wanna see the big bad city
Wanna see the lost city
Wanna see the dead city
Wanna see the ghost city
Wanna see the forbidden city
— Shriekback, The Bastard Sons Of Enoch

sock.strain.at, vertical weblog.

Items to build an Apple Store, “If you want to re-model your home in the style of an Apple store, here are links to the suppliers of the actual items they use.” WJW.

Booksthatmakeyoudumb, by Virgil Griffith. Very interesting.

Web 2.0 workplaces, yay for widescreen Dell displays.

The Type that Should Not Be, awesome type hackery/theory.

Anthropocene is used by some scientists to describe the most recent period in the Earth’s history, starting in the 19th century when the activities of the human race first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. The term was coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era.

Can you tell me tell me
Where’s the safe house?
Tell me, tell me where to hide out
Tell me, tell me where’s the safe house
Tell me, tell me
— Alina Simone, Riot Act

The Yoneda Embedding as a Reflection, grok.

Literary Atmospheres, “A British novelist has been awarded legal damages in excess of £100,000 because she writes thrillers, not literary masterpieces. What’s at fault? She’s been inhaling fumes from a nearby shoe factory.”

Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) 2008, most impressive committee of the year.

Smudgy Residues, “Nobody Knows Shoes” to be released as PDF in March. Yay!

26jan2008

roo allows one to access spreadsheets in OpenOffice, Excel and Google Spreadsheet from Ruby.

Recycling Continuations, by Jonathan Sobel and Daniel P. Friedman. “If the continuations in functional data-structure-generating programs are made explicit and represented as records, they can be “recycled.” Once they have served their purpose as temporary, intermediate structures for managing program control, the space they occupy can be reused for the structures that the programs produce as their output.”

The first stable release of Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is here, Timothy Appnel noticed.

Structured Timeline, a neat and creative use of CSS by Eric Meyer.

She saw the children drink the cankered water
She saw the chickens fly up on the roof
She saw the waters overflow the sewers
And flood their gardens of victory.
— Woody Guthrie, The Dying Doctor

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2008, call for papers.

WebPath, Micah Dubinko’s experimental XPath 2.0 engine in Python is now an open source project with a liberal BSD license.

So long, it’s been good to know yuh,
So long, it’s been good to know yuh,
So long, it’s been good to know yuh,
This dusty ol’ dust is a-gettin’ my home,
An’ I’ve got to be driftin’ along.
— Woody Guthrie, Dusty Old Dust

Musicbon: die umständlichste Art Musik zu kaufen, das kann man wohl sagen.

Me fail english? That’s unpossible!, with help of a plugin, you can finally have penises in Rails.

dwm-mitch, a set of patches for dwm. I really like the maximize patch.

25jan2008

Numbrosia, neat Javascript number game.

Feeds For Free, Err The Blog introduces hAtom.

I’m missing you in purple and without your shirt
I’m missing you, I like it and because it hurts
— Dan Bern, Missing You

24C3 Proceedings, gar nicht so viel dieses Jahr.

About BasicTeX (PDF), by Richard Koch. A small TeX distribution for OS X weighing only 40 MB.

Learning Depth from Single Monocular Images, cool image processing algorithm.

I’m gonna get restless pretty soon
I’m gonna get restless pretty soon
My hat is pointed west
And my boots are pointed south
And I’m gonna get restless pretty soon
— Dan Bern, Restless

Emergency Elisp, by Steve Yegge. “Are you an Emacs user but don’t know Lisp? Welcome to my first Emacs Lisp primer!”

24jan2008

Interface design and the iPhone, video by Edward Tufte. Great analysis.

100 books every child should read, I read seven of these: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Winnie-the-Pooh, Struwwelpeter, The Wave, Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Flies. But children literature varies a lot with the native language of course.

You hide an ocean in your hand
So let me pretend
To find my home again
— You Will Get Well Soon, Lost In The Mountains

Editors’ Note, “Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.” Really nice.

Visualization Tricks: Generate a Heatmap of your Keystrokes, nifty. Would be cool to compare Emacs and vi that way.

git-home-history, a tool to track the history and make backups of your home directory. Ingenious.

Xerox PARC’s Bayou Project, “The Bayou system was designed to support collaboration among users who cannot be or choose not to be continuously connected. Network connections may at times be too slow, too expensive, or too faulty for users to effectively utilize, or it may not be possible to establish a network connection at all. This can occur, for example, when collaborators are widely dispersed across the Internet or work on portable computers. In such a setting, weak consistency replication of shared data is the key to obtaining high data availability, good access performance, and good scalability.”

Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end. — Stephen Hawking

Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player. No Java required at the client!

LBFS: A Low-bandwidth Network File System (PDF), by Athicha Muthitacharoen, Benjie Chen, and David Mazières. Good idea, but the implementation is dead.

A good tiny X font, 5x9 allows for two 80x50 terminals on 800x480. (Guess what for.)

There’s no time to waste
The first gets the land
Where we need to build our home
Quiet people build the hardest gold
— You Will Get Well Soon, It’s A Race For Our New Home

Bears, inside out. Yay.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Manuals, by Sean Mc Grath. “Markup holds out the chimera of a perfect model. It teases you with the suggestion that there is a right way to markup any given chunk of content. Well, there isn’t. The answer to “how do I mark up X” is ‘mu’”.

X Windows fonts for MS Windows, converted by Lars C. Hassing. fixed is the one true terminal font!

23jan2008

Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC, WJW.

MIT TECO EMACS Version 170, hmm, I once ran version 169 emulated. (TECO rocks.)

ith your fist that’s bleeding from times of war
All you aim for is an untied breath
And for the case you should fail you brought your knife along
I will be so sad to hear that you’re dead
— You Will Get Well Soon, I Sold My Hands For Food So Please Feed Me

ZFS vs. HammerFS, comparison by Michael Neumann.

Core Memory Project, ye olde times.

Over the last few years, I went from counting lines of code to counting downloads to counting users. — Gregory Brown

Ruby Conferences vs. Go Tournaments, by Gregory Brown. “Here I’d like to talk a bit about my experience with the Ruby community and how it compares to something completely different, the community surrounding the board game Go.” Good read.

We never sleep at night – we tremble
We never turn out the light at all
But one day we’ll be free
One fine day we’re free
— You Will Get Well Soon, We Are Cannibal Corpse

Overview of Chinese mathematics, “Unlike Greek mathematics there is no axiomatic development of mathematics.”

You Would Do Well To Enjoy This Day, _why serializes tweets to poetry.

Review Board, “Code reviews are fun again! …almost.” A web app in Python to keep track of patches and let them be reviewed.

22jan2008

Webolodeon, a GreaseMonkey extension: “Once installed, you will be pestered every 5 minutes to make a case for your further web browsing. If your work is done, just cancel the dialog box and quit the app; if you’re not finished (and you really need to keep zipping around the Interweb a bit longer), insert a virtual nickel by typing a summary of what you’re working on.”

CMPH: C Minimal Perfect Hashing Library, which was conceived to create minimal perfect hash functions for very large sets of keys.

You said Clapton wrote that song for you
But you don’t look wonderful tonight
With wet eyes and black mascara on your cheeks
At least they’ll notice
— You Will Get Well Soon, I’m Dreaming Of A White Wedding

Nachtrag Weihnachtskartenkritik, was für eine geniale Karte.

Aguri: Coolest Data Structure You’ve Never Heard Of, can be used to heuristically find netmasks.

HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML is now a working draft! Yay.

The Design and Implementation of Typed Scheme, 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.”

Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart. “Two key factors, working in concert, have made the DOCTYPE unsustainable as a switch for standards mode.” Icky.

Don’t you think you’ll never be loved
I hold your hand till the bleeding stops
I hold your hand till you fall apart
And you dream your endless dream
— You Will Get Well Soon, Your Endless Dream

From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey, by Eric Meyer at A List Apart. “The version-targeting mechanism Aaron described was just wrong, completely backwards, the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. Every one of my instincts, honed over a decade-plus of web development, was in opposition.”

Welcome to the Flat Earth Society!, “Thanks for taking the time to go through this FAQ. It was created in light of the realization that for someone with a “round-Earth” (RE) background, the FE theory would appear at first glance to have some glaring holes.” Stunning.

21jan2008

Taygeta-Archive, hosted at ftp.uni-bremen.de. Contains cmForth sources.

Design Beyond Human Abilities (PDF), by Richard P. Gabriel. Recommended reading.

To the beat of my automatic heart you sing a song of life
We let it all go by on this easterday — no one
Will divide us again
— You Will Get Well Soon, Tick Tack Goes My Automatic Heart

Min: A Tiny Functional Language Implemented in Dyalog APL, with full source.

Gitorious aims to provide a great way of doing distributed opensource code collaboration by providing Git hosting.

ncache is a web cache system base on the nginx web server.

In general, Perl functions do exactly what you want, unless you want consistency. — Programming Perl

Handy dynamic rspec tip, this works with test/spec and bacon as well.

Fract static gallery, some very nice fractals.

Tiny Tiny RSS is a web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible.

20jan2008

Control, annotated slides by Khoi Vinh. “Why is interactive design different from print design?”

Soviet Constructivism was born following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is characterized by the art and design of its founder, Vladimir Tatlin. His work, and that by many other constructivist artists of the time, played a significant role in helping to reconstruct a post-revolutionary society. The artists of the constructivist era thought of themselves foremost as engineers, and then as artists, as they worked to build a new utopian Russia.

You hide under maple leaves
That’s the most secret place
Hide your secret beauty
Just guard that secret well
With your life
— You Will Get Well Soon, Help To Prevent Forest Fires

BSFlite is a rather small and minimalist client for AOL’s Instant Messenger service. Instead of having a full screen console interface, BSFlite employs a command line interface that allows your fingers to do all of the work without needlessly sifting through windows.

Trappa av TAF Arkitektkontor, very cool stairs.

Teewars, a little online multiplayer game, designed as a crossover between Quake and Worms. Loads of fun.

Chisanbop is an abacus-like finger counting method used to perform basic mathematical operations.

Happy 50th birthday, Simon Peyton Jones!, oh I wish him the same.

Mac OS X and the missing probes, ew ew ew! Apple!

What a beautiful weapon you got in your eyes
You hold the flower that never unfolds
I love you, I love you; the rest is a lie
What a beautiful weapon you got in your eyes
— Curt Kirkwood, Beautiful Weapon

Mathematica and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, “So how come inside Mathematica there are thousands of pages of code devoted to working out definite integrals–beyond just subtracting indefinite ones?”

Logic Programming with Ovid, a Perlcast: “Back at the Nordic Perl Workshop 2007, I sat down with Ovid to talk about logic programming. Here is the audio for that interview.”

Girl, you’ll be a woman sooner than expected, “Puberty is arriving ever younger in American females – 8 is no longer considered abnormal.”

19jan2008

Größere Displays für EEE PC, sind zumindest mal geplant. Super!

let’s define our terms: what is a “social networking technology”?, danah boyd asks.

There was a swirling mass of water that lived in a quiet pond
It asked permission from its master to visit the lands beyond
And its master allowed it to fly
So the wind swept the whirlpool across the sky
— Meat Puppets, Whirlpool

Scooping the Loop Snooper, an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem as a poem.

Project Fortress Code, a BSD licensed(!) reference implementation of the Fortress programming language.

Gradual Typing with Unification-based Inference (PDF), by Jeremy G. Siek and Manish Vachharajani. “This paper studies the combination of gradual typing and unification-based type inference, with the goal of developing a sys- tem that helps programmers increase the amount of static checking in their program. The key question in combining gradual typing and inference is how should the dynamic type of a gradual system interact with the type variables of an inference system.”

Someone who wasn’t related to anyone
Twisted the facts till the truth was apparent
And dished up a dollop of dubious doo-doo
That sparkled like something folks scrambled to swallow
— Meat Puppets, Sam

Developing an application with SimpleDb, by Alex Bosworth. Big fun, apparently. Sheesh.

spec-converter is a simple tool to convert test-unit or dust style tests to test/spec specs. It does not try to do a complete 100% translation, it just does the basic grunt work to make your job easier.

18jan2008

Squeak now running on Nokia N810, very neat.

Crystal Methodology, by Chet Haase. Must read and instant classic. :-)

Prop up their tents with one piece of rope from a curtain inside me.
Purging reform would admit that you fail, start bumming at parties.
Chasing a reason, refusing to reason by listening to reason.
Chasing a reason, refusing to reason by listening to reason.
— Minutemen, Life Is A Rehearsal

Video TECO, I<3$EX$$ (Seriously, this is usable!).

Chess legend Fischer dies at 64 “The controversial former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, has died in Iceland at the age of 64.”

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine. Each BUGmodule represents a specific gadget function (ex: a camera, a keyboard, a video output, etc). You decide which functions to include and BUG takes care of the rest letting you try out different combinations quickly and easily.

The people will survive
In their environment
The dirt, scarcity, and emptiness
Of our South
— Minutemen, Corona

The Indexed book is ready to go!, yay! And with just $8.80 it’s a great present.

Keynote Roundup, by John Gruber.

17jan2008

Marion Tinsley: Human Perfection at Checkers? , by Jonathan Schaeffer. “Over the last forty-five years of his life, comprising thousands of tournament, World Championship, match, exhibition and casual games, Tinsley lost the unbelievable number of seven games.”

Gitweb URL setting, how to set the Gitweb URL field. Trivial if you know it.

We can fall below
Or lift our selves above
Fear can stop you loving
Love can stop your fear
— Morcheeba, Fear And Love

Announcing Starling, finally: “Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth. […] It’s fast, it’s stable, it speaks the memcache protocol so it doesn’t need a new client library, and it’s disk-backed for persistence. […] We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve.”

A Game in plain HTML (no JavaScript, no Flash, no PHP), and not even that easy.

Rubinius adds Multi-VM support, very neat.

Journal für Kunst, Sex und Mathematik, interessantes Blog.

White House Redux, Geoff Manaugh says: “I’m excited to announce that I’m on the jury for a new design competition, called White House Redux, the purpose of which is to design a new home for the U.S. Presidency.”

Remember Lot’s wife
Renounce all sin and vice
Dream of the perfect life
This heaven gives me migraine
— Gang Of Four, Natural’s Not In It

Design Police, with a Visual Enforcement Kit. Must print!

Sun acquires MySQL, another reason to use PostgreSQL.

16jan2008

The Ruport Book: Your guide to mastering Ruby Reports, by Gregory Brown and Mike Milner has been released.

ACM Classic Books Series, “This list of classic books is the result of a poll ACM conducted where members named their favorite computer science books.We plan to make the full text available online to members as we obtain permissions from authors to display each book. We hope you enjoy the books in this Classic Books series!” Awesome: featuring Codd, Hoare, Kerninghan, Bentley, Dijkstra, Papert, Aho, Ullman, Minsky, Iverson, von Neumann and many others.

The Emptied Prairie, by Charles Bowden. “North Dakota ghost towns speak of an irreversible decline.”

The world is getting flatter,
The sky is falling all around.
And nothing is the matter
For I never cry in town.
— Tom Waits, Strange Weather

Urban Terror could best be described as a Hollywood tactical shooter; it is realism based to a certain extent (environments/weapons/player models), but also goes by the motto “fun over realism” (fast gameplay and lots of action). This combination of reality and action results in a very unique, enjoyable and addictive game. Ships binaries for all common platforms.

I Can Has Rezearch Papar?, by Cyle Gage. An analysis of teh Lulz. Also, cocks.

Skinhacking: A DIY Guide to Facials, Laxatives, and Moisturizers, by Trollaxor. “The recipe below is simple and forms the basis of most DIY skin moisturizers; it functions by shielding the skin from dehydrating agents and both attracting and trapping moisture within the skin. I created it after a few tries from some recipes I found online and in a local anarchist hippie zine called Motha Earrrth.”

Ebb Web Server announced, by Ry Dahl. “It’s written in C, makes use of the Mongrel HTTP parser, and uses libev its event loop. The goal is to be small, fast, and language independent server that can host web frameworks.” And it does Rack, with WSGI to follow. Hot!

MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Registration Open, with pretty interesting talks.

We pounded out the joyous light.
Our saviors buried now for years.
A legend now of time gone by,
A martyr of forgotten tears.
— Abney Park, Stigmata Martyr

Regensburg demonstriert am 2.2.08 gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung, mitmachen!

Back from POPL, forward to AGDA, with a bunchload of links to POPL talks.

Rubinius’ Foreign Function Interface, an introduction by Eric Hodel. Pretty neat indeed.

15jan2008

The 2007 Feltron Annual Report, by Nicholas Feltron. Plain wonderful (click through).

Toka is an experimental language with roots in Forth. It has a number of useful features, including a simple garbage collector, decompiler, standard library, and foreign function interface. We need more GCed stack languages.

What I meant to say was I love you
What’s been killin’ me is I hurt you
What I didn’t do was hold you when I saw the teardrops fall
What I should’ve said was I’m sorry
What I should’ve said was forgive me
What I meant to say was what I didn’t say at all
— Wade Hayes, What I Meant To Say

Macworld Expo Predictions, by John Gruber.

Inferno on the OLPC, wheeeee.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. — Christopher Hitchens

I’m already listening to music, so shut the fuck up. thanks, I primarily wish for a mute button for the Flash plugin.

Want isn’t clean,
And want isn’t man enough for me,
To make me believe,
That want could ever fill my need,
To be.
— Giant Drag, High Friends In Places

OOPs, Jean-Claude Wippler argues that OOP can put a straight-jacket on your internal DSL. But then, every paradigm will do that.

Implementation of a Pure Lazy Functional Language as a Template Metaprogram, SK-calculus in C++ Templates, yay!

14jan2008

Amy Editor, a collaborative editor written in JavaScript. And has a pretty interface.

Frei ab sechs, von Harald Martenstein. Lesebefehl!

I’m alright, I’m alright
It only hurts when I breathe
I’m alright, I’m alright
It only hurts when I breathe
— Melissa Etheridge, Breathe

assert_efficient_sql, nifty.

Open source tools: a good collaboration environment for people with Aspergers Syndrome, Andy Oram says. Ack. (And yes, I hate Skype.)

Getting started with Yi, the haskell editor, looks pretty nice to code for.

Danger is always most exciting, makes us feel alive
So does fighting, so starving, so does trying to survive
And so our futures tend to pass, we need our saints and Judah’s
We need our crucibles, we need to hunger, that’s what makes us humans
— Sunshine Blind, Keyeslough

ZFS on OS X, it has progressed more than you’d think.

ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat, interesting idea.

13jan2008

We Love To Build, “In fact, I’d love to see dozens of these images.”

Don’t you ever wish for a kick that’s long?
A kick thats long?
Don’t you ever wish
grow a pair of wings
a pretty pair of wings.
— Verbena, Baby Got Shot

The Gauss-Legendre algorithm is an algorithm to compute the digits of π. It is notable for being rapidly convergent, with only 25 iterations producing 45 million correct digits of π.

Blank World map, grab four pens and have fun.

Now my head is clear
My luke hands washed
My daughter’s pure
My son is tall
Land of plenty, land of fun
To find out I’m Nimrod’s son
— The Pixies, Nimrod’s Son

Functional Roman Numerals in Python, yum, unfolds.

Magnesium Burning Between Bricks of Dry Ice, yay yay yay.

12jan2008

How to install FreeBSD 7.0 under ZFS, very nice.

Demonology ‘08, by Trollaxor. “In the new year the Berkeley Software Distribution family of Unix-like operating systems is growing at a phenomenal rate and excitement over the possibilities for this operating system family is in the air. After unprecedented development and adoption as well as major shifts in the marketplace, it’s time to take a look at what’s new with this demonic family of operating systems. Don’t fear, the word demon means Unix goodness at just the right price.” I wish for ZFS and dtrace for NetBSD.

Just because I’m good at fooling you
When no ones around
I walk in your shoes
— Mono, Silicone

BASIC and the IBM 5100, with a brilliant switch.

Mädchen auf Schweizer Kinderschokolade, revolutionär.

Perl 5.12 proposals, if they go on like that, we won’t need Perl 6 at all.

RIP Mitch Kapor’s Chandler, and now just do a straight port of Agenda for modern systems!

Has Google gone MAD?, “Google Calculator can now perform calculations in Donald Knuth’s units of length, volume and mass – the Potrzebie System, as defined in MAD Magazine issue #33.”, yay!

I lost myself on the subway train
and i know now what it’s worth
to have you here
I took the L in my final breath
and it’s everything to me
to have you here
please help me god
all I know is that this is the end.
— Atomica, Recent

The story behind the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, WJW: “Prof. Andrew Wiles told me by himself, in order to focus on the proof of the Fermat’s Last Theorem, there was one year in which he worked extremely hard to write 20 papers and locked them up in his desk drawer. Then he would pick up two to publish each year. In this way, he gained precious ten years to allow himself to do nothing else except Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

Hilbert II wants to become a free, world wide mathematical knowledge base that contains mathematical theorems and proofs in a formal correct form. All belonging documents are published under the GNU Free Documentation License. We aim to adapt the common mathematical argumentation to a formal syntax. That means, whenever in mathematics a certain kind of argumentation is often used we will look forward to integrate it into the formal language of Hilbert II. This formal language is called the QEDEQ format.

11jan2008

The Pelican Project, book cover timeline.

Help, help!, Mark Dominus does introspection and reflection in Perl. Rarely seen these days, but good to know you can do that stuff in Perl as well.

I’m waiting on the empty docks
Watching the ships roll in
I’m waiting for the agony to stop
Oh, let the happiness in
— Sylvian David, Let The Happiness In

Wilber loves Apple, alternative GIMP binaries for OS X.

Hubble finds double Einstein ring, “The gravitational field of an elliptical galaxy warps the light of two galaxies exactly behind it.”

FriCAS is an advanced computer algebra system. Its capabilities range from calculus (integration and differentiation) to abstract algebra. It can plot functions and has integrated help system. FriCAS a fork of Axiom project – its starting point was wh-sandbox branch of the Axiom project.

Ich weiß, das mir nichts angehört,
Als der Gedanke, der ungestört
Aus meiner Seele will fließen,
Und jeder günstige Augenblick,
Den mich ein liebendes Geschick
Von Grundaus läßt genießen.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Eigenthum

Lazy Bricks, Lazy Mortar, _why points out the “hacky parts” (IMO) of Io.

Landing airplanes in the middle of the sea, The design pictured below – for “a track, supported above the water by pontoons,” forming a sea-based airport on top of which planes could land – was published in Science and Mechanics back in 1936.

10jan2008

Sequel Interview with Sharon Rosner, by Pat Eyler. “I wrote Sequel mainly because I tried ActiveRecord and it really didn’t fit what I wanted to do.”

Tutorial Materials for Programming Language Research, from the POPL08 Tutorial. (Great material, take the time.)

My mother told me, don’t ever change
You’re original, in your own way
My mother told me, don’t ever change
You’re original, got your own path
— Leftfield, Original

Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is a voting system used for single-winner elections in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. Fair, easy to memorize and apply.

Happy Birthday, Donald Knuth!, I wish the same.

Steal This Wi-Fi, Bruce Schneier says: “Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people – and attracts the most criticism – is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet. To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.” Yay!

Underneath the chilly gray November sky
We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive and
Were shooting for the moon and smiling Jackie’s driving by and
They say ‘good try’
Tomorrow Wendy is going to die
Tomorrow Wendy is going to die
— Concrete Blonde, Tomorrow, Wendy

Kant, Chaitin and the absence of axioms in arithmetic, “Kant maintained that arithmetic, in contrast with geometry, has no axioms, only “practical postulates”.”

Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors. Useful.

Mercurial-easy, UI Love For Hg.

09jan2008

Make your own vacuum tubes?, WJW.

Ramaze 0.3.0 has been released and now uses Bacon.

NewsGator Makes Client Apps Free, this rocks! NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader I know.

More sweet
More sweet
Iconography fucks with me
You look great in bloodstains
— Massive Attack, Antistar

atompubbase, an AtomPub Python Client Library by Joe Gregorio.

Holy crap, a full speed dtraceable perl!, yay.

Major screwups in mathematics, Mark Dominus says: “I don’t remember how I got thinking about this, but for the past week or so I’ve been trying to think of a major screwup in mathematics.”

The Text Editor sam, by Rob Pike. Must read for everyone interested in editing text effectively.

Using ASCII Art on Google Adwords: Brilliantly Innovative!, nifty idea really.

Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby, by Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger.

Thinking Of Mathematics: An Essay On Eyes-free Computing, by T. V. Raman.

My Personal Ad, help rms find a mrs (thx, OneAndOnlySnob).

SFS is a secure, global network file system with completely decentralized control. SFS lets you access your files from anywhere and share them with anyone, anywhere. Anyone can set up an SFS server, and any user can access any server from any client. SFS lets you share files across administrative realms without involving administrators or certification authorities. Great idea but apparently dead.

Suddenly I see
I go ba-dap ba-dap ba-dap ba-dap
every time you walk in the room
no escape for me
I go ba-dap ba-dap ba-dap ba-dap
every time you’re close to me
— Lamb, B Line

shimmer is a pair of small programs (a client and a server) that provide an alternative to port knocking program such as tumbler and are used to hide a valuable port (such as a hidden web server or SSH) on a public IP address. shimmer works by cryptographically changing a set of 16 ports (one of which forwards to the real service, and 15 others that lead to a trap to blacklist attackers). The 16 ports change every minute frustrating an attacker, but a legimitate user with access to a secret shared between the client and server can determine the real port, avoid blacklisting, and get a connection.

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, read the pages of the Notebooks by RSS, one at a time.

Matt Webb remembers the time before permalinks. I like his new blogging style, but really prefer the old look.

The Sex Singularity: When Machines Surpass Human Hotness, fiction by Paul Spinrad. NSFW.

Mexico boy tries to stick at home, very clever.

08jan2008

TeachingType is an initiative by tutors, students and people interested in typography, typographic education and related subjects. The aim of this platform is to develop and refine graphic design education.

Monads in Python (with nice syntax!), nice but pretty slow I guess.

Drinking friends
who’ve drunk in bars
whose drunken friends
in drinking bars, waiting
for the lightning man to strike.
— Nitzer Ebb, Lightning Man

Top 10 Drunk American Writers, let’s drink on that!

Jalapeno Eyewash and the Suicide Attemptress, by mybostinks. “If you have ever fixed nachos with fresh jalapenos, it only takes one time to figure out that you don’t pick your nose, take a piss or rub your eyes…especially you don’t rub your eyes.” PNSFW.

Thank You, Aptitude!, chromatic says. I still prefer dselect…

I can’t get anything done
with you shaking around like that.
I can’t take if off for fun
with that animal on your back.
— Prick, Animal

RDoc’s TemplatePage removed from Ruby, and there was much rejoicing.

Woodcarving by Jamis Buck, “In August of 2007, I began to be interested in whittling. I picked up a couple of scrap pine blocks from the local Home Depot and began carving away at them with my pocket knife.”

07jan2008

Bacon 0.9 released, a small RSpec clone by me.

GNU Smalltalk 3.0 released, with lots of new syntax and stuff.

XLaTeX, a DTD/Schema Which is Very Close to LaTeX.

As I lay like a lizard to bake in that sun,
A young Indian girl from her corn field she run;
She rolled and she cried till I thought she might die,
So I pulled out my shirt tall and dried both her eyes.
— Woody Guthrie, Circle Of Truth

Kalman filtering in Q.

rootz is a new no install system that works differently. It mounts complete live systems over the web, and make them available locally. With rootz you can attach your local linux system to various mirrors that serve livecds and simply run applications without any installation or prior download of the software.

ikea hacker, a blog about hacking Ikea stuff. The hack I use at the moment: get a kitchen working plate and four table-legs to get a cheap, stable and minimalist desk.

YAP6 Operator: Junction Operators, by Adriano Ferreira. Now the real fun starts.

Crystals That Nature Might Miss Creating (PDF), by Toshikazu Sunada.

FAQ about CouchDB and it’s new IBM overlords, yay for GPL to Apache License.

Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter, by Steve Yegge.

What does topology have to do with computability?, on the problems of representing reals in computing.

Tame the BeaST: The B to X of BibTeX, by Nicolas Markey. Did you know it uses a stack-based language for item processing?

The snow it blowed and the wind it blew;
My little seed grew and it grew and it grew.
It grew up a cradle all soft inside;
And a baby was sleeping there covered over with vines.
— Woody Guthrie, Little Seed

Alienware curved display rocks Crysis at 2880 x 900, WJW.

Lguest is a lightweight x86 virtual machine monitor for Linux developed and documented by Rusty Russell. And it’s a literate program!

The secret of two hidden messages in Google 2008 Logo, way cool.

Incision Skin, “Architects Wojciech Kakowski, Natalia Paszkowska, and Marcin Mostafa will be designing the Polish Pavilion for Shanghai’s World Expo in 2010.” A paper cut-out is available.

Chaos Computer Club geht juristisch gegen Wahlcomputer in Hessen vor, “Der Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hat mit Hilfe einer hessischen Wählerin beim Staatsgerichtshof des Landes Hessen einen Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung gegen den Einsatz von Wahlcomputern bei der dortigen Landtagswahl gestellt.”

Devel::DTrace for Perl, possibly useful.

06jan2008

Thin is a Ruby web server that glues together 3 of the best Ruby libraries in web history: Mongrel, Event Machine and Rack.

Ct: C for Throughput Computing, “One of the main challenges in scaling multi-core for the future is that of migrating programming tools, build environments, and millions of lines of existing code to new parallel programming models or compilers. To help this transition, Intel researchers are developing “Ct,” or C/C++ for Throughput Computing.” APL shall never die.

Typesetting: Linotype (Part I), (Part II), a video description.

Dein Fuß hat grad mein Bein berührt, dein Zeh hat mich gekrault
Drei Finger hoch der Gin, das Glas im Gesicht
Und ich frag auch gar nicht, was du da machst
Komm rüber hier, ich kitzel dich, mal sehn ob du lachst
Und das ist noch rein, rein, rein, rein gar nichts
— Element Of Crime, Rein Gar Nichts

Cursor*10, a fantastic flash game. Great idea.

Self-publishing is the new blogging, Jeffrey Zeldman says.

24C3-Vortragsvideos verfügbar, “Der Chaos Computer Club ist stolz, in Bestzeit Mitschnitte der Vorträge vom 24. Chaos Communication Congress veröffentlichen zu können. Sie sind inzwischen per BitTorrent verfügbar.” Das ging echt schnell.

Takahashi method for Beamer, Chung-chieh Shan wrote a style file.

Kurz vor der ersten Straßenbahn
Sind die Gedanke müde und schwer
Ein Stern fällt ins Wasser und der Mond hinterher
Einmal für dich, einmal für mich
— Element Of Crime, Wenn Der Morgen Graut

Full Chess in 1k ZX81 Assembler, apparently doesn’t know all the rules, tho.

p4wn, chess with AI in JavaScript in 5k code. Almost impossible, that tiny bit of code plays chess? “Its endgame strategy is to win before the endgame.” Very impressive, still.

FSVS stands for “Fast System VerSioning”, “File System VerSioning” or “Full System VerSioning”. It is a complete backup/restore tool for all files in a directory tree or whole filesystems, with a subversion repository as the backend. You may think of it as some kind of tar or rsync with versioned storage.

05jan2008

Wikinomicon, an online mythos tome that anyone can edit.

Sears Roebuck and Privacy, WJW.

Least Appropriate Uses of Perl You’ve Seen, James Turner looks for ideas. I already fear “I wrote a controlling software for a nuclear warhead”-like stories…

Vintage 0.0.1, Merb gets a Merb.

Autotesting Javascript in Rails, neat intro by Dr Nic.

I had drifted o’er seas without ending,
    Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
    That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.
— H. P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

Iris is not a vegetarian, but thinking too much about that story could make you one. ;)

The Virtual Typewriter Museum, “This virtual museum, that is based on private collections of antique typewriters from around the world, is a tribute to their ingenuity.”

Data Visualization Review, by Pat Eyler. Ben Fry wrote a book for O’Reilly and noone told me?

The Elevator Tower, “Mitsubishi has opened a “test tower,” built for experimental new elevator designs and technologies. It’s “the world’s tallest elevator testing tower” – and it’s a functionalist monolith, standing at 567 feet.” Amazing.

Two New Groovy Titles, why again is Groovy cool?

just lost The Game!

Man is a breath, and Life is the fire;
Birth is death, and silence the choir
Wrest from the aeons the heart of gold!
Tear from the fabric the threads that are old!
Life! Ah, Life!
— H. P. Lovecraft, Life’s Mystery

Sylver Coinage is a mathematical game invented by John Horton Conway. Two players take turns choosing numbers, which represent denominations of money. A player may not name a number that can be expressed as a sum (with multiples) of some previously chosen numbers. The player who names 1 loses.

The horrible secret of Number 6 Whitten Street, One day they were all messing about, doing chores, cleaning up, moving in, when they “found a secret room in their home behind a bookcase” – but “what was inside,” we read, “was a nightmare beyond their wildest dreams.”

5¢ Concurrency, shown by _why. Reifiying the source tree and forking, yikes.

Everything old, “to commemorate the passing of Netscape, I installed a copy of Netscape. Specifically, version 0.9b.” A sad state of affairs, really.

When Nano-Wires Explode, awesome shot.

02jan2008

The Micro-Web, proposed by Duncan Cragg.

Quake done Quick, the whole game in less than 15 minutes! And almost not shooting required. (Yay for grenade jumps.)

Negative temperature is possible. Explained at Wikipedia.

Popping wheelies on her motorbike
Straight girls wish they were dykes
She’ll do anything on a dare
Mom and Daddy’s worst nightmare
— L7, Fast and Frightening

io9, new science fiction Gawker blog.

New Gig, Damien Katz goes IBM to hack CouchDb.

Sequel 1.0 Released!, probably the nicest Ruby SQL API out there.

Managing Humans, an introduction.

A brief history of boredom, fits today.

When I feel like I’m about out of hell
I can feel my cage is shrinking
I can see the light from a prison cell
I can feel the world weeping
Understand me, understand me
Release – acceleration
— Machines Of Loving, Acceleration

Predictions for 2008 and Beyond, by krkrbt. “In each of the prior six years, K5 has issued predictions for the year to come. Most predictions have been quite bland, and the let’s face it, so have the last few years.”

Happy Birthday TCP/IP!, 25 years of TCP/IP on the ARPANET.

01jan2008

Who needs matrices?, by Jack W. Crenshaw. Everyone does.

Santa Claus, Mark Dominus: “You don’t get presents because of the fat guy in the red suit, which is a shame, because wouldn’t it be fun if it were true? But you do get them anyway, and it’s because your family loves you. As consolation prizes go, that one’s pretty good.”

Halcyon is a JSON Web App Server Framework built on Rack for speed and light weight. Pretty neat, wanted to write something like that myself.

Out in the valley of wandering sleep
The images flood I can not keep
It’s picking me up blind energy
I’m floating on sensations wings
Fluttering kisses I go by
It catches me and soothes my worried mind
— Supreme Beings Of Leisure, Last Girl On Earth Lyrics

etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git repository. It hooks into apt to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It uses metastore to track file metadata that git does not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow.

100 things we didn’t know last year, “34. Kryptonite exists.”

Low red moon,
How can you sleep like a baby,
Sleep like baby?
Sleep like baby?
— Belly, Low Red Moon

BLDGBLOG: The Year in Review: May 2007, the other months are linked there.

Find objects in IRB directly from browser URLs, a hack from Dr Nic.

New Years Beethoven-a-thon, Joi Ito reports: “Last night, Mizuka, Sachiko-mama and I went to see the special New Years performance produced by our friend Shigeaki Saegusa. This was the 5th year of the event where the theme of each year is to perform Beethoven’s 1st through 9th Symphonies in one day as we pass into the New Year.”

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