Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
29feb2008
Bacon cups, yum yum yum!
CDR 5: Extra Numerical Types for Common Lisp, by Marco Antoniotti.
I love the sound of laughter
And music in the air
And in the Ever After
I know it’s always there
— Neil Young, Ever After
Labeled Faces in the Wild, a database of face photographs designed for studying the problem of unconstrained face recognition. The database contains more than 13,000 images of faces collected from the web. Each face has been labeled with the name of the person pictured.
Invalid proofs on Wikipedia.
Lisp in a single expression of Python. Neat.
Tea Pantry, at Mighty Girl’s.
Dumble, a JS experiment to auto tumble your delicious links. Client-side, but a really good idea actually.
Somebody got murdered
His name cannot be found
A small stain on the pavement
They’ll scrub it off the ground
As the daily crown disperses
No-one says that much
Somebody got murdered
And it’ left me with a touch
— The Clash, Somebody Got Murdered
Tales of the Hive: So you want to keep honeybeees?, by xC0000005.
Happy Leap Day!, I don’t know why everyone is crazy about that or why the story needs to be retold (almost) every four years, but at least Mark Dominus has all the details and math. And more.
28feb2008
Algebraic pattern matching in join calculus, by Qin Ma and Luc Maranget. “We propose an extension of the join calculus with pattern matching on algebraic data types. Our initial motivation is twofold: to provide an intuitive semantics of the interaction between concurrency and pattern matching; to define a practical compilation scheme from extended join definitions into ordinary ones plus ML pattern matching. To assess the correctness of our compilation scheme, we develop a theory of the applied join calculus, a calculus with value passing and value matching. We implement this calculus as an extension of the current JoCaml system.”
HoneyComb Fixed Content Storage, an archival server based on OpenSolaris.
Vlerq 1.7.0, This is the first version of Vlerq based on Lua.
The winning design of the new euro coin turned out very nice, I think: “The design symbolises that the euro is the latest step in the long history of trade, from pre-historic barter – evoked by the deliberately primitive design – to Economic and Monetary Union.”
And I’m also hesitating by temptation lest it runs
Which it don’t follow me
But I’m not there, I’m gone
— Bob Dylan, I’m Not There
del.ishli.st allows you to use del.icio.us for your wish lists. Clever.
GFERNA, highly impressive portfolio.
Game Graphics During the 8-bit Computer Era, by Steven Collins. “This article will explore the 8-bit computer industry (from about 1982 to 1990) and in particular the graphics architectures, algorithms and techniques being employed at that time in computer games.”
The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. — Jack Kerouac, On The Road
DragonFly’s Freezer, _why(!) says: “DragonFly is my favorite OS and it works great for me.” Didn’t expect that, but way cool.
Mack, a Rack-based Ruby web framework.
Bundesverfassungsgericht schafft neues Grundrecht auf digitale Intimsphäre, “Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat heute dem nordrheinwestfälischen Verfassungsschutzgesetz, das die sog. Online-Durchsuchung von Computern und anderen informationstechnischen Systeme erlauben sollte, eine deutliche Absage erteilt. Zugleich definierten die Richter ein neues Grundrecht, das den Bürger in seinem digitalen Leben weitgehend vor dem Zugriff des Staats schützt.” Danke, Rechtsstaat.
27feb2008
The K5 Gaming Platform: Abusing Kuro5hin’s Comment System, by yuo. “With the recent changes to Kuro5hin, most turn-based games of complete knowledge can easily be played directly in the comments.” Whee.
Trsly lets you keep track of your favorite quotes and snippets from around the web.
On Git, koz: “So naturally I’m interested in migrating rails from subversion to git, as are the rest of the core team. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as running git-svnimport and updating some webpages.”
My shame is complete, yay for monadic FizzBuzz!
Don’t try to save me
try to save me
try to save me
try to save me
With your midas touch
that you planned for me
that you planned
— Rubicks, Midas
GitHub: My Kind of Social Software, by Ryan Tomayko. “Forking on GitHub is like friending on Myspace (or Facebook or whatever crazy ass social networking site that is) inasmuch as this is the point where a line is drawn from one node to another in the social graph.”
Apple bumps MacBooks, adds Penryn MacBook Pros with multi-touch, nice.
Uniquely-decodable codes, Mark Dominus: “Ricardo J.B. Signes asked me a few days ago if there was a way to decide whether a given set S of strings had the property that any two distinct sequences of strings from S have distinct concatenations.”
Pure, Declarative, and Constructive Arithmetic Relations, by Oleg Kiselyov, William E. Byrd, Daniel P. Friedman, and Chung-chieh Shan. “We present decidable logic programs for addition, multiplication, division with remainder, exponentiation, and logarithm with remainder over the unbounded domain of natural numbers. Our predicates represent relations without mode restrictions or annotations. They are fully decidable under the common, DFS-like, SLD resolution strategy of Prolog or under an interleaving refinement of DFS…”
Ach komm
Oh komm
Komm mit
Ins Wasser
Weil du
Und Sex
Und Wasser
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im Wasser liebst
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im Wasser liebst
— DAF, Sex unter Wasser
Protecting Journalistic Integrity Algorithmically, John Wiseman got code to detect the “copy brush”. Very cool.
dahingeschmissenes, Lydia mal wieder.
Top Ten Percent, how to find the top N percent items of a set.
26feb2008
Eliza in Q, by Stevan Apter. Three versions.
Rope is a python refactoring library that supports a lot of refactorings already.
Hunt out misguided angels
Search in vain amongst the ruins
A message, do you know how I feel?
Nothing stays the same
Nothing stays the same
— Cyberaktif, Nothing Stays
What’s New in FreeBSD 7.0, Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more.
“Ich arbeite nur mit Kunden, die intelligenter sind als ich”, ein Interview mit Stefan Sagmeister.
It’s easy to convince yourself that you could do it better, especially if you don’t understand the technical and business constraints that underpin the design. — Mark Bernstein
Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! We’ll begin accepting applications from mentoring organizations on Monday, March 3, 2008, and student applications on Monday, March 24th.
The First Photoshop Icon, pretty cool.
iChatTodoScheduler, Lypanov’s odyssey on providing recurring To Dos for Mail.app 3, with a solution.
OCamlcore Planet, aggregating a few OCaml blogs.
25feb2008
What’s new in ECMAScript 4.0?, a list of weird and wonderful things.
In praise of mandatory indentation for novice programmers, by Chris Okasaki.
Data types à la carte, a functional pearl by Wouter Swierstra: “This paper describes a technique for assembling both data types and functions from isolated individual components. We also explore how the same technology can be used to combine free monads and, as a result, structure Haskell’s monolithic IO monad.” Good read.
Make plants talk! They’ll Twitter you when they need to be watered (and more), WJW.
Forgive me, Let live me
Kiss my falling knee
Forgive me, Let live me
Bless my destiny
Forgive me, Let live me
Set my spirit free
— Antony And The Johnsons, Man Is The Baby
The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2007, interesting infographic.
Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees, really good slides by Robert Sedgewick. I’d like to know if a purely functional implementation is better than the usual finger trees as well.
Foundations for Structured Programming with GADTs, by Patricia Johann and Neil Ghani. “GADTs are at the cutting edge of functional programming and become more widely used every day. Nevertheless, the semantic foundations underlying GADTs are not well understood. In this paper we solve this problem by showing that the standard theory of datatypes as carriers of initial algebras of functors can be extended from algebraic and nested data types to GADTs.”
A debugger should prostitute itself to its users, doing whatever is wanted with a minimum of encouragement; commands should be concise and obvious. — Phil Winterbottom, Acid: A Debugger Built From A Language
libowfat is a library of general purpose APIs extracted from Dan Bernstein’s software, reimplemented and covered by the GNU General Public License Version 2 (no later versions).
µstr a Micro String API for C. Just one header file in the end, but still pretty big for my tastes…
RR (Double Ruby) is a test double framework that features a rich selection of double techniques and a terse syntax. I really like the interface but I think the implementation is too complex.
24feb2008
Dulce de Leche, almost made me puke, YMMV.
garfield minus garfield, WJW.
And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure – the privilege is mine
— The Smiths, There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
Bravit, The Multi-flame Candle, neat idea.
cgit, a fast webinterface for git. Nice alternative to gitweb, written in C.
Effective Procrastination with HiveMinder, slides.
FastBit: An Efficient Compressed Bitmap Index Technology, LGPLed and C++.
What is Topology?, an intro by sigfpe. “So I’m going to describe Topology in a way that is completely different from what you’ll find in any Topology textbook I know, but which does draw on published ideas in Computer Science. Nonetheless, I am describing standard off-the-shelf point set topology, just dressing it with different intuitions.”
Typical me, typical me
Typical me
I started something
…And now I’m not too sure
— The Smiths, I Started Something
Simulated Environments for Animals, what a zoo: “These artificial earthforms will contain simulated environments within which animals will live. The whole complex will encompass 15 hectares and six “biozones,” and it will run partly on solar power.”
Addressing fragments in REST, by Simon St. Laurent. “REST offers a great way to build simple applications that Create, Read, Update, and Delete resources. But what if you want to get at part of a resource?”
23feb2008
Dyatlov pass accident, freaking scary.
Beer benefit, 7. Beer is good for mental work There are lots of group B and P vitamins in malt and hop, and they improve mental activity. Cheers!
Traumatic anal intercourse with a pig, including a detailed description of the swine genital anatomy. PNSFW, but science.
no conferences for me… no sxsw, no etech… wah, danah boyd says: “Please, do go, listen to amazing talks, play werewolf, and ask the goddesses of late night partying to support me in finishing my dissertation so that I can join you in the fall.”
At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the
Middle of my head
Only you can cool my desire
I’m on fire
— Bruce Springsteen, I’m On Fire
tmux is a “terminal multiplexer”, it enables a number of terminals (or windows) to be accessed and controlled from a single terminal. tmux is intended to be a simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to programs such as GNU screen.
The Perry Bible Fellowship enters semi-retirement, the comic strip will still continue, Nicholas said today. “There are actually a number of papers and magazines still interested in publishing at undetermined intervals.”
Spineless and fish-like, I swim in the mire
I swear like a saw-tooth, fin-flap and gill
Scrap this ludicrous chain of events
Tear away from book-form and screen-time
— Fad Gadget, Ad nauseam
Switching Editors Is Just As Hard As Switching Languages, jeez, am I the only one that can use Emacs and vi fluently?
The revolution goes on. Now that Fidel Castro has retired, Emacs has the chance to develop into the longest ruling entity ever. — David Kastrup
New Emacs maintainers are Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong, both long term contributors. Thank you rms for your years of work as Emacs maintainer.
lowercase L, “Ever notice hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L? It looks like an uppercase i … WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?”
CSSDOC is a lot like JavaDoc but for CSS files.
22feb2008
LanFTPd is an ftp server with builtin zeroconf and ipv6 support.
The Dogcow is a bitmapped image first introduced by Apple. It is the shape of a dog with nose and spots that look like a Holstein cow, originally created in 1983 as part of the Cairo font by Susan Kare as the glyph for ‘z’. The original dogcow was named Clarus by Apple employees. The sound she makes is “Moof!”.
This ain’t no rock and roll town
This ain’t no fuckin’ around
This ain’t no planet of sound
— Pixies, Planet Of Sound
Things For Sale That I Will Mail You, amazing idea for a site.
aerial geometry, 5 circular communities from the sky.
Sophie Scholl, zum 65. Todestag.
Ich bin nach wie vor der Meinung, das Beste getan zu haben, was ich gerade jetzt für mein Volk tun konnte. Ich bereue deshalb meine Handlungsweise nicht und will die Folgen, die mir aus meiner Handlungsweise erwachsen, auf mich nehmen. — Sophie Scholl
tno: totalniceone.info, a design blog.
WildWords, a version of scrabble with Unix wildcards.
They say freak
When your singled out
The red…
It filters through
— Chevelle, The Red
Zero Sign On: 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On?, by Dr Nic. Yes yes yes!!
ugrep, grep in 11k code.
21feb2008
Authoring With Templates, by Anders Fagerjord. A paper written as stretchtext, which is hypertext that can be read in short and long versions as preferred.
Nomnomnomicon, wonderful.
Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. Omeka is free and open source.
All in all, it’s no one’s fault
excuses turn to carbon walls
blame it all on chemical intercourse
the swallowed seeds of arrogance
breeding in the thoughts of ten thousand fools that fight irreverance
the full moon is dead skin
the one down here’s wearing thin
— Pearl Jam, Insignificance
Hydra VM is a virtual machine capable of running multiple Croquet images side-by-side, therefore being able to effectively utilize multi-core CPUs. MIT-licensed.
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone, by John Baez and Michael Stay. “At present, the deductive systems in mathematical logic look like hieroglyphs to most physicists. Similarly, quantum field theory is Greek to most computer scientists, and so on. So, there is a need for a new Rosetta Stone to aid researchers attempting to translate between fields.”
On Some Mathematics in Garrett Lisi’s ‘E8 Theory of Everything’, video and notes for an advanced talk by Bertram Kostant.
Well it’s 3 a.m. I’m out here riding again
Through the wicked winding streets of my world
I make a wrong turn brake it now I’m too far gone
I got a siren on my tail and that ain’t
The fine I’m looking for
— Poe, Hey Pretty
Going Up, “The structural engineers over at Hyder Consulting have announced that they are planning what will be, by an overwhelming margin, the world’s tallest skyscraper, coming in at double the height of the Burj Dubai – or very nearly one vertical mile.” WJW.
Crappiest literary theory this month, found by Mark Dominus.
Hypertextopia, a space for reading and writing stories for the internet. Reminds me a lot of Tinderbox, pre-WWW stuff, and, to an extent, fugi.
Developing RESTful Web Services in Perl, by Andrew Sterling Hanenkamp. Using CGO amd libwww-perl. Old School!
20feb2008
Extracting Square Roots with pencil and paper, can be very useful.
MindNode is a free and very easy to use mindmapping application. It was created with the user in mind and features a very simple interface for quickly creating visual appealing mind maps. Very simple, but lacks export to common formats like XOXO or OPML.
Obsolete Skills, a big list.
I don’t have to go far
To know where you are,
Strangers all give me the news.
I’ve been living the blues
Ev’ry night without you.
— Bob Dylan, Living The Blues
Idea: A new typography term: keming, noun. The result of improper kerning.
Lustige Gesellschaftsspiele, Teil 1, …oder: “Wie überwinde ich die lähmende Langeweile im Dienst.” Dave hat Googlewhacking in ein Saufspiel konvertiert. Genial.
The Shoebox, “A place for lil’ apps to live in harmony.”, “The Shoebox is a repository for Shoes apps, and hopes to provide them with a friendly home. So that they might grow and prosper.”
Top Ten Tags, various ways to find the n largest elements of a set.
History of Lambda-calculus and Combinatory Logic (PDF), by Felice Cardone and J. Roger Hindley. Essential reading with a massive bibliography.
We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to
I go back to us
— Amy Winehouse, Back To Black
Watch Mark E Smith read “The Colour Out of Space” by HP Lovecraft, yay!
SMS Tutorial, “we will discuss in detail various ways to send and receive SMS messages from a computer, the advantages and disadvantages of each way, what SMS service providers are, the hardware (e.g. GSM / GPRS modem) and software (e.g. HyperTerminal) required to send and receive SMS messages from a computer, and where to find some free SMS messaging libraries and tools.”
The Internet Firelog, “If you don’t have your own fireplace and firelog, you can watch ours!” Excellent.
Adding Delimited and Composable Control to a Production Programming Environment (PDF), by Matthew Flatt, Gang Yu, Robert Bruce Findler, and Matthias Felleisen.
19feb2008
Moca is a general construction functions generator for Caml data types with invariants. A relational data type is a concrete data type that declares invariants or relations that are verified by its constructors. For each relational data type definition, Moca compiles a set of construction functions that implements the declared relations.
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, “announced he would neither seek nor accept a new term as either president or commander-in-chief.”
Wir werden siegen – irgendwann einmal.
Und wir leben nur für diesen einen Tag.
Wir werden siegen – irgendwann einmal.
Venceremos, doch es wird ein langer Kampf.
— Die Toten Hosen, Venceremos
SALT (Semantically Annotated LaTeX) is an authoring framework for creating semantic documents for scientific publications. “It defines and series of new LaTeX commands, while making use of some of the already existing ones in order to capture the logical structure of the document and the semantics present in the publication’s content.”
John Gruber: A Mix of the Technical, the Artful, the Thoughtful, and the Absurd, interviewed by Shawn Blanc.
Ancient “devil frog” may have eaten baby dinosaurs, Belzebufo would make a nice pet IMO.
Cutting out Static, Gilad Bracha on static variables.
They Shoot Browsers, Don’t They?, by Jeremy Keith at A List Apart. “Standards-aware developers, by their very nature, will object to adding a line of unnecessary markup to their documents just to get one single browser to behave as it should by default.”
They’re tryin to make me go to rehab
I said no, no, no
Yes I been black, but when I come back
You wont know, know, know.
— Amy Winehouse, Rehab
Version Targeting: Threat or Menace?, by Jeffrey Zeldman at A List Apart. “I’d like to live in a world where people weren’t killing each other over religious and ethnic differences and where version targeting wasn’t needed. Designing with web standards ought to be enough, and anyone who works on websites should know how to do it.”
A Valuable Lesson, We The Robots on what school really is about.
Asleep beneath the Northern Lights, awesome pictures.
18feb2008
Some rudimentary control flow analysis for Factor. Very impressive already.
Harvard Research Free Online, excellent: “Under the new system, faculty will deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library. The papers will instantly become available for free on the Internet. Authors will still retain their copyright.”
It’s going to feel so good
now I’d pay a high price
to feel nothing at all
I hope all your dreams come true
— Daisy Chainsaw, Hope Your Dreams Come True
Joint Mathematics Meetings: Exhibition of Mathematical Art from San Diego, California. Pretty neat stuff.
andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only]). andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. Xming is used as X server and PulseAudio as sound server. Wow.
ccollect backups data from local and remote hosts to your local harddisk. Although ccollect creates full backups, it requires very less space on the backup medium, because ccollect uses hardlinks to create an initial copy of the last backup. Only the inodes used by the hardlinks and the changed files need additional space.
So merb-core is built on rack you say? Why should I care?, Ezra Zygmuntowicz explains.
They said “Sunsets never used to look like this, all blues and greens”
They’re beautiful!
Admit it, they’re beautiful
— The Epoxies, My New World
Eyeball Stickers would have been so cool.
Vertical Transport Through Architectural Space, “Further proof that elevators have been ignored for too long in contemporary building design – after all, they are moving rooms and could be put to use as something other than mere vertical transport through architectural space – even Harrods, the London department store, is (temporarily) updating its lifts.”
17feb2008
Kosovo MPs proclaim independence, “Kosovo’s parliament has unanimously endorsed a declaration of independence from Serbia, in an historic session.”
Packet Forth (PF) is a scripting language for soft real-time graphics processing and generation. Although the focus has shifted towards generative graphics in the last couple of years, the original goal was and still is real-time video processing. PF is now quite stable and usable, but remains a bit of an odd duck in the land of open source video processing tools.
Dynamite is a Ruby interface to the Processing graphics API. This is done via JRuby, a Ruby interpreter written in Java.
Doctor, do you have a remedy?
This is not alright by me
Do you think that you have the trick?
For a city that’s so spent and sick?
— Pretty Girls Make Graves, All Medicated Geniuses
Michigan laser beam believed to set record for intensity, impressive: “The record-setting beam measures 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. It contains 300 terawatts of power.” Only lasts 30 femtoseconds, but whatever.
Untangled, Roy T. Fielding got a blog.
Greasekit and user style-sheets, Lypanov’s hard core way to surf.
SCC5: POVRay Short Code Contest #5, impressive what one can do in less than 512 bytes!
Electracy describes the kind of “literacy” or skill and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds.
Who clicks on ads? (Revisited with data), danah boyd finds out. I have absolutely no trust in online advertising in the long run.
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
— John Donne, Meditation XVII
Anti-Social Software, Joe Gregorio: “Enough of this so-called Social Software, what I want is Anti-Social Software, it isn’t about my friends or my connections, it’s all about me. Me. Me. Me.”
Extrema is a powerful visualization and data analysis tool that enables researchers to quickly distill their large, complex data sets into meaningful information. Its flexibility, sophistication, and power allow you to easily develop your own commands and create highly customized graphs.
Prover9 is an automated theorem prover for first-order and equational logic, and Mace4 searches for finite models and counterexamples. Prover9 is the successor of the Otter prover.
MATHOWLIE, Howl for MetaFilter. “I saw the best minds of mefi generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked, …”
16feb2008
Fregl: an introduction to FRP in Haskell.
Six Principles for Making New Things, essay by Paul Graham. “After years of working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of macros? Why hadn’t I worked on more substantial problems?”
When I got older and I learned the truth
some things don’t matter if they ain’t no use
if you can’t get there without playing games
or pointing fingers at who’s to blame
I’m only human but time will tell
who’s sold out and who is for sale
kicked out – kicked in, I can’t open the door
— Dead Moon, Kicked Out – Kicked In
The Appeal of the MacBook Air, John Gruber writes: “[T]he MacBook Air is like a sporty convertible coupe. You buy one not for practical reasons, but because it is satisfying to own something beautiful and clever and fun.”
The Origin of Valentine’s Day, by j1mmy. “Saint Valentine was, conicidentally both born and martyred on February 1st. It might be difficult to understand how this man’s life gave birth to the rather later holiday we know today, but there is a connection!”
ugit, the pythonic Git GUI using PyQT.
I don’t want to pale the light
I don’t want to lose you twice
I don’t want an explanation
Like the echos in the waiting station
I just want to spread your wings beneath my sky
— Dead Moon, Echoes To You
Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth, neat.
Amsterdam Subcity, “Will the city of Amsterdam soon build “a labyrinth city” beneath its canals?”
Acta Quandalia, Mark Dominus found a cover page of it!
15feb2008
Trash Mandala, “Jeffrey Inaba and C-LAB have created this mandala of consumption, refuse, and plastic waste, with one side dedicated to the “hydration compulsion” that helps puts millions of one-use bottles in places bottles aren’t meant to be.”
How To Pronounce Rubinius, by M. David Peterson. Aha! Posting a soundfile would have been easier, tho.
Must be strangely exciting
To watch the stoic squirm
Must be somewhat heartening
To watch shepard meet shepard
But you’re not allowed
You’re uninvited
An unfortunate slight
— Alanis Morissette, Uninvited
Games for Programmers: Zendo, explained by Chris Okasaki. “Zendo is a game about debugging. Ok, it’s not really about debugging, but you’ll see what I mean in a moment.”
What would Richard Feynman do?, a flow chart.
The Atlas of Strange Maps, to be released by the author of the Strange Maps blog.
Orange is a component-based data mining software. It includes a range of preprocessing, modelling and data exploration techniques. It is based on C++ components, that are accessed either directly (not very common), through Python scripts (easier and better), or through GUI objects called Orange Widgets.
Everyone I come across in cages they bought
They think of me and my wandering but I’m never what they thought
Got my indignation but I’m pure in all my thoughts
I’m alive
— Eddie Vedder, Guaranteed
The Marketing Denglisch Wordbook of Horrors, z.b. “Output: Heiße Luft, Dung und weitere Anglizismen für ein happy Biznesstogether. Seltener: Grund für die Alimentenzahlung.”
How To Do RESTful Partial Updates, by Joe Gregorio. Using Atom of course.
14feb2008
Wondermark #380: In which Jake does his Best, happy Valentine’s.
Saying Goodbye to an Institution, “Well, it’s a sad day for ruby-talk. This morning James Edward Gray II posted his last ruby quiz summary, finalizing his retirement.” Makes me really sad, in spite of having left ruby-talk recently as well, I fondly remember the quizzes. Heck, I’m in the book!
fo.py, mighty Forth Lisp SmallTalk mix in Python, an interesting piece by Ivan Tikhonov.
I do not like
anyone walking behind me
And I do not want to get stopped
by the cops for anything
— Dan Bern, Disarmament
Grit is a Ruby library for extracting information from a git repository in and object oriented manner. Very useful.
Philosophische Untersuchungen, Volltext Ludwig Wittgensteins spätes Hauptwerk. Absolut lesenswert.
Talking pomo: An analysis of the postmodern movement, by Steve Mizrach. Pretty well written, as are most of his other stuff at that site.
Lost work, this list of Wikipedia makes me sad.
Jin Ping Mei is a Chinese naturalistic novel composed in the vernacular during the late Ming Dynasty. “The story contains a surprising number of descriptions of sexual toys and coital techniques that would be considered fetish today, as well as a large amount of bawdy jokes and oblique but still titillating sexual euphemisms.”
Valentine’s Day
I don’t think,
It’s so bad to say
That I think we needed
Valentine’s Day
— Dan Bern, Valentine’s Day
Using autofs for GPG keys on a USB stick, a complicated but safe solution.
random($foo) is active again.
Bookendless, “Books on art, photography, design, mode, architecture/urbanism… From my bookshelf to the information and knowledge on the web.”
13feb2008
Hello Kitty MMORPG goes beta, “Sanrio Digital’s “Hello Kitty Online” accepting players for closed beta”. WJW.
Chaosradio: Moderne Webentwicklung, “Welche Standards und Methoden das Programmieren neuartiger Anwendungen im Web erlauben.” Tim Pritlove war im Metalab und hat die soup.io-Leute interviewt. Ich werde namentlich erwähnt ab Sekunde 300. Guter Podcast. ;-)
MACLISP manual comes to the web, by Kent M. Pitman. Awesome!
Such is the passage of time
Too fast to fold
Suddenly swallowed by signs
Low and behold
— Eddie Vedder, Rise
What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory , by Ulrich Drepper. “As CPU cores become both faster and more numerous, the limiting factor for most programs is now, and will be for some time, memory access.”
Torture And The Law, Mark Bernstein provides the clearest statement on breaking the law when it’s necessary.
The least interesting number, displayed by Mark Dominus.
Ray Kurzweil turned 60 yesterday. Happy birthday and may you be able to live as long as you want to.
Das Ende des Brockhaus naht, “Die 21. Auflage der Brockhaus Enzyklopädie war voraussichtlich die letzte.”
XML Stream Processing Using a Lazy Concurrent Language (PDF), by Shin-Cheng Mu, Ta-Chung Tsai, and Keisuke Nakano. “The challenge is how to encapsulate concurrency without compromising expressiveness and flexibility of languages. We propose the idea of pushing datatypes – when a pushing closure is demanded, all expressions referring to it are evaluated concurrently to weak head normal forms.”
I’ve got this light
I’ll be around to grow
Who I was before
I cannot recall
— Eddie Vedder, Long Nights
The Lipson-Shiu Corporate Type Test classifies along four alternative axes: Intelligent-Stupid, Lawful-Chaotic, Important-Unimportant, and Good-Evil. I’m ICUG (Inventor).
connotype.com, “a compendium of things heard and seen” by Rumsey Taylor. Makes a wonderful homepage.
Conal Elliott blogs a lot of good stuff about functional reactive programming lately.
468B Thy Future, “Porter turned his attention to poetry as unintentionally written by machines, in machine meter. This, Porter told us, is the poetry of the future: a poetry of numbers, repetition, function, gravity, and trajectory, redefining the standards of human emotion and tone.” Magnificient.
12feb2008
Begraben unter Phänomenen, von Christian Gapp. “Die auf “Anwendungsbezug” setzende Vermittlung von Mathematik verhindert genau das, was sie angeblich bewirken sollte: Begeisterung für Mathematik als Kulturwissenschaft.”
Society, you’re a crazy breed.
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.
Society, crazy indeed…
I hope you’re not lonely, without me.
— Eddie Vedder, Society
Air Disaster Simulations, scary shots.
An Abstract Unification Machine, by Mark Tarver. “The Abstract Unification Machine (AUM) is a model for compiling Horn clauses into a functional language. The approach of the AUM is derived from lessons learnt into compiling an extended lambda calculus. The paper opens by describing an accepted model for compiling a pattern- directed functional language and then goes on to describe the AUM in two stages. In the first stage, we describe the AUM at an abstract level, in terms of its ability to generate virtual instructions for a functional programming language. In the second stage, we describe a concrete interpretation of these instructions in Common Lisp.”
10.5.2 update shows Apple listens to users, non-transparent menu bar, folders in the dock and a Time Machine menu-bar indicator!
There’s a big
a big hard sun
beating on the big people
in the big hard world
— Eddie Vedder, Hard Sun
Color Pencils Reviewed, an awesome technology, in spite of its limitations!
11feb2008
Galago is a new search engine software package developed primarily for research into efficient query processing techniques with lots of query features.
Angus Hutcheson Chrysalises, “It’s incredible what can be done with raw silkworm chrysalises.” Absolutely.
Born to breathe
and not much else
You’ll die for nothing
like everybody else
— Front 242, Born to Breathe
Developing SGML DTDs From Text To Model To Markup, by Eve Maler and Jeanne El Andaloussi. Full text online.
Network Hydrology, “The project reimagines the entire San Francisco peninsula in the year 2108 A.D., having been overlain, if not completely replaced by, a kind of prosthetic hydrological landscape – complete with underground rivers of algae which will be cultivated as a source of hydrogen for fuel.”
Gas Mask Girl is a 16 year old girl who showed up to the Sydney Scientology raid bedecked in a hello Hello Kitty babydoll tee and a respirator+motorcycle goggles (NOT an actual gas mask). Because of her bosom and being azn she became an instant meme and the poster child of the global movement. Awesome, NSFW if you scroll.
Palindromic Quine, results of a Golf contest.
Further the road we see,
Blessed with this technology.
Welcome to the industry of noise.
— Photek, Industry of Noise
Portrait of a N00b, roman by Steve Yegge. For myself, when I learned Ruby, I often felt like running against a wall: this was because I was closer to the actual problem I was trying to solve than I’d ever been in C, for example.
issuu.com: Read the world. Publish the world. Read magazines onlines. I really like it.
Qi II and Beyond, I always was a bit sceptical about the thing, but I only read good news there. Let’s hope it comes in time.
10feb2008
XML is ten years old today, happy birthday, sucker.
Yahoo Board to Reject Takeover Bid From Microsoft, let’s hope it works.
Space in time,
a lover’s kiss,
a point of view,
measure this
love is perfect,
love is cruel…
all for you…
— Low Pop Suicide, Black Hole Babies
First Priority: Core Language, Paul Graham explains the important things of Arc at the moment.
List of countries by beer consumption per capita, 3rd place!!
Turn your life into a moonlight daydream
and do the world a favor
just fold into one
day by day
one by one
and give it all away
— The Crash Baptists, One By One
Constructing List Homomorphism from Left and Right Folds, by Shin-Cheng Mu. “Well, I think the moral is that we cannot just stop when it appears that is no elegant solution that suits our taste. It sometimes pays to get our hands dirty, through which we may eventually discover the beauty within.” Pretty amazing results.
Fluorescent Field, “the project involved over a thousand fluorescent bulbs “planted” underneath high voltage AC transmission lines. Unwired, the bulbs drew energy from the surrounding electromagnetic radiation and lit up, making for what must have been a marvelous sight.”
Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography, the end of an era.
09feb2008
The Grammy in Mathematics, “Mathematician nominated for award for restoring the only known recording of a live Woody Guthrie performance.” Yay.
CppSpec is a behavior driven development (BDD) framework for C++. Even looks usuable.
FDA warns of Botox side effects, deaths, ” The popular anti-wrinkle drug Botox and a competitor have been linked to dangerous botulism symptoms in some users, cases so bad that a few children given the drugs for muscle spasms have died, the government warned Friday.” Do tell. WJW.
Dollars and cents
make so much sense
why can’t they work all over
cleveland and nice and dover
Euros and quarters and pounds
— Pretty Balanced, Euros And Pounds
How many functions are there from () to ()?, answer: it depends!
Ten Years of Purely Functional Data Structures, Chris Okasaki recaps. I took this as a chance to look into his thesis again and I don’t regret it: it is very well written and provides clear analysis of his short data structure implementations. (His blog is a good read as well.)
Continued Fractions in Haskell, irrational numbers to come.
a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared, or: why I POP all my mail and host blogs on my own.
Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass.
— T.S. Eliot, The Triumph of Bullshit
W3C’s Excessive DTD Traffic, the useless fetching of HTML DTDs troubles the W3C: “up to 130 million requests per day, with periods of sustained bandwidth usage of 350Mbps, for resources that haven’t changed in years.”
Calls for Cthulhu, “Breaking the minds of mankind, and answering their calls.” Very funny videos, also on YouTube.
08feb2008
Plotting the spirograph equations with ‘gnuplot’, by Víctor Luaña. Cool.
Anti-Oscar blamiert freche Produktpiraten, eigentlich nur Wirtschaftsdarwinismus.
I’m here with all of my people
Locked up with all of my people
So let me hear you scream if you’re with me
— The Presets, My People
The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development, good list of laws.
Easy, Do-It-Yourself Ghost, fun.
Incremental Map/Reduce, Damien Katz: “Ok, here is a quick rundown of how the full Map/Reduce functionality in CouchDB will work.”
Gung ho, Mr. Murder,
could be a while but you look no further,
snip, snip, scissor quickstep,
cut the line, you are out of your depth.
— The Damage Manual, Scissor Quickstep
Perl is now Y2038 safe, time to roll it out everywhere.
We will migrate into the sky, whee: “What if subways flood, streets close, and whole neighborhoods are submerged by up to 23 feet of ocean water and battered by 130 mile-per-hour winds? What if New Yorkers need a place to live during years of reconstruction?”
Fixing Pastie for Emacs, a bit updated version of my functions.
ArcLite implements Arc in JavaScript in 1200 LoC.
07feb2008
The 7 Wonders of the Food Coloring World, tasty coal tar.
plasTeX is a LaTeX document processing framework written entirely in Python. It currently comes bundled with an XHTML renderer (including multiple themes), as well as a way to simply dump the document to a generic form of XML.
xPattern, a Community Driven Textpattern fork.
You’ve to give and then return
You just can let it go
— Dead Disco, Automatic
The Arc Challenge, Jim Weirich tackles it.
open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals, danah boyd says. “I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.”
Trivial theorems, Mark Dominus proposes: “How about a Journal of the Properties of the Empty Set? The editors would never be at a loss for material. And the cover almost designs itself.” Neat. ;)
Project LambdaCan: Lambda Calculus in a Can, wow.
Pick up where you last left off
Pick up the little pieces
You left upon the altar
Devoted to yourself
— Tuxedomoon, Holy Wars
The basics of applicative functors, put to practical work, by Bryan O’Sullivan.
Rarindra style workflow…, how to make fairy-tale photographs.
WikiVS is the one stop for up-to-date comparisons between products, projects, and programs.
06feb2008
Tic Tac Toast, Helping You Play With Your Food, must have.
ExPASy Logo Biochemical Pathways: Metabolic Pathways, an overview. WJW.
Aerial Terrains, “It what sounds like the coolest job description going, the BBC reports that “scientists have been sailing across the Atlantic in a bid to track down sand from the Sahara Desert.” They are chasing an aerial landform whilst plying currents through the sea – terrestrial stability is nowhere in sight.”
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
Thermal camera’s unique view of London Zoo, neat.
Movement, Web Directions North 2008 closing keynote, by Matt Webb. “By considering the Web in motion, an approach which uses a ‘motivations flowchart’ is demonstrated, where the states of a user are used to derive features regardless of the interaction medium.” Snap sounds great.
A Third Order Quine in Three Languages, someone was bored: “This is a Haskell program that outputs a Python program that outputs a Ruby program that outputs the original Haskell program.”
God said, OK, I think you re projecting
You just like saying his name
I said this dream is mine it isn t yours
You may be God but this is my game
He said what is it you re avoiding
He said please tell me what you want
— Dan Bern, Venus And Serena
Using Xen for High Availability Clusters, by Kris Buytaert and Johan Huysmans.
Major screwups in mathematics: example 1, Mark Dominus now found some: Gödel and the decidability of formulas with identity sign.
Smalltalk and OMeta, implemented in OMeta/JS, this is great.
Packrat Parsers Can Support Left Recursion, by Alessandro Warth, James R. Douglass and Todd Millstein.
05feb2008
Game boy damaged in the gulf war, still works.
A Lambda Calculus Interpreter in Twelf, part #1, finally a neat introduction to Twelf.
Typed relational algebra: schemas, CRUD, source code, by Mauricio Fernandez. Seriously cool stuff.
Rock List: Readers’ Best Protest Songs, at Rolling Stone. Pretty shallow, but it gets better at the top.
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord,
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Ooh, they only answer More! more! more!
— Creedance Clearwater Revival, Fortunate Son
The Ruby Community Is Dead, Long Live Ruby Communities, Gregory Brown says.
Lisaac, a new prototype-based language. “It stands as a Self’s successor, however it distinguishes itself in many ways, essentially because of system- programming constraints. Lisaac allows low-level programming but remains a high-level language.”
Die Essayisten, von Kurt Tucholsky. “Jenes alte gute Wort darf auch hier angewandt werden: der Essaystil ist der Mißbrauch einer zu diesem Zweck erfundenen Terminologie. Es ist eine ganze Industrie, die sich da aufgetan hat, und sie hat viele Fabrikanten.” Genial.
Hypertext and the future of reading & writing, “So my next business idea: a platform that allows anyone to import, shuffle & mix their existing stuff – be it text, music, video, or any other type of multimedia – and give them the means to publish it on-demand. I don’t think we actually need paper to do this, Hypertext will do.” Tumblelogging grows up?
What do you get when you cross an ouroboros with a Möbius strip? , “M.C. Escher knew: The dreaded Mouroboröbius!”
It’s the nature of the experiment
It’s the patterns of my temperament
It’s the nature of the experiment
They’re taking me in increments
— Tokyo Police Club, Nature Of The Experiment
Matt Webb on Web Directions North 2008, says: “Best conference ever!” (And now the tumbleloggers have to make up titles, thank you.)
Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring, by Alex Bischoff at A List Apart. “Maintainable code is even more important if you’re going to hand off your code to a client or a content management system: the less intricate the markup, the fewer chances there are for the nuances of your code to become lost in the shuffle.”
The Rules of Digital Engagement, by Jonathan Follett at A List Apart. “[O]nce you commit to working down the long hallway, the question becomes, how do you successfully navigate this new and changing territory?”
04feb2008
How To Use Low Pro For jQuery, $.klass sounds very cool.
Creative thinking rules, print it out and glue it to the wall.
A lambda calculus for real analysis, by Paul Taylor. “Abstract Stone Duality is a revolutionary theory that works directly with computable continuous functions, without using set theory, infinitary lattice theory or a prior theory of discrete computation. Every expression in the calculus denotes both a continuous function and a program, but the reasoning looks remarkably like a sanitised form of that in classical topology.” Hot.
Often I see fear in your eyes
and sometimes I know your heart is full of little arrows
but trust in me and no one can do you wrong
‘cos I know and you know our love is strong enough
— Lamb, Trans Fatty Acid
GolfScript is a stack oriented esoteric programming language aimed at solving problems (holes) in as few keystrokes as possible. It also aims to be simple and easy to write.
Psychology at Depth, a plan for a “depthscraper” that would “defy earthquakes.”
Tips For Core Implementors of Fit, this is how specifications should be implemented and software ported.
Hearts and flowers
Those people that make up valentines
Forget the flesh and blood of love
Like yours and mine
— Lamb, Hearts And Flowers
darcs-to-git makes Git mirrors of Darcs repositories.
Earth Class Mail provides an “online PO Box”: “View scanned images of your sealed envelopes online, then choose to have your mail securely scanned into a PDF document, recycled, shredded or forwarded to you or someone else.” Awesome idea, especially if you travel a lot!
ErlyJS is a Javascript compiler running on and compiling for the Erlang virtual machine.
03feb2008
Waiting for It, by Rachel Donadio. “Technology may be speeding up the news cycle, but in publishing, things actually seem to be slowing down.”
Design Issues for Foreign Function Interfaces, “A survey of existing native interfaces for several languages and some suggestions”, by Reini Urban.
You’re still breathing but you don’t know why
Life’s a bit and sometimes you die
You’re still breathing but you just can’t tell
Don’t hold your breath
But the pretty things are going to hell
— David Bowie, The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell
An approach to call-by-name delimited continuations (PDF), POPL 2008 slides by Hugo Herbelin and Silvia Ghilezan.
Swing and Shadow by Gumdesign, cool wine glasses.
The History of Visual Communication, “This website attempts to walk you through the long and diverse history of a particular aspect of human endeavour: The translation of ideas, stories and concepts that are largely textual and/or word based into a visual format, i.e. visual communication.”
Prolog is a great language for writing append; after that it’s all downhill. — Paul Graham, Take the Arch Challenge
Spurius Carvilius Ruga was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G. Cool.
For such an innocent face
Such an innocent face
You got an innocent
Lalalalala
You’re an innocent
— Veruca Salt, Innocent
Velena is a freeware expert system crafted for playing connect four. It’s based on eight mathematical rules, each proven to be correct. This implies that also the conclusions made by Velena are correct. In this way it has been possible to show that connect four is a first player win, and Velena is always able to win if she plays first.
Using Git within a project (forking around), Dr Nic explains.
Purely functional recursive types in Haskell and Python, “It’s interesting that theory about static types has something to say about programming in a dynamically typed programming language.”
02feb2008
Growing old in the age of lead, “Maybe if you’d lived in a different house as a teenager, or your dorm room hadn’t had lead paint on the walls, you’d still have perfect vision at 93.”
Netscape Windows 3.1, the Firefox theme. Old times…
It’s half biology and half corrective surgery gone wrong
You’ll notice something funny if you hang around here for too
Long ago in some black hole before they had these pills to take it back
I’m half Jill
and half Jack
— The Dresden Dolls, Half Jack
The Worst Addiction of Them All, by Kurt Vonnegut: “If Western Civilization were a person, we would be directing it to the nearest meeting of War-Preparers Anonymous. We would be telling it to stand up before the meeting and say, “My name is Western Civilization. I am a compulsive war- preparer. I have lost everything I ever cared about. I should have come here long ago. I first hit bottom in World War I.” (1983)
How the Military Conquered the Natives of Subterranean Earth, another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh at io9.
Pure Bigraphs: a Tutorial, draft of a book by Robin Milner.
On Our Desks 01, “[H]ere are some pics of the things – in various states of progress – that are being passed around the desks of Super Colossal currently.”
LuaJIT roadmap 2008, pretty amazing.
I want to give you it now
I want to give you some broken peices
Wanna give you it now
Hand in glove
— Pigface, Hips, Tits, Lips, Power!
LuaVlerq, using Lua to script Vlerq sounds pretty clever.
01feb2008
Agilo for Scrum is a simple, web-based and straightforward tool to support the Scrum process. Agilo is based on Trac a very successful and widespread Ticket Tracking System, and developed using the Python programming language.
Introducing Prologue, personal twitter by the Wordpress guys.
Neulich im Radio, ROTFL. Made my day.
Achtung Achtung
tanz dich barfuß durch die Welt
Achtung Achtung
tanz dich barfuß durch die We-he-he-helt
denn Zeit ist Bares alles andre ist egal
jeder Augenblick ist Hartgeld und du hast die Wahl
Kopf oder Zahl
— Jennifer Rostock, Kopf Oder Zahl
offbeat reddit, wheee.
7 Abandoned Wonders of the Former Soviet Union: Deserted Cities, Buildings, Bases and More, crazy stuff.
Euruko 2008, taking place in Prague March 29th and 30th.
CGOL: an Algebraic Notation For MACLISP users, by V. R. Pratt.
Type inference for The Simply Typed Lambda Calculus, implemented in Prolog. Now try to do an evaluator without getting crazy. (Cool blog by the way.)
SRFI 72: Hygienic macros, by André van Tonder. Defmacro-style!
Scheme-Style Macros: Patterns and Lexical Scope (PDF), by Matthew Flatt. Good tutorial slides.
First experiment with Arc, a small Rspec clone. Nice.
Wer diktiert hier die Gesetze?
Wer definiert hier die Moral?
Wir schenken euch die Fragen,
wenn ihr uns die Antwort spart.
— Die Toten Hosen, Kopf Oder Zahl
Rev is a high performance event library for Ruby 1.9. It uses the libev C library to handle support for underlying system calls. This includes the epoll system call for Linux, the kqueue system call for BSDs and OS X, and the completion ports interface for Solaris. Rev also binds asynchronous wrappers to Ruby‘s core socket classes so you can use them in conjunction with Rev to build asynchronous event-driven applications.
Ivan Mato, yay for Helvetica.
Duty of Cake photolog, really really cool shots.
eavier’s guide to enjoying straight pr0n in the company of other heterosexual males, “While sitting in the company of three male friends last weekend watching Hustler’s “Campus Confessions” (excellent btw), it came to me that enjoying porn with and in the company of other men is a delicate business. One wrong move can ruin, what was up until that point, a spotless heterosexual record.” PNSFW.
CouchDB Catchup, by Damien Katz.
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