Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30apr2008
minimalexperimental is a platform for online and offline design exhibitions. We want to encourage designers to be more daring, to experiment more, not to choose the most available solution to any project.
What Emacs is to editors, Stumpwm is to window managers, Bill Clementson says. What ever happened to Sawfish, anyway?
‘Cause even when I dream of you
The sweetest dream will never do
I’d still miss you, babe
And I don’t wanna miss a thing
— Aerosmith, I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing
The Rubyists are Wrong, a Ruby is not a Diamond!
From OBJ to ML to Coq (PDF), by Jacek Chrzaszcz and Jean-Pierre Jouannaud. “Our interest focuses on three implemented specification/programming languages, OBJ, ML and Coq, which have played an important historical role in the process of coming up with better languages.”
All Streets, by Ben Fry. “All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments.”
When architects get prizes, the people suffer. — John McCarthy
RecentChangesCamp, a BarCamp-style wiki conference.
If it makes you feel it
we want it intense
we want our violence.
— Concrete Blonde, Violent
Twistori, what do Twitter users love/hate/think/believe/feel/wish? Neat.
29apr2008
Notes on Structured Programming, by Edsger W. Dijkstra.
Igloo building guide, “Building an igloo is easy and fun. And the igloo is a great place to spend the night on a small ‘expedition’ in the mountains. It is much warmer than a tent, and can be built just about anywhere.” As long there is snow, that is.
Puffy and the Crytonauts: What’s New in OpenBSD 4.3, “Federico Biancuzzi interviewed a large group of developers to talk about the new networking tools (snmpd and snmpctl), the new features and scope of relayd (previously known as hoststated), how the configuration of carp was simplified, improvements in wireless drivers, storage limits and speed-ups, SMP support in sparc64, bug fixes and audits for some tricky coding practices, and much more!” Give OpenBSD a try.
The parson, the inventor, the television presenter
The robber, the writer, the cop, the calligrapher
Studio tape-ops industrial spies
We know lots of people
The reptiles and I…
— Shriekback, The Reptiles And I
A Type Error Slicer for MiniML, wanthave.
Plastic red blood cells, this could have been a band name, but it’s real!
Reiser is guilty of first-degree murder, the jury has found. Nuff’ said.
Big Fan, very funny!
Aus dem Haufen
Dieser Stadt
Musst Du raus
Und Du wirst sehn
Du wirst Dich verändern
In all diesen Ländern
— Jeans Team, Das Zelt
Wortschatz-Portal der Uni Leipzig. Praktisch.
Pure is a functional programming language based on term rewriting. It has a modern syntax featuring curried function applications, lexical closures and equational definitions with pattern matching, and thus is somewhat similar to languages of the Haskell and ML variety. But Pure is also a very dynamic and reflective language, and is more like Lisp in this respect. The interpreter has an LLVM backend to do JIT compilation, hence programs run blazingly fast and interfacing to C modules is easy. This guy is reading my mind!
Canon Cat Manual, by Jef Raskin.
SBCL leadership change, kudos to Christophe Rhodes, Juho Snellman, and Nikodemus Siivola for managing the best free Lisp system available.
XEmacs is Dead. Long Live XEmacs!, Steve Yegge’s call to join forces. How true.
28apr2008
Polite Umbrella is a shrinkable umbrella that enables users to morph its shape in order to reduce occupied space and to increase user maneuverability. Fantastic!
Shaking in the desert, wherefore do you cry?
Here there may be rattlesnakes to punch you in the eye
Shotguns full of silver, bullets made of glass,
String barbed wire at your feet and do not let you pass
When Push Comes To Shove, you’re afraid of love
— Grateful Dead, When Push Comes To Shove
Lisp Machines, and how to get a virtualized one!
Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics, MacAthur Forum Talk by danah boyd. “I want to talk about why most American teenagers are hanging out with their friends on MySpace and Facebook.”
Naked Chicks On Post-It Notes, NSFW but aesthetic.
Give us strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve. — Roland Dahl, Great Automatic Grammatizator
The Physics of Whipped Cream, “The whipped cream just did something rather puzzling. First it flowed smoothly out of the nozzle like a liquid would, and then, a moment later, it perched rigidly in the spoon as if it were solid.”
Infinitesimal rotations and Lie algebras, SO(3) in literate Haskell.
27apr2008
Still debating with Plato, “Where do mathematical objects live?”
European Common Lisp Meeting 2008, detailed summary by Dan Weinreb.
Two Minutes and 42 Seconds, a muxtape.
What she read
All heady books
She’d sit and prophesise
— The Smiths, What She Said
A small self applicable Scheme to C compiler, by Tobias Nurmiranta.
Laxa is an incremental compiler for the Scheme programming language targeting the Squeak VM. Neat.
Adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit. — Ovid
Zed on literate programming, he has some fresh ideas. I like the approach.
java’scrypt, Gilad Bracha says: “Javascript is the assembly language of the internet platform (and the browser is the OS). It’s flexible enough to support almost anything on top of it, and poorly structured enough that humans shouldn’t be writing sizable applications in it.”
26apr2008
PLT Redex is a domain-specific language designed for specifying and debugging operational semantics. Write down a grammar and the reduction rules, and PLT Redex produces a stepper. It also provides support for building a test suites from the specification of a semantics.
Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables, these are the future.
It’s a long long long long way to go home
It’s a long long long long way to go home
Any which way you are tempted to go
It’s a long long long long long long long long way
Way to go home
— Grateful Dead, Way To Go Home
Left-Leaning Red-Black Trees, (PDF 12MB), revised talk by Robert Sedgewick.
Instruction set, a monthly call for code: “Instructions may be vague or specific. Your challenge is to write software to carry out the instruction.”
I will make love with every virgin who defends the Internet.
Mapping the distraction that is Wikipedia, how true.
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game.
— Bob Dylan, Only A Pawn In Their Game
Interview with Donald Knuth, “Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.” Must read. (And I want his Emacs font!)
Encyclopedia Mythica, enter the award-winning internet encyclopedia of mythology, folklore, and religion. Here you will find everything from A-gskw to Zveda Vechanyaya, with plenty in between.
25apr2008
We Tell Stories 6, Six authors. Six stories. Six weeks. Pengiun dabbles into alternative reality fiction.
Paxos Made Live – An Engineering Perspective, by Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, and Joshua Redstone. Google paper: “We describe our experience building a fault-tolerant data-base using the Paxos consensus algorithm. Despite the existing literature in the field, building such a database proved to be non-trivial. We describe selected algorithmic and engineering problems encountered, and the solutions we found for them. Our measurements indicate that we have built a competitive system.”
In praise of idleness, by Bertrand Russell. “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”
Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. — Augustinus, Confessiones XI, 14
Game/Space: An Interview with Daniel Dociu, and really awesome imagery.
Breast milk cheese: Any takers?, WJW.
Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate, Steve Yegge tries to fix it.
Concrete examples don’t help students learn math, study finds, works for me, though.
ZooKeeper is a service for coordinating processes of distributed applications. Historically distributed processes are coordinated using group messaging, shared registers, or distributed lock services. ZooKeeper incorporates elements from all these servers, but incorporates them into a replicated centralized service. The interface exposed by ZooKeeper incorporates the wait-free aspects of group messaging and shared registers with an eventing mechanism similar to those of locking services to provide a simple, yet powerful coordination service.
Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear,
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer.
The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.
— Bob Dylan, Every Grain Of Sand
OpenProcessing is a ‘flickr’ish place for processing community to share their sketches, comment on each other’s pieces, etc…
Mega Wall, DerGuteMoritz rocks: “Classic NES Mega Man on my room’s wall, made of 7x7cm paper squares, about 2m in height.”
Passive polarization clock, nifty idea.
Hadoop Summit and Data-Intensive Computing Symposium Videos and Slides, March 2008. I like Pig.
MetaScheme, or untyped MetaOCaml, Oleg writes: “We implement the four MetaOCaml special forms – bracket, escape, cross-stage persistence (aka `lift’), and run – in Scheme. A Scheme system thus becomes untyped MetaOCaml, in which we can write and run code with an arbitrary number of stages. We point out how distinct the staging annotations are from Scheme’s quasiquotation, despite superficial similarity.”
24apr2008
Recounting the rationals, Mark Dominus read of a nice way to do it. Recommended reading.
Final Shift for Call/cc: Direct Implementation of Shift and Reset, by Martin Gasbichler and Michael Sperber. “We present a direct implementation of the shift and reset control operators in the Scheme 48 system. The new implementation improves upon the traditional technique of simulating shift and reset via call/cc.”
Vee is a command-line blog tool that is very portable across Unix systems.
unsubscribe me from Humand Rights Abuse. Shocking waterboarding movie. “Thousands of unsubscribers have now joined up. The threat of terrorism is real, but trampling over human rights and abandoning our values is not the answer. From Guantanamo Bay, Rendition, Torture and Waterboarding – we unsubscribe.”
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
Species: making analytic functors practical for functional programming, by Jacques Carette and Gordon Uszkay. “Species are analytic functors, representing a broader range of structures than regular functors. This includes structures such as bags, cycles and graphs.”
This is the story of Helmer, a linux cluster in a IKEA Helmer cabinet.
Bring Out Your Inner Tool With Peripherals Pants, add a HUD, yay!
The Great Porteño Smokeout, Maciej Ceglowski reports: “For many days, a thick layer of smoke from burning scrub in the nearby river delta has covered the capital region, much of Entre Ríos province and parts of Uruguay, turning the name “Buenos Aires” into an outright mockery.”
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
Pac-Man was a game you could beat. You could beat it by memorizing patterns. The ghosts, you see, weren’t programmed for randomness. Ms. Pac-Man is a different story.
A Beginner’s Introduction to Perl 5.10, by chromatic and Doug Sheppard.
A closed timelike curve (CTC) is a worldline of a material particle in spacetime that is “closed,” returning to its starting point.
23apr2008
492 Jahre Reinheitsgebot, darauf trinke ich einen.
JSONVid: Pure JavaScript Video Player, yikes!
Konstruktivismus und Kreativität, “Ernst von Glasersfeld ist Mitbegründer der Denkrichtung des Radikalen Konstruktivismus, die untersucht, wie wir uns unsere Vorstellung von der Welt bilden. ORF.at sprach mit ihm darüber, wie Ideen entstehen und wie frei diese sein können.”
Sage-3.0 and Beyond, the fruit salad of free math software has been given a new release.
There would be a mighty clearance,
We should all be Planck’s adherents
Were it not that interference
Still defies “hν.”
— Gilbert Stead, Aitch Noo
Cruiser.Parse, parsing combinators for JS.
CPS in Little Pieces: Composing Partial Continuations, theoretical pearl by Daniel P. Friedman and Amr Sabry.
Google Summer of Code 2008, accepted projects are announced.
GRIPS, a pre-processor for functional programming in Prolog adds functional calls with return values. Makes it almost like Erlang. ;-)
Galois web libraries for Haskell released, some pretty nice stuff there.
Eternity, eternity
Honey, I love you, you love me
Let’s love each other through eternity
— Grateful Dead, Eternity
compcache creates a RAM based block device (named ramzswap) which acts as swap disk. Pages swapped to this disk are compressed and stored in memory itself. Compressing pages and keeping them in RAM virtually increases its capacity. This allows more applications to fit in given amount of memory.
Twitter Japan is a go!, Joi Ito says.
22apr2008
Kiss yourself, PNSFW but awesome.
Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails, by Michael Slater at A List Apart. “The combination of the language (Ruby) and the framework (Rails) means you can do more with less code.”
Getting Started with Ruby on Rails, by Dan Benjamin at A List Apart. “This article isn’t a Rails programming tutorial. We won’t be writing code here, but I will introduce you to some of the important concepts critical to understanding how the Rails framework functions.”
When I’m drowning in the sea, I am
When you’re looking down at me, I am
When I’m walking in the streets, I am a bullet
When I’m looking and I find, I am
When I’m purer than the sky, I am
When I’m fucking with your mind, I am a bullet
— Kidney Thieves, Black Bullet
Wikipedia goes print, Bertelsmann Lexikon Institut bringt Wikipedia-Lexikon heraus. Nett.
Afghanistan swaps heroin for wheat, “with wheat prices doubling in the past year, and the street price of heroin falling, it is now more cost effective to grow wheat.” Plus you can make beer from it.
Slapp: A simple chat wall Merb tutorial, nice walkthough.
If I could be anything
I’d be a machine gun
‘Cuz everytime I see you
I’m sorry I don’t own one
— Bang Sugar Bang, The Machine Gun Song
Hackystat is an open source framework for collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, annotation, and dissemination of software development process and product data. A long range goal of Hackystat is to facilitate “collective intelligence” in software development, by enabling collection, annotation, and diffusion of information and its subsequent analysis and abstraction into useful insight and knowledge. Hackystat services are designed to co-exist and complement other components in the “cloud” of internet information systems and services available for modern software development.
Tidbits 1, by Chung-chieh Shan. I hope Anarchaia will end up like this when I can’t keep it up daily anymore.
NFS vs. CIFS for VMware, Dustin Puryear reports his experiences. Isn’t it amazing there is no network file system that doesn’t suck!?
21apr2008
Stone: Dead-Simple Data Persistence for Ruby. Uses YAML.
Office 2007 fails OOXML conformance test, made my day: “Word documents generated by today’s version of Microsoft Office 2007 do not conform to ISO/IEC 29500.”
Tonight, my heart you are stealing
Tonight, nervous with feeling
Tonight, innocent side by side
Tonight, I’m dreaming with you
— The Dollyrots, Eat My Heart Out
A summary of design rules, by Jef Raskin.
ordinary things, “an online journal of my observations in the comics form”.
Be Good, essay by Paul Graham.
Rubber love, rubber glove
Mechanical love with a latex heart
No conscience
No shame
No guilt
Play the game
— Bile, Rubber Love
Hotels in the Afterlife, “The hotels now look more like “architectonic sculptures” in the desert, the photographers claim, or derelict abstractions, as if some aging and half-crazed billionaire had constructed an eccentric sculpture park for himself amongst the dunes.”
Reality, Jean-Claude Wippler has wise words: “Why, with all our culture and technology, are we as a whole still living in medieval times?”
List of Intel Atom microprocessors, amazingly low-power, no?
20apr2008
A peek at In/Out, an internal app at 37signals, the first “groupware”-app I could imagine using and being useful.
Vicipaedia est opus commune, quo creetur encyclopaedia libera interretialis. Omnes ad contribuendum invitantur! Vicipaedia adhuc habet 19 566 commentationes.
The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden
— Bob Dylan, Gates Of Eden
Tedir: An Efficient, Dynamically Extensible ELL Parser Library (PDF), master thesis by Christian Plesner Hansen.
JSSh is a Mozilla C++ extension module that allows other programs (such as telnet) to establish JavaScript shell connections to a running Mozilla process via TCP/IP. This functionality is useful for interactive debugging/development of Mozilla applications, remotely controlling Mozilla, or for automated testing purposes.
Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken.
We’ve lived in bars
and danced on the tables
hotels trains and ships that sail
we swim with sharks
and fly with aeroplanes in the air
— Cat Power, Lived In Bars
piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD and needs a TUN/TAP device. The bandwidth is assymetrical with limited upstream and up to 1 Mbit/s downstream.
19apr2008
A 2-categories companion, by Stephen Lack. “This paper is a rather informal guide to some of the basic theory of 2-categories and bicategories, including notions of limit and colimit, 2-dimensional universal algebra, formal category theory, and nerves of bicategories.”
You’re supposed to have an answer
You’re supposed to have living proof
Well do you have your answer
Do you have your answer
Well i am your answer i am living
— Cat Power, Living Proof
Scheme Pattern Matching with syntax-rules, awesome!
About GhettoSearch.net, “We invented the cutting-edge Bash on Rails Web 3.14 platform to power GhettoSearch.net.” Geez.
Announcing franchise 0.0, a configuration/build system by David Roundry. Looks pretty nice.
Zootool is your personal web notebook. You can capture all your favourite web stuff here in seconds. Seems nice, focusing more on visuals than del.icio.us.
The Naked Game, “What you are seeing is a primitive version of ‘Pong’, being played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code governing the mechanics of the game exposed below it, and the variables affecting the mechanics to the right. Furthermore, you can remove lines of code and see the effects in real time.”
WikiXMLDB provides a way of querying Wikipedia with XQuery. We have parsed Wikipedia content into well-structured XML representation, loaded it into Sedna XML database and implemented an XQuery Web interface.
The Axiotron Modbook is a revolutionary slate-style tablet Mac that enables users to draw and write directly on the screen. Whee.
18apr2008
Twitch, Dean Allen on two weeks of the new Textism. I really enjoy it. (And, damn it, excuse for thinking your first name was David. Happens when the real name only can be googled!)
Plash is a system for sandboxing GNU/Linux programs. Plash’s aim is to protect you from the programs you run by letting you run them with the minimum authority and privileges they need do do their job – this is the Principle of Least Authority (POLA). Plash can run programs in a secure, restricted execution environment with access to a limited subset of your files.
And so I wrestle with the angel
To see who’ll reap the seeds I sow
Am I the driver or the driven
Will I be damned to be forgiven
Is there anybody here but me who needs to know
— Grateful Dead, Victim Or The Crime
Die Vorhersagbarkeit hat Flügel, Heise zum Tode von Edward Norton Lorenz.
One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow. Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem.
Interview with Wes Cherry, creator of solitaire. “Are you bitter at not being paid for such a popular and essential utility?” – “Yeah, especially since you are all probably paid to play it!”
Picasso Moon, fractal flame
Blazing lace filling every frame
Picasso Moon, wheels within wheels
What’s true when everything’s real?
— Grateful Dead, Picasso Moon
No CSS Reset, Jonathan Snook doesn’t use them.
Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.
Frankenmac! What’s in a Mac clone?, by Rob Griffiths. I really wish there was something between the Mini and the Mac Pro to put under the desk as well.
Small Memory Software: Patterns for systems with limited memory, by Charles Weir and James Noble. Free PDF available.
17apr2008
Sophomore’s Dream, neat integral.
Sada Abe is infamous in Japan for erotically asphyxiating her lover, Kichizo Ishida, on May 18, 1936, and then cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them around with her in her handbag.
Bride of Cthulhu, print by KaosBeautyKlinik. NSFW.
Sky.doc, “Over on LiveScience we learn that a new company has started using “a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium” to create “floating ads and messages” in the sky.” Whee!
My chance
In the middle of the stadium in Paris, France
Can I finally tell you
Can I finally tell you
To be my man
April in Paris, can I see you
Can you please be my man
— Cat Power, Song To Bobby
Were I to seek examples of the subjunctive…, mmh, one of my favorites.
The decline of the web, Manuel wrote back in 2006: “For fun, I’ve applied Spengler’s cyclical civilization model to web technology.”
my creative environment, danah boyd often listens to Son Kite. Read why.
How I Make Chocolate, virtual but yummy pictures!
It’s time to take Kuro5hin back from the trolls, by psychologist. Too late?
Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies, history by Ben Shneiderman.
I feel like tonight I’m goin’ ride, ride
And if you feel you goin’ die, die
Now baby, baby, baby what the deal
Respect my mind I’m just telling you how I feel
— Cat Power, I Feel
IM2GPS, “Estimating geographic information from an image is an excellent, difficult high-level computer vision problem whose time has come. The emergence of vast amounts of geographically-calibrated image data is a great reason for computer vision to start looking globally – on the scale of the entire planet! In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm for estimating a distribution over geographic locations from a single image using a purely data-driven scene matching approach. For this task, we will leverage a dataset of over 6 million GPS-tagged images from the Internet.” Crazy.
Fancy meeting you here!, WJW: A German man survived a 25ft plunge down a lift shaft when he landed on a woman who had fallen down it a day before.
16apr2008
Screw Asylum, a blog about screws…
This New Vulnerability: Dowd’s Inhuman Flash Exploit, the future is wild: “Dowd’s exploit uses a NULL pointer write32 to knock the locks off the bytecode interpreter in Flash, so that his SWF file can run bytecode that will rewrite the system stack.”
Cause the moon is not only beautiful
It is so far away
The moon is not only ice cold
It is here to stay
— Cat Power, The Moon
Dan Bern: President, drawn video clip by Sex Mahoney.
Cairo Sound City, “This is not like London or New York, or even Tehran, another car-clogged Middle Eastern capital. It is literally like living day in and day out with a lawn mower running next to your head, according to scientists with the National Research Center.”
Half of it is innocent
the other half is wise
the whole damn thing makes no sense
I wish I could tell you a lie
hey, come here
let me whisper in your ear
— Cat Power, Hate
If We Had to Drop Java, Brian McCallister wonders. Well, I don’t use any Java apps and the companies I know do neither, so nothing would change for me…
Ganglia is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters. It leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization. Looks pretty cool, e.g. Wikipedia’s Ganglia setup.
15apr2008
Type punning isn’t funny: Using pointers to recast in C is bad, lesson learned.
Trapped, Nick Paumgarten writes about the lives of elevators, and tells the story of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator in New York City’s McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Here is a condensed look at White’s ordeal, as captured by the building’s security cameras. Creepy!
Don’t you hear my call though you’re many years away?
Don’t you hear me calling you?
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew
— Queen, ‘39
Why There Aren’t More Googles, essay by Paul Graham.
Project Caroline is a research program by Sun developing a horizontally scalable platform for the development and deployment of Internet services. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. Project Caroline helps software providers develop services rapidly, update in-production services frequently, and automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.
Cascading is a large dataset build tool and a processing API for Hadoop. The “scale free” processing API lets the developer quickly assemble complex distributed processes without having to “think” in MapReduce. The build functionality allows common processes to be reused against different datasets, while efficiently scheduling these processes based on their dependencies.
The new machines are calling you
to become one of them
A lifetime of circles
A lifetime of squares
Pushing, but never too far
— Switchkicker, New Machine
Continuation Fest 2008: Continuations for video decoding and scrubbing, conference report by Conrad Parker.
Ursala (UniveRSal Applicative LAnguage) is a functional programming language suitable for scientific and numerical computation. It began in 1996 as a personal tool kit to assist its author at certain practical problems in CAD applications and mathematical finance, but it is now mature enough and adequately documented for general distribution. Crazy but worth a look.
The Rather Difficult Slow Font Game, but fun anyway. I scored 29 points out of 34.
Algebra of Programming using Dependent Types, by Shin-Cheng Mu, Hsiang-Shang Ko, and Patrik Jansson. “Dependent type theory is rich enough to express that a program satisfies an input/output relational specification, but it could be hard to construct the proof term. On the other hand, squiggolists know very well how to show that one relation is included in another by algebraic reasoning. We demonstrate how to encode functional and relational derivations in a dependently typed programming language. A program is coupled with an algebraic derivation from a specification, whose correctness is guaranteed by the type system.” Includes a nice intro to Agda.
14apr2008
Computer Wins a Game Against a Go Master, “During the Go Tournament in Paris, staged between 22 and 24 March 2008 by the French Go Federation (FFG), the MoGo artificial intelligence (IA) engine developed by INRIA – the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control – running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer, won a 9x9 game of Go against professional 5th DAN Catalin Taranu. This was the first ever officially sanctioned ‘non blitz’ victory of a ‘machine’ over a Go Master.”
Let me into the rage, inside your mind,
The fire burning in your eyes, terrifies
But I can’t look away from the light, if I do
I think I’ll go blind
I just want to cool your power
— Pain Teens, Cool Your Power
Ki Do (The Way of the Trees), by Sarah Thomas. “Bonsai have a tale about the origin of the world. It is true, so listen.”
Flensted Mobiles: The Wisest Owl, cuuuute.
Bob Ippolito on Erlang, not much new, but Erlang still is the only mildly popular functional language with pattern matching in the core, isn’t it?
Storage Space, The Final Frontier, great news: “…our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.”
And all you are is all you are…
I’m so sorry (for you) I’m sorry…
So all hail the new flesh,
because it suits me fine…
— Strapping Young Lad, All Hail The New Flesh
Free Strips of Paper, made my day.
YUI Simple Editor, needs 223kb of data and ~2s to load here. Nice. (I really want a WYSIWYG editor that has pre-defined markup, though.)
13apr2008
Chuang Tzu & Wittgenstein, “Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.”
Show files that Time Machine does not backup, very useful.
You’re a ghost on the highway
And I’ll love you forever
Ghost on the highway
And I’ll love you forever
Forever and ever
— Mazzy Star, Ghost Highway
The Parsing Expression Grammar Template Library (PEGTL) is a C++0x library for creating parsers according to a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG). Grammars are embedded as regular C++ code, and consist of template hierarchies of classes. These hierarchies naturally correspond naturally to the inductive definitions of PEGs.
WebServ is a DOS-based web server that runs on any x86 based machine with MS-DOS 5.0+. Starting with v0.9 beta, the QuickBASIC source code is included! (There is also an IRC client for DOS on that site.)
And we will all go together when we go
Ev’ry Hottentot and ev’ry Eskimo
When the air becomes uranious, we will all go simultaneous
Yes we all will go together, when we all go together
Yes, we all will go together when we go
— Tom Lehrer, We Will All Go Together When We Go
Eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.
hPDA Nano, genius.
Idea: migrating autotools into a pure gnu-make system, hell yes!
Negative Probabilities, “One of the axioms of probability theory says that all probabilities must lie in the range zero to one. However, we could imagine relaxing this rule even though on the face of it it seems meaningless.”
12apr2008
A softer world, very good and deep web strip.
Fruity Mystery, what a genius Flash game. Not for epileptics!
Ten Tweetable Scripts in less than 140 chars. I contribute (95 chars): curl -u $user:$pass –basic –data-binary status=”$msg” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json.
Or if I just wake up
at four a.m.,
head towards the shore
with my blanket in my
hand again?
— Midnight Movies, Tide And Sun
Crossmark: a flexible, lightweight textual markup language for the OLPC project, based on Markdown but refined and made extensible.
Delay line memory was a form of computer memory used on some of the earliest digital computers. Like many modern forms of electronic computer memory, delay line memory was a refreshable memory, but as opposed to modern random access memory, delay line memory was serial access. Pictures.
Skip graphs are a novel distributed data structure, based on skip lists, that provide the full functionality of a balanced tree in a distributed system where resources are stored in separate nodes that may fail at any time. They are designed for use in searching peer-to-peer systems, and by providing the ability to perform queries based on key ordering, they improve on existing search tools that provide only hash table functionality.
A Brief Tour of Graphd, Scott Meyer on the design of the query engine underlaying Freebase.
First-Class Modules for Haskell, by Mark Shields and Simon Peyton Jones. “In this paper we refine Haskell’s core language to support first-class modules with many of the features of ML-style modules. Our proposal cleanly encodes signatures, structures and functors with the appropriate type abstraction and type sharing, and supports recursive modules. All of these features work across compilation units, and interact harmoniously with Haskell’s class system.”
Who should buy Yahoo?, what Patrick Logan proposes is still better than Microsoft.
Because Im still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because Im still in love with you
On this harvest moon.
— Neil Young, Harvest Moon
Ancient Roads, “Half-forgotten slashes of land, cutting through, around, and over the hills of Vermont, might actually be “ancient roads,” dating back to colonial times – and a 2006 state law has given the residents of nearby towns a strong incentive for uncovering these buried throughways.”
Mechanizing the Metatheory of LF, by Christian Urban, James Cheney, and Stefan Berghofer. “Besides its intrinsic interest, our formalization provides a foundation for studying the adequacy of LF encodings, the correctness of Twelf-style metatheoretic reasoning, and the metatheory of extensions to LF.”
In which we get impatient over fractions, Dean Allen asks for vulgar fractions. Bah, just write 0.5 cups.
11apr2008
Roadfood.com, the most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America.
Lost America, roadside gallery.
If I was an eagle I’d dress like a duck
Crawl like a lizard and honk like a truck
If I get a notion I’ll climb this tree
or chop it down and you can’t stop me
Chop it down and you can’t stop me
— Grateful Dead, Liberty
Making a bootable USB flash key for installing OpenBSD.
Parallel generational-copying garbage collection with a block-structured heap, by Simon Marlow, Tim Harris, Roshan P. James, and Simon Peyton Jones. “We present a parallel generational-copying garbage collector implemented for the Glagsow Haskell Compiler. We use a block-structured memory allocator, which provides a natural granularity for dividing the work of GC between many threads, leading to a simple yet effective method for parallelising copying GC. The results are encouraging: we demonstrate wall-clock speedups of on average a factor of 2 in GC time on a commodity 4-core machine with no programmer intervention, compared to our best sequential GC.”
I hold your hand till the bleeding stops I
hold your hand till you fall apart
And you dream your endless dream
— Get Well Soon, Your Endless Dream
Measuring the Color of Light, an introduction to color temperature by James Duncan Davidson.
The arrow calculus, a Functional pearl by Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler, and Jeremy Yallop. “We introduce the arrow calculus, a metalanguage for manipulating Hughes’s arrows with close relations both to Moggi’s metalanguage for monads and to Paterson’s arrow notation.”
Twitterpated, WJW on following 34k people.
10apr2008
GitHub is officially live. Gratulations for the launch!
Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) 2008, the program is up now. Richard P. Gabriel speaks about “On Sustaining Self”. I’ll be there!
“Manual”, An anthology of new work from seventeen writers with websites. It is available as a downloadable PDF. From 2002, but worth a read if you don’t know it yet. Nicely typeset, too.
Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
if you plant ice you’re gonna harvest wind
— Grateful Dead, Franklin’s Tower
Using Amazon S3 from Perl, by Abel Lin. “This article covers the Perl, REST, and the Amazon S3 REST module, walking through the development of a collection of Perl-based tools for UNIX command-line based interaction to Amazon S3. I’ll also show how to set access permissions so that you can serve images or other data directly to your site from Amazon S3.”
Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool.
Charles Babbage’s masterpiece difference engine comes to Silicon Valley, “A full-scale model of the Charles Babbage-designed difference engine, on display at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif. The difference engine will be exhibited for six months starting May 1. It was delivered Wednesday after traveling from London, where it was built at the Science Museum, the home of the world’s only other full-scale difference engine.”
Brown eyed women and red grenadine
the bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down
and it looks like the old man’s getting on
— Grateful Dead, Brown-Eyed Women
American Babysitter, by Victor J. Palagano III. Excellent picture.
Custom Corset Pattern Generator, useful, no?
A couple of interesting DSLs, namely OMeta and Pierce.
09apr2008
Bob Dylan wins a Pulitzer, Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Deservedly!
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
— Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin
CSS Naked Day number three. Anarchaia participates as well this year.
Pragmatic Version Control Using Git, a book by Travis Swicegood. To appear in November 2008.
Darcs 2.0.0 release, now officially. darcsum should be fixed now, I hope.
U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S, I like, even if only for more sane roundtripping.
Computing History at Bell Labs, transcript of Doug McIlroy’s talk.
But it ain’t me, babe,
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe,
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.
— Bob Dylan, It Ain’t Me Babe
“Does ‘Sleep Gas’ exist?” or “Ethnic Cleansing in the US”, by tilly. “This article describes harassment and barrage of assaults I have been experiencing on my body during the past five months.” WTF.
Lemonodor Auxiliary, tumblelog by John Wiseman.
Baby born with 2 faces worshiped as a goddess in Northern India, they should have called her Jana.
08apr2008
Stefanie Posavec “On the Map”, simply fantastic infographics. “The pieces featured in On the Map focused on Kerouac’s On the Road. The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.”
The Monad.Reader Issue 10 is now available, featuring “Step inside the GHCi debugger” by Bernie Pope and “Evaluating Haskell in Haskell” by Matthew Naylor.
The Thing About Git, by Ryan Tomayko, “… is that it’s oddly liberal with how and when you use it.” True. Also provides really good tricks you may have missed so far.
Now, you take your file and you bend my head
I never can remember anything that you said
You promised to love me, but what do I know
You’re always spillin’ juice on me like you got someplace to go
Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again
— Bob Dylan, Odds And Ends
Compaction, Damien Katz says: “File compaction is now checked into the Apache CouchDB SVN repos.”
Steak tartare, yum!
Roasting and eating a goose alive, WJW how evil.
Fun with Ruby 1.9 File Encodings, this ought to work in 1.8 as well.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications. Shared hosting 2.0. Python only for now. (And I wonder how long it takes the first serious password fishing begins.)
Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town,
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair.
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down,
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere.
— Bob Dylan, Time Passes Slowly
Git for Rubyforge accounts, yay!
Take Control of Your Maps, by Paul Smith at A List Apart. “It is now possible to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software and produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to our design goals. The question becomes, then, how?”
Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards, by Wilson Miner at A List Apart. “Here are three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based navigation patterns.”
07apr2008
Holumbus is a Haskell library which provides the basic building blocks for creating powerful indexing and search applications. This includes a framework for distributed crawling and indexing as well as distributed query processing. Powers Hayoo!, a Hoogle-like search.
Lorem Ipsum web banners, exactly what we needed.
Hardhack, in Berlin, 18–20 April. “Warm up your soldering irons.”
You
flew
to me
— Grateful Dead, Attics Of My Life
Renderance, Dean Allen on the sad state of web typography.
Das Ende der “Schwäbischen Zeitung”, “Sie war die christliche Stimme Oberschwabens, identitätsstiftend für die Region, respektiert im Land. Vorbei. Die schwäbische Zeitung hat ihre Leser heimatlos gemacht.” Ich fänds furchbar amüsant, wenn es denn hier was anderes zu lesen gäbe.
Wake now, discover that you
are the song that the morning brings
but the heart has its seasons
its evenings and songs of its own
— Grateful Dead, Eyes Of The World
If you are using a loop, you’re doing it wrong, maybe loops are the most harmful feature of current languages… Nice introduction to LINQ.
Neuro-Tourism, “In J.G. Ballard’s otherwise unexceptional 1996 novel Cocaine Nights, we read about a Mediterranean resort called the Estella de Mar.”
06apr2008
The True Price of SMS Messages, “So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.”
Geomyidae is a daemon for serving the Gopher protocol written in less than 1000 LoC C.
On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning, by Haruki Murakami. A sad story, don’t you think? *sniff*.
But I’m here by the road,
Bound to the load
That I picked up in ten thousand cafes and bars.
Alone with the rush of the drivers who won’t pick me up,
The highway, the moon, the clouds, and the stars.
— Grateful Dead, Black-Throated Wind
Agora is a reflective prototype-based object-oriented programming language that is entirely (and solely!) based on message passing. […] However, prototype-based languages often go beyond message passing. Deep down in their implementation, many things such as delegation, encapsulation, cloning and object concatenation can be found as explicit operations on objects. By making such languages reflective, these implementation operators also become visible to the programmer. As such, the programmer can easily bypass the message passing paradigm just by ‘going meta’. Agora98 Language Manual (PS).
Quake 3 + iTouch, WJW.
Don’t say anything unless you’re fairly sure of it. If you’re not omniscient, you just don’t end up saying much. — Paul Graham on Robert Morris, Heroes
HTun is a tool to allow you to create a fully bidirectional IP VPN over an HTTP proxy or just over port 80, allowing you to bypass restrictive firewalls and use any service you desire.
Notes from Valentine’s Day Knuth Lecture, awesome: “Life is a Binary Search”.
List of finite simple groups, on Wikipedia.
05apr2008
The Kx user community now open for everyone. And a personal version limited to 2 hour sessions is now available as well! Also OS X binaries, yay!
Q for Mortals 2.0: A Tutorial in Programming kdb+, by Jeffry A. Borror. Highly recommended book on Q.
Programs Ted Nelson Likes, for example Emacs!
Quick beats in an icy heart.
catch-colt draws a coffin cart.
There he goes now, here she starts:
Hear her cry.
Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words
Wheel to the storm and fly.
— Grateful Dead, Cassidy
Shaving with Ockham, excellent MountainWest Ruby Conference 2008 talk by Jim Weirich.
The Google Static Maps API lets you embed a Google Maps image on your webpage without requiring JavaScript or any dynamic page loading. The Google Static Map service creates your map based on URL parameters sent through a standard HTTP request and returns the map as an image you can display on your web page!
Textism is back!
Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3, and what Firefox lacks on Mac, by John Gruber. I mainly miss inline PDF rendering, why can’t someone please sit down and recompile Schubert’s PDF Plugin for x86!?
Memoize: A replacement for make, written in Python. “It is designed to be simple and easy to use.” It uses strace to figure out the inputs and outputs, wow. (Maybe this can be combined with redo-ifchange?)
Pretty lady ain’t
got no friend
till the Candyman
come round again
— Grateful Dead, Candyman
Simply efficient functional reactivity, by Conal Elliott. “This paper presents a way to implement FRP that combines data- and demand-driven evaluation, in which values are recomputed only when necessary, and reactions are nearly instantaneous. The implementation is rooted in a new simple formulation of FRP and its semantics and so is easy to understand and reason about.”
Debuggers are Needlessly Tedious to Use, Wolfgang Meyer presents a nice Oz debugger with Emacs integration.
A Debugger for Standard ML, by Andrew Tolmach and Andrew W. Appel. “We have built a portable, instrumentation-based, replay debugger for the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler.”
04apr2008
Real Life Futurama, words fail me.
The immediacy of PHP, WJW.
Abraham and Isaac
Digging on a well
Mama come quick
with the water witch spell
Cool clear water
where you can’t never tell
— Grateful Dead, Greatest Story Ever Told
Richard Feynman: The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, videos.
Girl vs Pig, neat webcomic.
Military Patches You Should Not Be Seeing, by circletimessquare.
A Spectacular Failure, by Chris Okasaki: “About five years ago, a mathematical puzzle occurred to me. I eventually solved the puzzle, but I don’t want to talk about that solution here. Instead, I want to talk about my first attempt at solving the puzzle, which was an utter failure. A glorious, spectacular failure. Perhaps the single most impressive failure of my career.”
VPN HOWTO, this HOWTO describes how to set up a Virtual Private Network with Linux using SSH and PPP.
He ripped the beast till he killed him dead.
The bees made honey in the lions head.
— Grateful Dead, Samson And Delilah
Programming in Standard ML, working draft of a general introduction to ML by Robert Harper. Fast going and for people with functional programming experience.
The Definition of Standard ML (1990) and Commentary on Standard ML (1991), full text online. Both highly recommended reading, not only for the specification but also the background and history of the language.
Syntactic Conventions used in the MLton compiler. Seems like a good guideline, even if three-spaces indentation seems a bit quirky to me. (Then, many ML keywords are three chars.)
03apr2008
The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins, “I don’t want to encourage more cars onto the roads,” New Scientist wrote, “but if topology and beauty mean anything to you, get out there and enjoy I-95/695 now. It may soon be too late.”
ML Module Mania: A Type-Safe, Separately Compiled, Extensible Interpreter, by Norman Ramsey. “To illustrate the utility of a powerful modules language, this paper presents the embedded interpreter Lua-ML. The interpreter combines extensibility and separate compilation without compromising type safety.”
Ruby Fools Copenhagen 2008 Slides: tuesday, wednesday. I recommend Ramaze by Michael ‘manveru’ Fellinger.
Tennessee, Tennessee
There ain’t no place I’d rather be
Baby won’t you carry me
Back to Tennessee
— Grateful Dead, Tennessee Jed
Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem Part II: Merb, by Ezra Zygmuntowicz at the MountainWest Ruby Conference 2008.
Factor Parsing DSL, yay for PEGs.
Type Checking with Open Type Functions, by Tom Schrijvers, Simon Peyton-Jones, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, and Martin Sulzmann. “We report on an extension of Haskell with open type-level functions and equality constraints that unifies earlier work on GADTs, functional dependencies, and associated types. The contribution of the paper is that we identify and characterise the key technical challenge of entailment checking; and we give a novel, decidable, sound, and complete algorithm to solve it, together with some practically-important variants. Our system is implemented in GHC, and is already in active use.”
Ahoi Polloi, nun kategorisiert.
Das Projekt DeinProgramm arbeitet an der Einführung von Programmieren als Basiskompetenz im Schulunterricht. Programmieren ist eine konstruktive und kreative Auseinandersetzung mit Mathematik und fördert besonders die Abstraktions- und Modellierungsfähigkeiten der Schülerinnen und Schüler, an denen es besonders deutschen Schülern oft fehlt, wie PISA 2000 zeigte. Scheint etwas eingeschlafen, würde aber wirklich nicht schaden.
Rails is moving from SVN to Git, very nice.
Ditz is a simple, light-weight distributed issue tracker designed to work with distributed version control systems like darcs and git. Ditz maintains an issue database file on disk, written in a line-based and human-editable format. This file is kept under version control, alongside project code. Changes in issue state is handled by version control like code change: included as part of a commit, merged with changes from other developers, conflict-resolved in the standard manner, etc.
“Bob” is a song and video by “Weird Al” Yankovic, from his 2003 album Poodle Hat, made up entirely of palindromes. “Bob” is performed in a style resembling Bob Dylan’s vocal delivery. The song’s video is a parody of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” segment of the film Dont Look Back.
Type Classes Without Types (PDF), by Ronald Garcia and Andrew Lumsdaine. “This paper describes and discusses a mechanism, inspired by Haskell type classes, for implementing generic functions in Scheme[…].”
Xoc, an Extension-Oriented Compiler, by Russ Cox, Tom Bergan, Austin Clements, Frans Kaashoek, and Eddie Kohler. Yay for metaprogramming C.
Mathematics of the Rubik’s cube (PDF), by W. D. Joyner. Gentle general introduction into group theory.
There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
— Grateful Dead, Ripple
Erasmus is a research project directed by Peter Grogono and Brian Shearing. During the first phase, we are developing a programming language that uses communicating concurrent processes as its basic abstraction.
Irregular Webcomic! 1420, explaining Maxwell’s Equations.
The Alexander horned sphere is one of the most famous pathological examples in mathematics discovered in 1924 by J. W. Alexander. It is the particular embedding of a sphere in 3-dimensional Euclidean space obtained by removing a radial slice of a standard torus and attaching a new standard (punctured) torus to each side of the cut that interlocks with the new torus on the other side, then repeating the same construction ad infinitum on the new tori.
02apr2008
Pure Type Systems for Functional Programming, by Jan-Willem Roorda. Includes a good introduction to the Calculus of Constructions.
Cardboard Cubby, want have.
Microsoft OOXML / ECMA376: Get The Facts (PDF), slides by Anand Vaidya.
MemcacheQ is a memcachedb variant that provides a simple persistent message queue service.
Been walking all morning
Went walking all night
I can’t see much difference between the dark and the light
And I feel the wind
And I taste the rain
Never in my mind
to cause so much pain
— Grateful Dead, Comes A Time
The lightest lightweight threads, Protothreads, more benchmarks by Mauricio Fernandez. I wonder if it would work well for an interpreter.
RFC 5242: A Generalized Unified Character Code: Western European and CJK Sections, by J. Klensin and H. Alvestrand.
RFC5241: Naming Rights in IETF Protocols, by A. Falk and S. Bradner. “But the financial realities of funding the Internet engineering and standardization processes may dictate that the IETF must consider whether names associated with such protocol fields represent an asset capable of responsible monetization. This notion may be offensive to some protocol purists; however, we believe the exigencies of the situation make the proposal below worthy of consideration.”
Land Of Lisp, Functional Programming is Beautiful! Creepy.
Manifest for the extension of the SMS slang to all the media, This book is built as a grammar book where all the SMS slang’s rules are taught then immediatly applyied in the manual.
Almost aflame still you don’t feel the heat
Takes all you got just to stay on the beat
You say it’s a living, we all gotta eat
but you’re here alone there’s no one to compete
If mercy’s in business I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true
— Grateful Dead, Fire On The Mountain
Brobinius, Rhinestone, RBXML, RazzleDazzle, SRuby, and Gobi, all forks of Ruby.
Planning a Book with Tinderbox, video tutorial by Mark Bernstein.
The Sound of Evolution, “Some species simply are not able to make themselves heard above the ever-growing racket and are finding themselves squeezed out of the city. Others are beginning to change the way they communicate. In the long term, new species may evolve. If noise levels continue to rise, it seems inevitable that urban bird life will change dramatically.”
01apr2008
Review Board is a web-based tool designed to help projects and companies keep track of pending code changes and make code reviews much less painful and time-consuming. It currently has support to SVN, CVS, Perforce, Git, and Mercurial repositories.
And so I wrestle with the angel
To see who’ll reap the seeds I sow
Am I the driver or the driven
Will I be damned to be forgiven
Is there anybody here but me who needs to know
— Grateful Dead, Victim Or The Crime
Unicycle Java, by Phil Hagelberg, is an implementation of the Java Programming Language, but implemented while riding a unicycle. “What about type safety? – Always wear a helmet.”
Fortress Version 1.0 Released, yay.
Introducing Gmail Custom Time, “Be on time. Every time.”
A Kakeya set, or Besicovitch set, is any set of points in Euclidean space which contains a unit line segment in every direction. While many types of objects satisfy this property, several interesting results and questions are motivated by considering how small such sets can be.
CouchDB Language Change, in Java, it’s at least portable.
COBOL_ON_COGS, Yet Another Rails Knockoff.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea, ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.
— Grateful Dead, Ship Of Fools
Ahoi Polloi #556, mein Lieblingswortspiel wird perfektioniert. Brilliant!
Edge Side Includes or ESI is a small markup language for edge level dynamic web content assembly.
cardboard tron!, really nice video.
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