Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31may2008
Modernista!, way to go “siteless” design.
Tetrius Puzzle Game Magnets, yay.
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
Drunken watermelon on tap, oh yum want have.
ElScreen provides several switchable window-configurations like GNU Screen for Emacs. Try this if you miss tabs in Emacs.
It’s All Text!, should have installed that years ago. Works fine with emacsclient.
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favor of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
People asking questions lost in confusion
Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions
Well they shake their heads and they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind
I tell them there’s no hurry, I’m just sitting here doing time
— John Lennon, Watchin’ The Wheels
Aesthletics: Game Designers Should Create More New Sports, I once invented Coneball, wherein one plays a Swiss ball with marking cones.
Spaces in 10.5.3 seem to be a lot better, says John Gruber.
30may2008
Freshen Your Air with Sheep Poo, WJW.
WikiMystery 1, Mark Bernstein on configuring MediaWiki.
Types Considered Harmful (big PDF), says Benjamin C. Pierce. And he has more to say.
Remember how you used to feel dear
You said nothing would change your mind
It breaks my heart
To see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad
— Don and Phil Everly, So Sad
if (int i = ...).POHMELFS stands for Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System. This is a high performance network filesystem with local coherent cache of data and metadata. Its main goal is distributed parallel processing of data.
Serl is a S-exp based frontend designed for Erlang. If you like Scheme, you might want to try LFE, but if you like Common-Lisp and its comparative hairyness, Serl might be for you.
And I’m gonna get me a shiny gun
Just to show the boys some fun
Diamond Joe come and get me, Diamond Joe
— Tex Logan, Diamond Joe
Elgot (Co)Algebras, “I want to talk about a novel recursion scheme that hasn’t received a lot of attention from the Haskell community and its even more obscure dual – which is necessarily more obscure because I believe this is the first time anyone has talked about it.”
HiBase: A Persistent Functional Programming Environment, a very neat idea.
Include File Parametric Polymorphism, eeeeech.
29may2008
Conway’s Game of Life in one line of APL, I like.
Does a working writer keep improving?, worth a read for everyone.
The npthread library interface, by D. J. Bernstein. Pure genius.
Summertime in the heat
Summer dive in the sheets
Waterslide into me
Come closer
— Veruca Salt, Closer
OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There (PDF), by Stavros Harizopoulos, Michael Stonebraker, Samuel Madden and Daniel J. Abadi. “[…]we look at some interesting variants of conventional database systems that one might build that exploit recent hardware trends, and speculate on their performance through a detailed instruction-level breakdown of the major com- ponents involved in a transaction processing database system (Shore) running a subset of TPC-C.”
Cities and Ambition, essay by Paul Graham.
Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. IMO an extremely important skill for the future.
She’s like Heroin to me
she’s like Heroin to me
she’s like Heroin to me
she cannot miss a vein
— The Gun Club, She’s Like Heroin To Me
Peak Water?, USA is the first place, but the next few are interesting.
Exploring the Regular Tree Types , by Peter Morris, Thorsten Altenkirch, and Conor McBride. “In this paper we use the Epigram language to define the universe of regular tree types—closed under empty, unit, sum, product and least fixpoint.”
28may2008
foldit, solve puzzles for science. Kind of fun protein folding game that supposedly helps research.
Glow-In-The-Dark Pedophilia, powerful ads.
“Tonight”, she said, “we leave here.”
We leave here for sure.
I’m still waiting here.
I can’t keep waiting for her.
— Jane Jensen, Blank Sugar
Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API, Google hosts versions jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, MooTools and Dojo now. Very nice.
malyon.el provides a basic interpreter for version 3, 5, 8 z code story files in ELisp.
Presseerklärung der Rechtshilfe zur Repressionswelle in Österreich. “Gegen zwölf Personen, bei denen Hausdurchsuchungen stattgefunden haben, liegen Haftbefehle vor. Begründet werden diese mit Verdunkelungsgefahr, da die Betroffenen zb mit verschlüsselten Mails kommuniziert haben[…]”. WJW.
Later on we were talking and you charmed me
sign me up I’m enlisting in your army
swept me off my eyes and undercovers
close to you and I didn’t want another
— The Dollyrots, Nobody Else
Easy Examples of Pattern Matching in Coq, very useful trick.
An Outline for a Universal Logic System (PDF), A Logic System in Eight Truth Values by Graeme Heald. “The Universal Logic System is composed of three primary logic sets: truth, falsity and neutrality together with three secondary sets: not-true, not-false and not-neutral. Furthermore, there are the Universal and Null logical sets.”
The Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements are a set of sufficient conditions for a computer architecture to efficiently support system virtualization.
27may2008
SquirrelFish is an incremental rewrite of JavaScriptCore to turn it into a bytecode interpreter. It is a direct-dispatch register VM.
ScapeToad uses the Gastner/Newman diffusion-based algorithm to adapt map surfaces to user-defined variables without altering their topological relations.
Frama-C is a suite of tools dedicated to the analysis of the source code of software written in C, using OCaml.
I’ve spend my whole life yearning
Living and learning
Living and learning
Living and learning
Saving and spending
Spending and earning
Anticipating
Eternity burning
— Moev, Wanting
Prawn is a PDF writing library for Ruby designed to be tiny, fast, and nimble, just like the majestic sea creature. Compact and well-documented.
Cahiers Free Online!, category theorists rejoice.
The Other Night Sky, “You can point up at the sky for amazed friends, saying watch this – and a light appears, way up above you, beyond even where airplanes fly.”
A Runner’s Primer, by LilDebbie. “By popular demand, everything your ever wanted to know about running but were too lazy to google yourself.”
You say nobody told you
It would feel like this
You’ve got the killing gun
Held in your hand
— Eurythmics, No Fear, No Hate, No Pain, No Broken Hearts
PatchWork is a web-based patch tracking system designed to facilitate the contribution and management of contributions to an open-source project. Patches that have been sent to a mailing list are ‘caught’ by the system, and appear on a web page. Any comments posted that reference the patch are appended to the patch page too.
Zonnon is a general-purpose programming language in the Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon family. It retains an emphasis on simplicity, clear syntax and separation of concerns whilst focusing on concurrency and ease of composition and expression. Unification of abstractions is at the heart of its design and this is reflected in its conceptual model based on modules, objects, definitions and implementations.
26may2008
Symbolic Processing in Pascal, online book by Manfred von Thun. Features a DATALOG implementation, a miniature implementation of Joy, as well as four self-compiling versions of TECO(!).
Twitter’s business model, “I finally figured out a business model for Twitter. It’s advertising based and it only works if Twitter doesn’t solve their scaling problems.” Mwahahaha.
Well, I sure don’t know
What I’m goin’ for
But I’m gonna go for it,
That’s for sure.
— John Perry Barlow, Saint Of Circumstance
Curta, ooh jwz bought one. (I at least had one in my hands once.)
jsvi and TiddlyWiki, neato.
If the game is lost,
Then we’re all the same.
No one left to place or take the blame.
We can leave this place and empty stone
Or that shinin’ ball we used to call our home.
— John Perry Barlow, Throwing Stones
Phoenix Mars Mission, first pictures. No greeting committee.
Atul’s Mini-C Compiler is a compiler for a subset of the C programming language. It was written in Python during the spring of 2004.
Radio Reservations, “the moon’s far side will one day be a haven for radio telescopes, free from the electronic chatter of Earth and the many satellites now orbiting it.”
25may2008
Quantum Mechanics: A graduate level course, by Richard Fitzpatrick.
HPC Considered Harmful (PDF), slides by Greg Wilson. “The real grand challenge in scientific computing is doing it right, not doing it fast.”
An Interview with Vladimir Arnol′d, by S. H. Lui. Includes discussion of how mathematics is thought and which cultural differences exist.
What is defunctionalization?, a walkthrough.
She cries out ‘Not again Dear Lord!
I can not go on like this
No one can understand
No one could live like this’
— Kill Switch Klick, Her Trembling Hands
Trashing (from) the Command Line, I must be the only OS X user that never has emptied the trash in over three years of using OS X. (rm(1) ftw.)
A design problem is not an optimization problem. — Christopher Alexander, [via]
Reflow is the process by which the geometry of the layout engine’s formatting objects are computed. Last week, I was searching around and stumbled on these really cool visuals of what a reflow looks like. Has some nice videos of Mozilla and Google sites.
Cell Phones Are Evil, this one in a microwave is just too great.
Esau holds a blessing;
Brother Esau bears a curse.
I would say that the blame is mine
But I suspect it’s something worse.
— Grateful Dead, My Brother Esau
The Development of Categorical Logic, by John L. Bell. “I have elected to begin with a historical survey in which I hope to have touched on most of the major developments (as well as a number of interesting minor ones) in categorical logic, following which I offer a more detailed presentation of a number of aspects of the subject.”
Basic Concepts in Modal Logic (PDF), by Edward N. Zalta. “My goal was to write a text for dedicated undergraduates with no previous experience in modal logic.”
24may2008
Categorical logic is a branch of category theory within mathematics, adjacent to mathematical logic but in fact more notable for its connections to theoretical computer science. In broad terms, categorical logic represents both syntax and semantics by a category, and an interpretation by a functor. The categorical framework provides a rich conceptual background for logical and type-theoretic constructions.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
— Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Hotel #2
1983–1993: The Wonder Years of Sequential Prolog Implementation, by Peter Van Roy. Contains a description of the WAM.
machine language, chaos streamline :: perplexity crisis by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.
YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.
YAML Ain’t Markup Language, nice site.
Biggest Drawing in the World, WJW.
Let me see you stripped down to the bone
I taste when we kiss
I taste when we kiss
You’re breathing in fumes
I taste when we kiss
— Depeche Mode, Breathing In Fumes
NetBSD on a stick, a project devoted to installing the NetBSD operating system onto a USB based storage device. Its supporters are enthusiastic users of NetBSD and desire the ability to carry the OS on a keychain in the event of a need to run UNIX at short notice.
Simple VM JIT with LLVM, by Evan Phoenix. (A Ruby LLVM binding would kick ass.)
23may2008
»Simplicissimus«, 49 Jahrgänge, 1896 bis 1944, als Online-Edition neuerstanden. Die Geschichtslehrer wirds freuen.
Into What Viscous Liquid Will Sunglasses Next Be Dipped?, great idea anyway…
Everyone is smiling
The smiling is pushing it around
Its pushing it around
Like shadows in the evolution in the dark
— Underworld, Moaner
Brewing Beer on Todays Subprime Mortgage Budget, by GhostOfTiber. “Everything is more expensive nowadays. Beer, grain, bread, beer, food, gas, and beer. The important things in life it seems. How can we rectify this situation? We should conserve food, water, and grain by combining them into beer.”
My new look and a new feel, Joi Ito redesigns.
Take it slow
Let it go
The more you know
The less you know
— Luscious Jackson, Let Yourself Get Down
Abstraction (Huge JPG), a NSFW comic. Very great. More of this stuff (all NSFW, check out “Blow-up”).
Cubit is a scalable peer-to-peer system that can efficiently find the k closest data items to any search key. The central insight behind Cubit is to create a keyword metric space that captures the relative similarity of keywords, to assign portions of this space to nodes in a light-weight overlay and to resolve queries by efficiently routing them through this space. The system comprises a protocol for object and node assignment, a gossip-based protocol for maintaining the overlay, and a routing protocol to efficiently route queries.
Version Control Recommended Practices, by Bram Cohen. Pretty opinionated and pragmatic.
22may2008
Higher-dimensional, higher-order derivatives, functionally, third pard on derivatives by Conal Elliott.
titlecase.rb, a Ruby port of John Gruber’s TitleCase Perl script.
Touched, you say that I am too
so much, of what you say is true
I’ll never find someone quite like you again
I’ll never find someone quite like you, like you
— Vast, Touched
RFC 5064: The Archived-At Message Header Field, very useful, please adopt!
Life in a Lazy Universe, “what might be the consequences of supposing that such a ‘reality’ is running on a machine with lazy evaluation?”
Does it have to be a competition between Rails and Merb?, who cares as long as it uses Rack? ;-)
A missing feature in document viewers, page renumbering, yes! (It kind of worked in DVI, but noone uses it anymore.)
I’ve been moving
I’ve been dreaming
I’ve been looking at you
Sideways.
— Let’s Go Sailing, Sideways
Actor Object Protocol, Tony Arcieri and MenTaLguY defined “an object protocol that any object acting like an actor in Ruby ought to implement in order to interoperate with our actor implementations.”
Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too, a really cool idea.
21may2008
Spirograph Posters, gotta love them.
Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco, by Russ Cox. “What’s interesting is the situation that encouraged making the mistake and that made it possible not to notice it for almost two years.”
‘cos you’re never gonna spend a lonely day here
come and watch your fears fly away
and you’ll never hunger for a greener side than here
gonna wrap you up in cotton wool and save you
and save you
— Lamb, Cotton Wool
Title Case in Perl, by John Gruber.
Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver.
(Oooh) What’s the fun in playing it safe?
(Oooh) I think I’d rather misbehave
Our way
— Bitter:Sweet, Dirty Laundry
A Faster Scrabble Move Generation Algorithm (PDF), by Steven A. Gordon. “This paper presents a faster algorithm that uses a GADDAG, a finite automaton that avoids the non-deterministic prefix generation of the DAWG algorithm by encoding a bidirectional path starting from each letter of each word in the lexicon.”
Chinese Poems, this site presents Chinese, pinyin and English texts of poems by some of the greatest Chinese poets.
A Tutorial on (Co)Algebras and (Co)Induction, by Bart Jacobs and Jan Rutten.
20may2008
The K language definition framework, I think this looks pretty promising and deserves some time unraveling: Start with K: A Rewriting-Based Framework for Computations (PDF), have a look at K-Scheme and Rewriting Logic Semantics of Beta. And also take notice of Circ.
Hidden Logic (PDF), PhD thesis by Grigore Rosu.
A good notation sets the mind free to think about really important things. — Alfred North Whitehead
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.
recycled banner golden mean messenger bags, very nice.
Ars Moriendi, how to die in a proper way. Fun.
House in my head has left me for dead
This house in my head, and I’m going home
House in my head has left me for dead
House in my head, and I’m going home
— Sons And Daughters, House In My Head
Best. Paper. Ever. “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations”.
Louder and louder, nice and practical typography.
Serpents, Serpents Everywhere!, by givemegmail111. “And yet, if there are no such things as sea serpents, how could every man in the crew have witnessed the same sight?”
20x20x20 Rubik’s Cube Solve (YouTube), not a human.
Designing a Data Structure, by Chris Okasaki. “Students are rarely given an opportunity to design an algorithmically non-trivial data structure.”
Here she built a chapel with
Her image on the wall
A place where she could rest and
A place where she could wash
— P.J. Harvey, The Wind
Linear Logical Algorithms, by Robert J. Simmons and Frank Pfenning. “In this paper, we identify a bottom-up logic programming language based on linear logic that is amenable to efficient execution and describe a novel cost semantics that can be used for complexity analysis of algorithms expressed in linear logic.”
Why Did You Hire Me?, by Keith LaFerriere at A List Apart. “Money has a way of becoming an immediate barrier to your success. You need to address this and, to use gaudy corporate language, mitigate the risk. For freelancers, agency team members, and other hired guns, here are five tips.”
The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome, by Pepi Ronalds at A List Apart. “We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content?”
19may2008
A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world. Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you’ll never guess where (or even if!) it ends.
GNU libmicrohttpd is a small C library that is supposed to make it easy to run an HTTP server as part of another application.
FXPointer Extension for Firefox, “I would like to start creating links in my documents and blog posts that point exactly to some paragraph on the page. I hope the FXPointer Firefox extension will help.”
Its not really work
Its just the power to charm
Im still standing in the wind
But I never wave bye bye
— Last Town Chorus. Modern Love
Yhc/Erlang, a proof of concept runtime for Haskell on Erlang’s BEAM.
tex_wrap is a python module that implements TeX’s algorithm for breaking paragraphs into lines. Very readable and really not that hard.
ImageMagick 6.8.3-4 can do seam-carving, yay!!
What is a derivative, really?, Beautiful differentiation, part 2, by Conal Elliott. “How many forms of derivatives and chain rules are enough? Are we doomed to work with a plethora of increasingly complex types of derivatives, as well as the diverse chain rules needed to accommodate all compatible pairs of derivatives? Fortunately, not. There is a single, simple, unifying generalization.”
Design of Processed Tower Defense, a nontrivial Processing.js game.
Evolutionary Advantage, at cectic.
Deep-water city-states, gotta love it: “a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.”
The Persevere project is an open source set of tools for persistence and distributed computing using intuitive standards-based JSON interfaces of HTTP REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and HTTP Channels.
David Lynch puts a fan’s panties in his mouth, remixed with the Twin Peaks theme. WJW.
I’ve got a, grand vision, marching down the street in millions
But I don’t know , if it could be, I keep them secrets even from me
— Minuit, We’re All Scared Professor
TwitterSnooze, “Hit the snooze button on your “verbose” Twitter friends.” Yay.
Squatting, a Camping-inspired Web Microframework for Perl.
18may2008
RubySpec is a project to write a complete, executable specification for the Ruby programming language.
SSH Keys Generated on Debian/Ubuntu Compromised, and the Github guys actually noticed it.
Disconnecting Distraction, essay by Paul Graham: “Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else.”
The Interchange Law, “Anyway, on page 43 of Categories for the Working Mathematician (2nd Ed.) is the ‘interchange law’ for horizontal and vertical composition of natural transformations. Not only can we find a nice mundane example to help thinking about it, we can even test it using Quickcheck.”
Rails on Rubinius, Evan Phoenix says: “I’m super proud to say that tonight, rails served up both static and dynamic pages under Rubinius.”
Wenn der Frühling kommt und deine Seele brennt,
du wachst nachts auf aus deinen Träumen,
aber da is’ niemand, der bei dir pennt,
wenn der, auf den du wartest,
dich sitzen läßt:
Halt dich an deiner Liebe fest.
— Ton Steine Scherben, Halt Dich An Deiner Liebe Fest
Logical Algorithms, by Harald Ganzinger and David McAllester. “It is widely accepted that many algorithms can be concisely and clearly expressed as logical inference rules. However, logic programming has been inappropriate for the study of the running time of algorithms because there has not been a clear and precise model of the run time of a logic program. We present a logic programming model of computation appropriate for the study of the run time of a wide variety of algorithms.” Pretty nice way to express certain algorithms.
Creating Applications with Amazon EC2 and S3, a quick overview by Judith Myerson.
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration. — Jeffrey Zeldman
Cubescape, I like.
Using Git as a versioned data store in Python, John Wiegley “created a Python class that wraps Git as a basic shelve object.” Probably also great for storing metadata in the repository.
You belong to me, baby, without any doubt,
Don’t forsake me, baby, don’t sell me out.
Don’t keep me knockin’ about from Mexico to Tibet,
True love, true love, true love tends to forget.
— Bob Dylan, True Love Tends To Forget
Vertext is an OpenGL-enabled Processing vector font library. This enables you to draw giant, detailed typography at high frame-rates.
Processing Blogs, a planet.
Cover Stories, Old and New, Khoi Vinh compares CD covers.
Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.
Robert Rauschenberg is dead at 82, it was last week, but the “Erased de Kooning Drawing” is just too awesome to miss.
BlimLimb, the Travelling Bot Troupe, _why turns IRC into a theatre. “Annoying, yes. Certainly that is the whole idea.”
Favrd, a twittergator.
Artificial Finnish, and More artificial Finnish by Mark Dominus.
Dark Launch, or how to test your system in reality without anyone noticing.
13may2008
The collected jwz bicycle wisdom, must read.
The Thing That Should Not Be, Or: How to import 18500+ patches from Darcs into Git in less than three days, by Thomas Schilling.
Getting started with awk, essential Unix skills.
100 Essential Jazz Albums, compiled by David Remnick.
Confusion’s prince is at my door.
The crown I wear’s the one he wore
He’s here to bring me down some more
And bend my mind.
— Grateful Dead, Mindbender
An IRC client in 40 lines of shell script, Kragen was bored.
Using a Proof Assistant to Teach Programming Language Foundations, or, Lambda, the Ultimate TA, by Benjamin C. Pierce. “In Fall 2007, I taught an introductory course on logic and the theory of programming languages entirely in Coq. The experience was quite demanding — for the students and especially for me!— but the overall payoff in terms of student engagement and performance on exams far exceeded my hopes. I am now convinced that this is the right way to teach programming language foundations and am working on course materials that will allow the approach to be replicated elsewhere.” Wow, the material looks really good.
pymeta, OMeta in Python.
Barcodes as URLs, a QR decoder for the iPhone.
SigScheme is a R5RS Scheme interpreter for embedded use. It features small footprint (64KB in library form on the ‘small’ configuration) like SIOD and TinyScheme, low memory consumption (2-words per cons cell), multibyte characters handling (UTF-8, EUCs and Shift_JIS) and more. Cool.
Mountain Monuments, what a bunchload of steps.
Dynamic Languages Strike Back, autotranscript by Steve Yegge.
Those who misremember history…, critique of Yegge’s talk by Avi Bryant, who says: “Strongtalk was that much faster whether you used the optional static type system or not. Strongtalk’s optimizing compiler completely ignored the types, and it made your program run not one iota faster to add them.” Which is freaking amazing.
Preparing For EC2 Persistent Storage, “Using LVM + DRBD + NFS + Heartbeat + VTun To Gain Data Persistence, Redundancy, Automatic Fail-Over, and Read/Write Disk Access Across Multiple EC2 Nodes”, by M. David Peterson.
“I want you inside me…”, PNSFW but genius lubricant ad.
GChart exposes the Google Chart API (code.google.com/apis/chart) via a friendly Ruby interface. It can generate the URL for a given chart (for webpage use), or download the generated PNG (for offline use). Seems nice for avoiding the marshalling stuff.
I run through the forest, I cut past the vine
Head through the thickets, many a time
Octave of voices, sweet voices belie
I live for the comfort of cold Clementine
— Greateful Dead, Clementine
Is QWERTY harming language design?, Daniel Berger wonders. The time for Unicode has come IMO.
Good Margaritas, Bad Slugs, Mark Bernstein: “I mention the margaritas because, when we have margaritas on the porch, it always brings out the garden slugs.”
Useless use of *, good slides by Jan Schaumann on optimizing shell scripts.
Ajax anno 1858.
11may2008
Survive a Nuclear Blast, it’s not that hard apparently.
oEmbed FAIL! Represent RESTfully, a very good point.
I looked at you for the very first time
You’re like a river running through my mind
They say we’re young, we don’t know what we do
But I can’t make it if I can’t have you
— Dead Moon, Over The Edge
Desingularisation and its applications, very nice.
ctrlaltdel candy, oh I love salty liquorice
obsessing.org, pure JavaScript processing.js environment. Very neat idea, but buggy and the editor sucks.
How To Make a Skull Bong, a guide for the ultimate deadhead. WJW.
Commit Policies, Oliver Steele should write a book about Git.
Rain gonna come but the rain gonna go, you know
Stepping off sharply from the rank and file
Awful cold and dark like a dungeon
Maybe get a little bit darker ‘fore the day
— Grateful Dead, Doin’ That Rag
Elevators I Have Known, “Why maintaining the elevator should require eleven hours of hammering is something I try not to think about, just as I avoid asking why this particular elevator has to get its inspection certificate stamped each month instead of, say, every three years.”
Gaggia, a fantastic short poem by Dean Allen.
10may2008
The Blonde Map of Europe, hehe.
ECL = (not only) Embeddable Common Lisp, slides from ECLM 2008 by Juan José García Ripoll.
XTags is a little keyboard-driven Window Manager for X11. “It’s main goal is to get rid of a “real” WM by using it with dvtm on the master tag and put the secondary clients into the other tags.”
Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know
See how it feels in the end
May Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you
Soft, strong, sweet and true
— Grateful Dead, Crazy Fingers
Some Chrome For Pjs, _why wrote a small Processing.js IDE for Firefox.
Slides from last night’s BayFP talk, Bryan O’Sullivan talked about “Concurrent and Multicore Haskell”.
The Bla Language, by Wouter van Oortmerssen. “We investigate an (unpure) functional language whose concept of environment is not implicit as in traditional languages, but made available explicitly as a first class value.” The paper also presents lots of other languages with similar ideas.
My Git Workflow, by Oliver Steele. Includes a very nice diagram of data transport.
The summer sun looked down on him,
His mother could but frown on him,
And all the other sound on him,
He had to die, you know he had to die.
— Grateful Dead, That’s It For The Other One
Answers from John McCarthy, “Here is a VERY rough transcript of the informal interview.”
A Formal Investigation of Diff3, by Sanjeev Khanna, Keshav Kunal, and Benjamin C. Pierce. “We offer a simple, abstract presentation of the diff3 algorithm and investigate its behavior. Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that people find diff3’s behavior intuitive and predictable in practice, character- izing its good properties turns out to be rather delicate: a number of seemingly natural intuitions are incorrect in general.”
erlocaml, a tight bridge between Erlang and OCaml.
Content negotiation is a waste of bits. — Roy T. Fielding
Apache 3.0 (a tall tale) (PDF, 13.6MB), by Roy Fielding. On the way to Waka! (What is Moccasin?) Required reading.
BlackBerry vs. iPhone, by John Gruber, “wherein neither ‘RIM’ nor ‘Blackberry’ are even mentioned, but rather the stage is set for showing why they might be seriously screwed.”
09may2008
Processing.js, John Resig says: “I’ve ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element.” Yay!!
peg-markdown in an implementation of markdown in C, using a PEG grammar and Ian Piumarta’s PEG compiler.
Transparent Post-Its, WJW. Wanthave.
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.
Politik use drugs
Politik use bombs
Politik need torpedoes
Politik needs blood
Thats what my friend is an evidence
Politik is violence
What my friend is a evidence
Politik is violence
— Manu Chao, Politik Kills
The end in sight, great shots of Chile’s Chaiten volcano, which began erupting last week “for the first time in some 9,000 years” and notice that the BLDGBLOG Book will be ready for print soon!
The Origin of Consciousness, read by Mark Dominus. Mentions “Involuntary Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand Syndrome.”
A ternary search tree (TST) is a nice and simple data structure which provides a way to store strings in order for fast searching. It also supports more advanced string queries. A TST can be seen as a hybrid between a binary search tree and a digital search trie.
trish2 is a library to handle PATRICIA trees, a structure suited for large dictionary lookups. The library provides C functions to create, search, write and read PATRICIA trees. The tree nodes can be associated to arbitrary data so PATRICIA trees can act as a hash. An executable is also provided for fast search in a list of fixed string patterns.
Jack Kerouac explains On The Road, I like.
tms allows basic cvs style operations on local (not yet Time Capsule) Time Machine volumes. Looks useful.
Let the world go by
all lost in dreaming
To lay me down
one last time
To lay me down
— Grateful Dead, To Lay Me Down
When seekdir() Won’t Seek to the Right Position, Mark Ballmer has a nice story: “What I found out in the end is a surprise and was not expected: A bug that has been there in all BSDs for almost all the time, since the 4.2BSD times or for roughly 25 years…” (Honestly, I prefered reading the directory directly, like they did in K&R1.)
A Close Look at the Colossal Squid, “The squid’s resemblance to fiction’s monsters of the deep, including its dinner-plate-size eyes, has attracted global interest.” Fhtagn.
Karl Kraus, jede Menge Texte frei verfügbar.
08may2008
Pi Years, Feel younger and geeky at the same time! Calculate your pi age! WJW.
How are rubies cut?, Charles Nutter was only close.
Discrete Elastic Rods, by Miklós Bergou, Max Wardetzky, Stephen Robinson, Basile Audoly, and Eitan Grinspun. Impressive rendering.
My mantra is “Look for the Second Right Answer.” — Roger von Oech
Beautiful differentiation, Conal Elliott “stumbled across a terser, lovelier formulation for the derivative rules.”
Beginner’s Introduction to Perl 5.10, Part 2, by chromatic and Doug Sheppard.
History of the Development of Logic Programming, by Carl Hewitt.
Mapping the Human ‘Diseasome’, interesting map.
Wie schreibe ich denn?!
Ganz frei, ganz ohne Bedenken. Nie weiß ich mein Thema vorher, nie denke ich nach. Ich nehme Papier und schreibe. Sogar den Titel schreibe ich so hin und hoffe, es wird sich schon etwas machen, was mit dem Titel im Zusammenhang steht. Man muss sich auf sich verlassen, sich nicht Gewalt antun, sich entsetzlich frei ausleben lassen, hinfliegen –. Was dabei herauskommt, ist sicher das, was wirklich und tief in mir war. Kommt nichts heraus, so war eben nichts wirklich und tief darin und das macht dann auch nichts. — Peter Altenberg
Anti-Fly Sphere Device, by José de la O. “The refraction of the water, amplifies the colors and movements for the sensible eyes of a fly reflected on this sphere, scaring it away.”
moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write thirty years ago. Yay!
Zur Rolle des Projektionszeichnens bei erzählenden und beschreibenden Aufgaben.
Will I see you tonight
on a downtown train
every night is just the same
you leave me lonely now
— Tom Waits, Downtown Train
Projective geometry is a non-metrical form of geometry, notable for its principle of duality. Fun stuff.
Algernon: your personal assistant for Squeak, “A team of undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just released “Algernon”, a new keyboard-based launcher to help you navigate around your Squeak environment.”
DaMa(h)lszeiten, ach ja.
07may2008
Rechenschieber-Online-Museum, empfehlenswert.
Text Sects, by Theo Honohan. What do Unix, politics, and psychoanalytic theory have in common? Amazing. More of this!
Keep a rolling
Just a mile to go
Keep on rolling, my old buddy
You’re moving much too slow
— Grateful Dead, Jack Straw
Shallow Binding in Lisp 1.5, by Henry G. Baker, Jr. Using the genius rerouting trick.
Decipher, very neat cryptograms.
Núcleo is a toolkit for exploring new uses of video and new human-computer interaction techniques.
I’d meet you anywhere in the country
or anywhere on the sea
All over the world it could be
I would follow you with the heart of me
— Grateful Dead, From The Heart Of Me
instantrimshot.com, essential.
An updated tutorial for Session Types in Haskell. “For the purposes of these tutorials, a Session Type is a specification that dictates how two parties should communicate with each other over a given channel.”
06may2008
Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places), _why translates YARV bytecode to Python. WJW.
The Future of Newspeak, “Cadence has generously agreed to make Newspeak available as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.” Gilad Bracha just doesn’t know when yet.
Does it take much of a man
To see a whole life go down
To look on the world
From a hole in the ground
Too late for your future
Like a horse thats gone lame
To lie in the gutter
And die with no name
— Bob Dylan, Only A Hobo
linenum→info is a service for code readers to share knowledge about softwares in source level. You can leave comments on the Web-based source code listings. I wonder how that works with updates?
Mu License, neat.
Moving to Unicode 5.1, Google: “For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another.” It’s about time.
Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow, by George Oates at A List Apart. “Any community—online or off—must start slowly, and be nurtured. You cannot “just add community.””
Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?, by Jessica Enders at A List Apart. “Many believe that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along the row. However, despite being in use in both paper and electronic mediums for almost half a century, there is practically no evidence that it actually assists users in this way.”
When something interests us, we play around with it. Sometimes this yields a funny observation; sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s about all there is to it. Once in a while the cartoonist will find himself in a beam of light and angels will appear with a great idea, but not often. — Bill Watterson
An Under-Appreciated Fact: We Don’t Know How We Program, “So the next time someone in your organisation says something seemingly dumb about software process improvement, try explaining that software engineering has processes for everything except actually writing software.”
Pure JavaScript HTML Parser, by John Resig. Possibly useful.
Abstracting Control, by Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski. “This article investigates an alternative formulation, exploiting the latent expressive power of the standard continuation-passing style (CPS) instead of introducing yet other new concepts.” This is the paper introducing shift/reset.
Prolog CHR – Prime Seive One Liner, CHR rock!
05may2008
Delimited Continuations in Computer Science and Linguistics, a talk by Oleg Kiselyov. “We give a detailed introduction to delimited continuations – the meanings of partial contexts – and point out some of their occurrences in multi-processing, transactions, and non-deterministic computations. After briefly touching on the formalism and the logic of delimited continuations, we concentrate on two their particular uses: placing and retrieving multiple contextual marks (dynamic binding, anaphora) and meta-programming (generating code, generating denotations of interrogative sentences and clauses).”
We’re standing on the beach,
The sea will part before me
(Fire wheel burning in the air)
And you will follow me,
And we will ride to glory
— Grateful Dead, Estimated Prophet
Learning J, a tutorial by Roger Stokes.
Attention Beijing Olympics Visitors, “A national alert has been issued.”
Theorems Into Coffee, John Baez gives you coffee for proofs.
A located lambda calculus, by Ezra Cooper and Philip Wadler. “We show how to implement a location-aware language on top of the stateless-server model.”
Right outside this lazy summer home
you don’t have time to call your soul a critic, no
Right outside the lazy gate of winter’s summer home
wondering where the nuthatch winters
Wings a mile long just carried the bird away
— Grateful Dead, Eyes Of The World
Reluctant Sorting Algorithms, “I would like to present you two new sorting algorithms. They wholly follow spirit of multiply and surrender paradigm and still are damn beautiful.”
RapidXml is an attempt to create the fastest XML parser possible, while retaining useability, portability and reasonable[!] W3C compatibility. It is an in-situ parser written in modern C++, with parsing speed approaching that of strlen function executed on the same data. Entire library is contained in a single header file, and requires no building or configuration.
04may2008
Word War vi is your basic side-scrolling shoot ‘em up ’80s style arcade game. You pilot your “vi”per craft through core memory, rescuing lost .swp files, avoiding OS defenses, and wiping out those memory hogging emacs processes. When all the lost .swp files are rescued, head for the socket which will take you to the next node in the cluster.
jsvi is a vi-clone written in pure javascript and should work in any modern web-browser. Works amazingly well here.
Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: don’t you see?
got to make it somehow
on the dreams you still believe
— Grateful Dead, Comes A Time
Death of a racehorse, David A. Black asks: “Why is this allowed to go on? Is it simply because more horses survive races than don’t?”
The taxes on vodka became a key element of government finances in Tsarist Russia, providing at times up to 40% of state revenue.
Meandering leads to perfection. — Lao Tzu
The Haskell Execution Model, good to know.
Haskell is a strict language, fusion for the win!
You Could Have Defined Natural Transformations, didn’t we all?
Vertical House, “Kitchen, dining room, living room, and master bedroom are encountered in sequence as one moves up through the structure.” Given the space available there, doh.
03may2008
tako3, a very cryptic, but clever site that allows you to group urls by common topic and then read aggregated feeds.
State of the Union Sentence Bars, cool visualization.
A Persistent Union-Find Data Structure (PS), by Sylvain Conchon and Jean-Christophe Filliâtre. Contains some wonderful code.
The black-throated wind keeps on pouring in
With its words of a life where nothing is new.
Ah, Mother American Night, I’m lost from the light.
Ohhh, I’m drowning in you.
— Grateful Dead, Black-Throated Wind
It’s not homoiconicity, yes yes yes! “So why is Lisp better for metaprogramming? It’s because the representation of code is a convenient one.”
Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home. Cool.
How to Test RAM Under Mac OS X, worth knowing.
Going where the water tastes like wine
Well I’m going where the water tastes like wine
Going where the water tastes like wine
I don’t wanna be treated this a way
— Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad
GitHub Badge for your Blog with 100% guarantee of more coolness, a client-side inclusion of your GitHub projects.
Functional record update in SML. “We will show below how to implement functional record update in SML, with a little boilerplate code.” Awesome what one can do.
02may2008
Curry’s paradox, so named for its discoverer, namely Haskell B. Curry, is a paradox within the family of so-called paradoxes of self-reference (or paradoxes of circularity). Unlike the liar and Russell paradoxes Curry’s paradox is negation-free; it may be generated irrespective of one’s theory of negation.
dilbert.com/fast, yay yay yay.
Little Elegy, a tiny zine for tiny lit.
Random Password Generator, “Pronounceable password in one click”. Useful.
Her hair was brightsome color
Her voice was sweet to me
I know that I will always love her
And I hope that she loved me
— Charlie Monroe, Rosa Lee McFall
Twitter Charts show when and how often you twitter. Hook this idea up a SCM and find out your most productive times!
pdf2djvu creates DjVu files from PDF files. It’s able to extract: graphics, text layer, hyperlinks, document outline (bookmarks), and metadata. Very nice!
I once had a friend who said liquor will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no liquor. — Bob Dylan
Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively, very useful tip by Matt Neuburg.
Long Drives on Google Maps. In six days from the west coast to the east coast!
Aquablue font, for funny programs.
Show Trial Of The Gang Of Four, hehe.
Mountain high, river wide
So many roads to ride
So many roads
So many roads
— Grateful Dead, So Many Roads
Keyboard Calligraphy, the history of Arabic typesetting.
Beluga: Functional Programming with Higher-Order Abstract Syntax, “Our main interest in this project is to investigate programming and reasoning with data structures that provide support for binders. Many object languages include binding constructs, and it is striking that functional languages still lack direct support for binders and common tricky operations such as renaming, capture-avoiding substitution, and fresh name generation.”
A DTD for Protesting and the keeping track and planning of protests, by Pierre Anoid. The Revolution won’t be marked up.
01may2008
International Workers’ Day is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement.
Tresling: Tetris + Arm Wrestling, WJW.
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit den Bedrängern!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein Nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht länger
Alles zu werden, strömt zuhauf!
— Die Internationale
Migrating to Ruby 1.9, good slides by Bruce Williams.
OpenBSD 4.3 Release, now official.
MagLev: Gemstone builds Ruby runtime based on Smalltalk VM, very interesting.
An Efficient Incremental Algorithm for Solving Systems of Linear Diophantine Equations, by Evelyne Contejean and Herve Devie.
No saviours from on high deliver,
No trust we have in prince or peer;
Our own right hand the chains must shiver.
Chains of hatred, greed and fear.
‘Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot,
Each at his forge must do his duty
And strike the iron while it’s hot!
— The Internationale
Retsaot is Toaster, Reversed: Quick ‘n’ Dirty Firmware Reversing, pretty interesting how to do such stuff.
Embedded video is broken, Dean Allen is so right.
The Architecture of Ascent, “In what would merely have been an article about camping equipment in almost any other situation, revamped Italian architecture magazine Abitare recently took a fascinating look at portable mountain climbing shelters.”
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l’air, et rompons les rangs
S’ils s’obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux.
— L’Internationale
COLA (Combined Object-Lambda Abstractions) tutorial, “Our tutorial on COLA provides insight on how programming languages can be implemented using the combined abstractions and an implementation of parsing expression grammars in COLA. The “esoteric” programming language brainfuck was chosen for its simplicity, which allows for concentrating on COLA’s features.”
Zorba is a general purpose XQuery processor implementing in C++ the W3C family of specifications. It is not an XML database. The query processor has been designed to be embeddable in a variety of environments such as other programming languages extended with XML processing capabilities, browsers, database servers, XML message dispatchers, or smartphones. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Powered by Nukumi2 0.5.