Anarchaia

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

30jun2008

Brown Dyed Hotel, a wellmade and doable “get to the next page” game.

ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink: Making Art with Javascript, cool stuff by Aza Raskin.

Honk if you’re lonely tonight
If you need a friend to get through the night
A toot on your horn, a flash of your brights
Honk if you’re lonely tonight
— Silver Jews, Honk If You’re Lonely

V6 Thompson Shell Port, “Osh(1) is an enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Sixth Edition (V6) Unix shell (circa 1975), aka the Thompson shell. The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. Sh6(1) (a port of the original shell) and glob6(1) (a port of the global command) are also included in this package.” (I didn’t know there was a goto(1)).

Fractal Pizza, WJW. And olives, yum.

Fibonacci Numbers Spelled Out, an exercise in generatingfunctionology by Ivan Galkin.

Der Traum ist ein Traum, zu dieser Zeit,
doch nicht mehr lange, mach dich bereit
für den Kampf um’s Paradies!
Wir haben nichts zu verlieren außer unserer Angst,
es ist unsere Zukunft, unser Land.
Gib mir deine Liebe, gib mir deine Hand.
— Ton Steine Scherben, Der Traum Ist Aus

Death’s Acre: Tour the Body Farm (graphic!), “A body farm is a research facility where human decomposition after death can be scientifically studied in a variety of settings. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the decomposition process, permitting the development of techniques for extracting information (such as the timing and circumstances of death) from human remains.”

Hardware Design and Functional Programming: a Perfect Match, by Mary Sheeran. “This is a slightly odd paper that explains why I am still as fascinated by the combination of functional programming and hardware design as I have ever been. It includes some looking back over my own research and that of others, and contains 60 references.”

29jun2008

9vx is a port of the plan 9 operating system to FreeBSD, Linux, and OS X, using the vx32 sandboxing library to run “user” programs. 9vx runs as an ordinary user program, but behaves like a separate VM running plan 9. Excellent and it already works! (Sources of vx32)

Google C++ Style Guide, has some interesting parts.

Don’t think lover
Love lasts forever
— A Place To Bury Strangers, Don’t Think Lover

Revising HIV’s History, “The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) responsible for most of the AIDS cases in the world infected people approximately 100 years ago, more than 20 years earlier than previously believed, according to findings presented here this week at the Evolution 2008 meeting.”

tolua is a tool that greatly simplifies the integration of C/C++ code with Lua. Based on a cleaned header file, tolua automatically generates the binding code to access C/C++ features from Lua. Using Lua API and tag method facilities, tolua maps C/C++ constants, external variables, functions, classes, and methods to Lua.

When you git good lovin’, never go and spread the news
Yes, he’ll double-cross you, and leave you with them empty bed blues
— J. C. Johnson, Empty Bed Blues

Freshman electromagnetism questions: answer 3, I imagined it like that!

A blessed man’s formula for holey containers, “I love the way derivatives of types tell you about holes in containers. It works the other way too and holes can give insight into derivatives.”

28jun2008

Dreaming Of Better User Interface, by Hank Williams. “In a giant double fold newspaper, I can see far more than I can see on a computer screen.”

oiu isn’t unix, an experimental operating system design using persistent memory and a forth-like language.

But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
— Bob Dylan, Masters Of War

Some printable paper rulers, nice.

Museum of Menstruation, devoted to menstruation and selected topics of women’s health! WJW.

Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda’s flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views and reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting. Very early, but looks promising.

Scheme Implementation Choices, a comparison.

The Beagle Board is a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer based on Texas Instruments’ OMAP35x device family, with all of the expandability of today’s desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. ARM-based, runs Linux.

She’s taking hold of her sins now
For the first time
Well she’s been told about sins now
But it feels fine
— Jesus And Mary Chain, Teenage Lust

The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator, awesome thingy.

Edwards starfish, Weierstrass turtle, Jacobi-quartic squid and Hessian-ray, LMAO.

27jun2008

Crosscompiling NetBSD with build.sh, freaking easy and really awesome. Now I wish pkgsrc could be cross-compiled as well…

Indeterminacy of translation, “Consider Quine’s example of the word “gavagai” uttered by a native upon seeing a rabbit. The linguist could do what seems natural and translate this as “Lo, a rabbit.” But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: “Lo, food”; “Let’s go hunting”; “There will be a storm tonight” (these natives may be superstitious); “Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage”; “Lo, an undetached rabbit-part.””

We will survive as thieve we will survive as freaks.
Turn around, turn around turn around
And take a look at the crowd…
— Le Tigre, TGIF

Taylor Series: A matter of life or death, crazy story.

Shakespearean Insulter, for thou spongy beef-witted skainsmates!

Patagonia, talk at Interesting08 by Matt Webb.

SeisMac is a Mac OS X application that turns your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It access your laptop’s Sudden Motion Sensor in order to display real-time, three-axis acceleration graphs. Version 2.0’s enhancements make SeisMac an even more valuable tool for classroom demonstrations of seismic concepts and techniques. Cool!

The thrill of flirtation
On endless vacations
Keen as a thing that is keen
— Whale, Losing Ctrl

Sneaking Buckybase data into Google Spreadsheets for Fun and Gadgets, applied and useful Web 2.0.

For whom the bell tolls, “As if, down there in the bedrock, or perhaps a few miles out at sea inside a submarine, every few seconds you hear the tolling of a massive church bell – but it’s not a bell, it’s the 728-ton spherical damper inside Taipei 101 knocking loose against its structure.”

26jun2008

The New Modernist, a blog by Edward Lifson, “Something beautiful every day.”

Cue is a small mail user agent. Uses MH for infrastructure, and is amazingly useful for its size. (No threading, though.)

A few years ago, I coined the term “life hacks”, which has gone on to become an entire industry of hints and tips that I am, by my congenital laziness, unable to use or benefit from. It is some sort of karmic punishment. — Danny O’Brien

Sunny Day Sky, a new Orisinal game! Wonderful as ever.

Getting Git, excellent talk by Scott Chacon. Watch it if you don’t know git yet (well)!

How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, by Paul McHenry Roberts. “As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.”

You may not be what everybody needs.
But Tennessee, you’re good enough for me.

I can see stars shining in your night.
Your daytime sings like Cash and Patsy Cline.
— Mindy Smith, Tennessee

mult is an on-going research project to create a high-performance instance multiplicity system. An “instance” is defined as the operating environment within an operating system: in effect, those entities and resources available to a process tree rooted at init(8). An instance multiplicity system has several init(8) trees, each of which is isolated from the others.

25jun2008

Mathematica: The Scrapbook, contains pretty interesting stuff.

Lit 101 Class, in three lines or less. By Ben Joseph.

In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me
— Grateful Dead, Attics Of My Life

Eulogy for George Carlin*, by yuo. *adapted from another eulogy in order to save time. WJW.

Advice to public speakers: using microphones, by Charles Miller.

I’ll Let You Be In My Dreams, If I Can Be In Yours, Bob Dylan On Abraham Lincoln. And what he really said.

Wake of the flood, laughing water, forty nine
Get out the pans, don’t just stand there dreaming, get out the way
Get out the way
— Grateful Dead, Here Comes Sunshine

Mister anywhere you point this thing, great shot.

Reviewing Conference Papers, notes by Mark Bernstein.

24jun2008

Introducing Buckybase, a social web database with bidirectional hyperlinks, by Manuel Simoni.

Vicissicalc, a tiny spreadsheet by Darius Bacon. Amazingly small.

polyparse is a collection of parser combinator libraries in Haskell.

NetSurf is a web browser for RISC OS and UNIX-like platforms including Linux. Does HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, soon HTML 5 and SVG, but no JavaScript yet.

So when in doubt just call my name
Just before you go insane
If I ever leave this world
Hey I may never leave this world
But if I ever leave this world alive
— Flogging Molly, If I Ever Leave This World Alive

My old Sony MDR-V700 DJ headphones, when plugged into my outboard computer speakers, somehow pick up transmissions between ambulance drivers and dispatch…

Revisiting Coroutines, by Ana Lucia de Moura and Roberto Ierusalimschy. “This paper defends the revival of coroutines as a general control abstraction. After proposing a new classification of coroutines, we introduce the concept of full asymmetric coroutines and provide a precise definition for it through an operational semantics. We then demonstrate that full coroutines have an expressive power equivalent to one-shot continuations and oneshot partial continuations.”

NetBSD/i386 on Asus EeePC, everything except the webcam works! (And a UVC interface is a GSoC project.)

Walk away me boys
walk away me boys
and by morning we’ll be free
wipe that golden tear
from your mother dear
and raise what’s left
of the flag for me
— Flogging Molly, What’s Left Of The Flag

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond, Alan Kirby says “postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.”

The city may be defined as the social institution enabling people unknown to each other to nevertheless live together. — Dirk Baecker, What Is In A City?

Project Xanadu, reloaded, von Burkhard Schröder. “Was ist und zu welchem Ende betreiben wir Online-Journalismus? Wie setzt man Links, warum und wohin?” Redakteure, bitte lesen!

STOP! Hammertime!, a Firefox plugin: “Simply install and marvel as you hear MC Hammer sing whenever a page is stopped!”

Scarf, nicely typeset.

23jun2008

Updates on Drew Yao’s Terrible Ruby Vulnerabilities, heh.

New default license: 2-clause BSD license, “Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license.” And there was much rejoicing.

tcerl, a port of tokyocabinet to erlang, and tokyocabinet based erlang term store. Neat.

Give me an answer
Give me a sign
I’ve been climbing up this ladder
I’ve been wasting my time
— Radiohead, Up On The Ladder

yahoorezinr.com, WJW.

Indiana Jones and Nuke the Fridge, the making of phrases.

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous. — David Gelernter, The Second Coming – A Manifesto

The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon in the address bar that indicates a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange “broadcast” RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available. Great idea!

Kilim is a message-passing framework for Java that provides ultra-lightweight threads and facilities for fast, safe, zero-copy messaging between these threads.

Computation and the Periodic Table, talk by John Baez. “By now there is an extensive network of interlocking analogies between physics, topology, logic and computer science, which can be seen most easily by comparing the roles that symmetric monoidal closed categories play in each subject.”

Pure Type Systems type checker in Prolog, plain wonderful.

Facon is a mocking library in the spirit of the Bacon spec library. Small, compact, and works with Bacon.

JSqueak, Smalltalk interpreter written in Java by Dan Ingalls.

Topologie von Flächen XIX, “Eine mathematische Spielerei: was passiert, wenn man den Drehimpuls der Erde stetig erhöht?” Sehr lustig. :-)

The Next Euruko will be held in Barcelona in the first quarter of 2009.

Reddit goes open source, but not DSFG free software.

Your ears are burning
Denial, denial
Your ears should be burning
Denial, denial
— Radiohead, House Of Cards

Insane Architecture, Ian Lance Taylor: “My personal observation is that the towns of Silicon Valley make me feel insane. It seems therefore plausible that Silicon Valley is in some way associated with Cthulhu.”

Babelmark is a testbed for side-by-side comparaisons of the output of various Markdown implementations.

Moving Past BlueCloth, Ryan Tomayko provides two new libraries for Ruby.

Minimal, James Bennett on his IMO great minimalist redesign.

18jun2008

meg wachter: “dumped”, messy.

Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps, I noticed it was different.

Phone in the Toilet?, My friend Sara sent me an email: “Linda, Sorry that I’m not able to call you back. My phone fell into the toilet.”

And the tower bells chime, ding dong they chime
They’re singing, Jesus died for somebodys sins but not mine.
— Patti Smith, Gloria

Tomatoes: not coming back, by IHCOYC. “A notice posted on the door to my local McDonalds announced that it, as a corporation, “supports” the FDA’s latest contamination scare regarding tomatoes and salmonella, and as a result they have “voluntarily” and “temporarily” stopped serving tomatoes on sandwiches that formerly contained them. This is “temporary” only in the same sense that all other earthly things are temporary. They will never return.” And now drop the disgusting slice of cucumber.

What is *jour and why they are killer apps for RailsCamp08, Dr Nic on creative use of Rendezv^WBonjour.

Faring thee well now
Let your life proceed by its own designs
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
— Grateful Dead, Cassidy

Own a piece of the crypto wars, I really liked the PGP hardhack.

Colorforth 2.0 for stand-alone and Windows. With documentation!

17jun2008

17. Juni 1953.

The 100 Thing Challenge is my little way to personalize my efforts to “Challenge Stuff” and fight consumerism. “By November 12, 2008 I will only have 100 personal things. I will live with only 100 personal things for one full year, until November 12, 2009.” WJW.

wtop is like “top” for your webserver. How many searches or signups are happening per second? What is the response time histogram for your static files? wtop shows you at a glance. Useful!

On the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function, by Jorma Jormakka. “The paper proves the Riemann Hypothesis.” Hey, at least let me hope it will be as short as this.

There must be something I can dream tonight,
The air is filled with the moves of you,
All the fire is frozen yet still I have the will, ooh, ah.
— Patti Smith, Elegie

bondi is a programming language centred on pattern-matching. It supports functional, imperative, query-based and object-oriented programming styles using a single small evaluator.

PseudoPOD, a POD Extension for Authoring Large Documents.

Boomerang: Resourceful Lenses for String Data (PDF), by Aaron Bohannon, J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alexandre Pilkiewicz, and Alan Schmitt. ” We first propose a collection of bidirectional string lens combinators, based on familiar operations on regular transducers (union, concatenation, Kleene-star) and with a type system based on regular expressions. We then design a new semantic space of dictionary lenses, enriching the lenses of Foster et al. (2007b) with support for two additional combinators for marking “reorderable chunks” and their keys.”

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/setting-up-shop-in-apocalypse.htmlSetting Up Shop in the Apocalypse, “What sets the South China Mall apart from [other dead malls], besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board.”

Rohrer sketches on Police Brutality, Immortality, a few new games by Jason Rohrer of Passage fame.

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
— Bertolt Brecht, Die Lösung

Firefox 3 now officially released.

Pianist Esbjorn Svensson Dead at 44, this makes me really really sad.

Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping, by David Verba. “Use the quickest and most lightweight method that gets you the results you’re after.”

Faux Absolute Positioning, by Eric Sol at A List Apart. “My teammates and I have developed a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds. After quite a bit of experimenting and testing, it’s time to share the technique with the rest of the world and see how we can work together to improve it.”

16jun2008

Cruel Solitaire is an amazing solitaire game that seems to have a low success rate, but some advansed[sic] players can solve up to 50% of the deals.

What is it like to write a technical book?, an extensive post by Baron Schwartz.

Gonna wave, gonna wave
Gonna wave to the wind
Gonna wave my way to
Places I never have been
— Grateful Dead, Wave To The Wind

A Bisimulation for the Blue Calculus (PDF), by Silvano Dal-Zilio. Also includes a good overview of the Blue calculus.

Ypsilon is the implementation of Scheme Programming Language, which conforms to the latest standard R6RS. It implements “mostly concurrent garbage collection”, which is optimized for the multi-core CPU system.

Empty pages before my eyes
Do not deny or criticize
Empty bedrooms where I’ve paid my dues
Watching the ceiling instead of you
Can you tell me where you’ve gone?
Ain’t no one around to hear my songs
— Grateful Dead, Empty Pages

Correctness of an Expression Compiler in Coq, which is not even very long.

See Ungeheuer = (0.035*x^2+(y-x+0.166*x^3-0.0083*x^5+0.000198*x^7- 0.00000275*x^9)^2+z^2-1) * (y+0.4)*((x-6)^2+(2*y-5)^2+(2*z)^2-2)-1.

15jun2008

Look On My Words, Ye Mighty, And Despair!, the Chomskybot.

Over the Shoulder 1: Text Preprocessing in Forth, a screencast.

How many hours in a day
They tell me twenty four
There could be a couple less
I know there ain’t no more
— Grateful Dead, Samba In The Rain

Rhinos and Tigers, Steve Yegge: “I will once again plagiarize myself by transcribing a talk I gave.”

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

Categories of polynomials and comonadic plumbing, “Suppose you have a Haskell program and you want to introduce a new global constant into your program.”

Unofficial GIT Gateway for FoNC now available.

14jun2008

The Case for Cocktails, “Fifty years ago, men ordered Manhattans, women drank Mai Tais, and no one brought guns to school. The logic is irrefutable; Margaret Mason urges you to drink well.”

Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths, the greek win.

The 2008 Underhanded C Contest, “The object of this year’s contest: write a short, simple C program that redacts (blocks out) rectangles in an image. […] Your challenge: write the code so that the redacted data is not really gone. Ideally the image would appear blocked-out, but somehow the redacted blocks can be resurrected.”

Bevor die Glut in dir erlischt
Verlass die Stadt
Die keine ist
Ein neuer Wundbrand in Athen
S’ist an der Zeit endlich zu gehn
— Gustav, Verlass Die Stadt

Electoral Programming, Russ Cox uses dynamic programming to find out “how many ways there were to win the electoral college with a minimal set of states”.

Droopy is a mini-web server whose sole purpose is to let others upload files to your computer. Neat.

Es ist Sommer in Wien
Und nicht Stalingrad, sagt er
Ich weiss, sag ich,
Und trotzdem ist mir kalt
— Gustav, Verlass Die Stadt

A Skeptical Manifesto.

Lazy Bastards, how we read online.

13jun2008

Dan Mumford makes awesome horror vacui.

I cannot read between your lines
You cannot make me read your tiny mind
Oh who’s got the time
Oh you’d go blind
— Martha Wainwright, Jesus & Mary

2008-06-13, a biggish post by Zed Shaw with miscellaneous stuff. Also, Rack is sexy now.

Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, Bjarne Stroustrup wrote an introductionary book.

A monk asked Joshu, “What is the meaning of Bodidharma’s coming to China?” Joshu said,
“The oak tree in the front garden.”
A monk asked Zhaozhou, “What is the living meaning of Zen?.” Zhaozhou said,
“The cypress tree in the courtyard.” — Mumonkan, Case 37

Some comfort gained from the acceptance of the inherent lies in everything, cool old drug advertisements.

12jun2008

Lockjaw is a tetromino stacking game that lets you set the rules. Pretty flexible and works with some hackery on OS X as well.

PLT Scheme 4.0 released, featuring R6RS, immutable pairs in core, Typed Scheme and lots of other new stuff.

I must seem a little bit odd
Do I count as anything special
Is there sincerity in anything I say
Do I know what anything means?
Can I see?
— Martha Wainwright, I Wish I Were Lyrics

Pandemonium, “Some of the coolest photographs I’ve seen recently are these long exposure shots of crowds in St. Petersburg, Russia.” Looks like smoke! Awesome.

The blue calculus attempts at providing a better programming notation for higher-order concurrency. Compared with the polyadic pi-calculus, it is an asynchronous calculus, where replication is restricted to input prefix, and without sum. The main novelty is that any abstraction is also a process, and that any process may be applied to any name. Also, see the Deep Blue Calculus

New York, “The development of a world metropolis in a nutshell: from 25.000 inhabitants to 9.5 million within a century and a half.” Cool infographics.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’.
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.
— Bob Dylan, When The Ship Comes In

Squeak on the iPhone!, neat.

Obfuscated TCP is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet. Very clever.

More mathematical confections, a Poincaré disk pie!

HTML 5 differences from HTML 4, updated list. Still, can’t wait for wide adoption.

I Love My Life The Way It Is, by Ali Alvarez. “I didn’t need the lottery messing with my life – I’m alright with it the way it is. So as an experiment, I started buying scratch cards and not scratching them.” WJW.

11jun2008

Multitalk is a new type of presentation program featuring some fresh ideas.

Tacit Knowledge, “First, true discovery, cannot be accounted for by a set of articulated rules or algorithms. Second, knowledge is public and also to a very great extent personal (i.e. it is constructed by humans and therefore contains emotions, “passion”.). Third, the knowledge that underlies the explicit knowledge is more fundamental; all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge.”

Oh, it ain’t safe, you better watch out
They’re coming to get you – sickle and shroud
They’ll turn you to stone and burn out your sky
They’ve got your number – television eyes
The cinches, the doctors, the streaks, and the radio lights
— Dead Moon, Psychodelic Nightmare

FlyGuy (SWF), WJW, must try.

Epiphany, by Damien Katz. “Static typing in OO languages isn’t the solution to software complexity, rather it’s an enabler of it.” (And let me add that this is a flaw of current mainstream so-called statically typed languages and not static typesystems in general!)

SMP Boot, and how this works in Linux.

call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn’t rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the
depression era.
there wasn’t any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn’t rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
— Charles Bukowski, We Ain’t Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain

Top Tourist Spots Americans Can’t Visit, bad luck, guys.

Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns, by Serge Demeyer, Stéphanie Ducasse, and Oscar Nierstrausz, collects and distills successful techniques in planning a reengineering project, reverse-engineering, problem detection, migration strategies and software redesign. Full text available.

10jun2008

Bell Labs and CSP Threads, by Russ Cox. “Instead, we are interested in concurrent programming because it provides a natural abstraction that can make some programs much simpler.”

Twice as Fast, Half the Price, John Gruber on the iPhone 3G.

Undoubtedly, someone can learn OOP from reading code – after all Alan Kay (partly) learned OO by deciphering an 80 page Simula program thinking it was Algol. — Bjarne Stroustrup, Posting to comp.lang.c++

Antarctica base gets 16,500 condoms before darkness, that’s roughly one per day per person. Enjoy!

Sounding Rooms, “For some reason, when our upstairs neighbors came home tonight, their footsteps sounded different – as if someone had come up a staircase I didn’t know about, only to begin speaking inside a room I’d never known was there, located somehow behind the kitchen wall – which got me thinking.”

The Size of Africa, damn big.

Take it easy
I wish I could take it easy
Take it easy
Everything is under control
— Plastiscines, Under Control

STLFilt simplifies and/or reformats long-winded C++ error and warning messages, with a focus on STL-related diagnostics. The result renders many of even the most cryptic diagnostics comprehensible.

09jun2008

Paragrasp, an extension for Mozilla Firefox, adds a highlight to the current paragraph you’re reading, and allows you to use simple keyboard shortcuts to navigate forward or backward, moving the highlight and automatically scrolling the window to focus your reading attention to the center of the screen.

How to Write Parallel Programs: A First Course, by Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. Uses Linda, PDF available.

Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine
And I dare not drown my sorrows in the warm glow of your wine
You can’t buy my love with money, ‘cause I ain’t never been that kind
Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine
— Dick Reynolds & Jack Rhodes, Silver Threads And Golden Needles

Old and damned like a grave, “But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.””

Delta Encoding in HTTP, by Benjamin Carlyle.

C++ FQA Lite, C++ is a general-purpose programming language, not necessarily suitable for your special purpose. FQA stands for “frequently questioned answers”.

Black Queen, where’s your bank roll?
Black Queen, where did it go?
Black Queen, the truth is hard
Black Queen, you’re playing foolish cards
Black Queen
— Stephen Stills, Black Queen

Woman with objects fetish marries Eiffel Tower, “Someone who falls in love with objects can control that relationship on their own terms. Their objects will not let them down. That is extremely attractive for a person who is otherwise often desperately lonely.”

08jun2008

Daria Takes Aim At Jane Magazine, oh I loved that show.

All You Ever Wanted to Know About Banburismus but were Afraid to Ask, by Steven Hosgood. “60 years before this page was originally written, the cryptographers of Hut 8 (Naval Enigma) at Bletchley Park (BP) perfected “Banburismus”, a unique statistical attack that would work against German Navy Enigma messages even if they had no cribs available (i.e no guesses as to the exact plaintext).”

Flasche leer Feuerwehr
3 Tage Wach
Laufen geht jetzt auch nicht mehr
3 Tage Wach
Auf gehts Ab gehts
3 Tage Wach
Nächste Party Kommt Bestimmt
3 Tage Wach
— Lützenkirchen, 3 Tage Wach

Desktopography 2008, some very nice wallpapers.

REST: The short version, good overview by Mike Amundsen.

Amanda trinkt das Glas auf ex und sagt: Eure Gärten interessieren mich einen Dreck.
Und der Zimmerspringbrunnen plätschert, Kurt holt die Wäsche rein.
Ist das die Blaue Stunde, fragt er, kann das sein?
— Funny Van Dannen, Blaue Stunde

AmIOnMySpace.com?, by Ed Sanders. “This plugin will alert you if you accidently stumble onto MySpace.com, and take you back to the site you came from.” Awesome.

Incremental Development Environments, Gilad Bracha criticizes the file-based development model.

07jun2008

A slide word, says David A. Black, “I gather, is a word or phrase that has come to serve as shorthand for an entire argument—except that the argument isn’t really there.”

The Old Calculator Web Museum has some cool stuff.

Photoshop Blend Mode Math, a useful set of C macros.

Drugs, Kate Moss, and Intuitionistic Logic, fun thing: “Unfortunately, the law requires either a proof that she had been using a class A drug, or a proof that she had been using a class B drug. A proof that she had been using one or the other will not do. And hence Kate Moss cannot be prosecuted.”

Set out runnin but I take my time
A friend of the devil is a friend of mine
If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.
— Grateful Dead, Friend Of The Devil

Introducing pgTAP, a PostgreSQL testing framework by David Wheeler that uses TAP.

A Technique for Implementing First-Class Continuations, by Joe Marshall. “The technique involves modifying procedures (or methods) such that they are able to co-operatively participate in the creation and use of first-class continuations. The transform differs from continuation-passing-style in that the call/return stack continues to be the primary mechanism for representing continuations; a heap representation of the continuation is only constructed when necessary. This may result in better performance than CPS-conversion for those programs that make only occasional use of first-class continuations.”

Lunatic Python is a two-way bridge between Python and Lua, allowing these languages to intercommunicate. Being two-way means that it allows Lua inside Python, Python inside Lua, Lua inside Python inside Lua, Python inside Lua inside Python, and so on.

Faster than light and harder
Bleeds into overkill
Faster than light and harder
Never stop never ever
— Lead Into Gold, Faster Than Light

Hi-tech tombstones in Japan let mourners link to images, videos of deceased, cool idea.

Source Code Optimization (PDF), slides by Felix von Leitner. “People often write less readable code because they think it will produce faster code. Unfortunately, in most cases, the code will not be faster.”

The Eleventh ICFP Programming Contest will be held Friday, July 11, 2008 – Monday, July 14, 2008.

06jun2008

Cream Pie Turd (YouTube), “The greatest how-to of all time.”

SLRE is an ANSI C library that implements a tiny subset of Perl regular expressions. It is primarily targeted for developers who want to parse configuation files, where speed is unimportant. It is in single .c file, easily modifiable for custom needs.

Brewing your own hobo-wine on todays subprime mortgage budget, by lawngnomehitman.

Oh Lord don’t give me what I deserve
Give me something I need
Don’t give me what I deserve
Give me something I need
— Pig, Shell

Harold Simmons wrote some good introductionary material on Lambda calulus and Category Theory (scroll to the bottom).

ctheory.net, “One of the three leading intellectual electronic reviews in the world…”

Rev is an event library for Ruby, built on the libev event library which provides a cross-platform interface to high performance system calls . This includes the epoll system call for Linux, the kqueue system call for BSDs and OS X, and the completion ports interface for Solaris. Rev also binds asynchronous wrappers to Ruby’s core socket classes so you can use them in conjunction with Rev to build asynchronous event-driven applications.

Look for a while at the China Cat Sunflower
proud-walking jingle in the midnight sun
Copper-dome bodhi drip a silver kimono
like a crazy-quilt star gown
through a dream night wind
— Grateful Dead, China Cat Sunflower

280slides, a Keynote-style presentation software for the Web. Very promising! (And they use a Objective-C dialect that runs on JavaScript, dive into the sources…)

Scheme in J, pretty cool.

The notational conventions I adopted, and why (PDF), by Edsger Dijkstra. Recommended reading (and I like the dot notation).

05jun2008

Yang’s Iris Illusion (SWF), really impressive.

Empire (PDF, 1.3 MB), etext of the book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. “Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.”

Bead sort is a natural sorting algorithm. WJW.

Poetry has died, asphyxiated by metaphors. — Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Feynman-Platz, eine inoffizielle Bezeichnung. Es geht um einige Münchner Straßen, die ein Feynman-Diagramm bilden: Die lokale Straßenführung stellt den Compton-Effekt dar. Brilliant!

Implementing a high-performance Smalltalk interpreter with genbc and genvm (PDF), by Paolo Bonzini. Interesting tools, would be neat to see the final list of opcodes, though.

10 Gegenthesen zu 10 Thesen zur digtalen Zukunft, von Felix Schwenzel.

Mapping dryness, “The Sahara, you could say, is spreading north.”

Metagene is a program transformation tool which simplifies the development of such programs. Due to the similarities between C++ meta-programming and functional programming, the input language of Metagene is an ML language. Given a functional input program, Metagene outputs the corresponding C++ meta-program expressed using class templates. Whoo.

Treelets: An Adaptive Multi-Scale Basis for Sparse Unordered Data (PDF), by Ann B Lee, Boaz Nadler, and Larry Wasserman.

If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311

Natasha, an unknown short story by Vladimir Nabokov.

WWDC 2008 keynote bingo, by John Siracusa.

NiagaraCQ: A Scalable Continuous Query System for Internet Databases (PDF), by Jianjun Chen, David J. DeWitt, Feng Tian, and Yuan Wang. “Continuous queries are persistent queries that allow users to receive new results when they become available. While continuous query systems can transform a passive web into an active environment, they need to be able to support millions of queries due to the scale of the Internet.”

04jun2008

5 salts from around the world, can I have fries with that?

Group Theory and Machine Learning, a talk by Imre Risi Kondor. “The use of algebraic methods—specifically group theory, representation theory, and even some concepts from algebraic geometry—is an emerging new direction in machine learning. The purpose of this tutorial is to give an entertaining but informative introduction to the background to these developments and sketch some of the many possible applications, including multi-object tracking, learning rankings, and constructing translation and rotation invariant features for image recognition. The tutorial is intended to be palatable by a non-specialist audience with no prior background in abstract algebra.”

Why we skip Photoshop, Jason Fried explains.

Been walking all morning
Went walking all night
I can’t see much difference
Between the dark and 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

Counting Characters in UTF-8 Strings Is Fast, Kragen Sitaker says.

Yeti is ML style functional programming language, that runs on the JVM. Has tail recursion, lazy lists, OO by polymorphic structure types, first class scopes, and an interesting syntax.

Real Education Reform, by yuo. “Instead of school, send children to day-care when they’re young and let them do whatever they like as they get older. Our responsibility as adults is to provide them whatever they need, be it tools, places, clubs, encouragement, classes, better games, or whatever.”

HVD Comic Serif, a great free Comic Sans alternative. Lovely.

Indeterminacy, short stories by John Cage. Highly recommended.

Reia is a Python/Ruby-like mixed-paradigm language targeting the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM) and high-performance native compiler (HiPE). Reia aims to expose all the features and functionality of Erlang in a language more familiar to programmers of scripting languages, while improving string handling, regular expressions, linking with external libraries, and other tasks which are generally considered outside the scope of Erlang.

Now what’s to found, racing around
You carry your pain wherever you go
Full of the blues, and trying to lose
You ain’t going to learn what you don’t want to know
— Grateful Dead, Black Throated Wind

A planimeter is a table-top instrument for measuring areas, usually the areas of irregular regions on a map or photograph. They were once common, but have now largely been replaced by digital tools. Awesome tool.

Tom Waits True Confessions, a conversation with himself.

03jun2008

Writing an Interface Style Guide, by Jina Bolton at A List Apart. “Unfortunately, it’s also common that beautiful interfaces don’t stay beautiful. An interface’s design disintegration can be frustrating to deal with, especially for the designer and developer of that interface; it can be particularly frustrating for the designer and developer who can no longer access the site to fix the issues.”

Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas, by Mark Boulton at A List Apart. “For most of us, ideas have to be squeezed out of us every day. To stand up to this challenge, you need to arm yourself with some good tools.”

Sorted Linear Hash Table is an expandable hash table data structure with fixed insertion cost. Two hash tables containing the same key-value pairs will have identical data traversal order, regardless of insertion order differences.

Wo-oh, hey-eh-hey
Oh ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah
Hey hey hey
Wo, hey hey hey
Wo-oh, hey hey hey, hey
— Bo Diddley, Wo Wow Hey Hey

oohEmbed is an oEmbed compatible provider of HTML embed codes for various web sites. Dumble, the del.icio.us-backed tumblelog now uses it. Great!

The expression lemma, by Ralf Lämmel and Ondrej Rypacek. “Algebraic data types and catamorphisms (folds) play a central role in functional programming as they allow programmers to define recursive data structures and operations on them uniformly by structural recursion. Likewise, in object-oriented (OO) programming, recursive hierarchies of object types with virtual methods play a central role for the same reason. There is a semantical correspondence between these two situations which we reveal and formalize categorically. To this end, we assume a coalgebraic model of OO programming with functional objects.”

In the day nothing matters
It’s the night time that flatters
In the night no control
— Laura Branigan, Self Control

Two American membership cards, a funny comparison by Chung-chieh Shan.

Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent, dead at 71. (Follow the links for some orbituraries.)

Floating prisons do exist, for instance, in Amsterdam. There, an illegal-immigrant detention center “sits on two concrete platforms, each in turn moored to large steel pilings,” moving up and down with the tides, like a building only temporarily docked on the edge of the city.

Chaos Computer Club fordert nach Telekom-Spitzelaffäre wirksamen Schutz vor Datenverbrechen, “Angesichts der immer weiter eskalierenden Enthüllungen über die Spitzelpraktiken der Telekom und anderer deutscher Großkonzerne fordert der Chaos Computer Club (CCC) eine grundlegende Neuordnung des Datenschutzes und eine Ächtung von Datenverbrechen in Deutschland.”

02jun2008

Put a Little Science in Your Life, by Brian Greene. “Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable – a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional.”

Toward Better UI Programming Models, a list by Patrick Logan. Worth investigation.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Always a good read.

You mean trouble, oh, with your Lucifer’s eyes
And make me daydream, oh, and fantasize
Running through a field of flames
Playing our forbidden game
— Joan Baez, Lucifer’s Eyes

readatwork.com, ingenious!

The Art of Assembly Language Programming, with a focus on x86.

Purely Applicative XML Cursor, a kind of zipper.

git-darcs-import 0.1, a high-speed converter.

WMD is a small, simple WYSIWYG-style HTML editor written in JavaScript. MIT-licensed soon.

There’s beauty in the silver singing river
There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky
But none of these and nothing else can match the beauty
That I remember in my true love’s eyes
— Bob Dylan, Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Monads in C++ template metaprogramming, lovely.

Introducing Vertebra, Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s RailsConf 2008 slides on his Next Generation Cloud Computing/Automation Framework.

Sequel 2.0.0 Released, nice and pretty sophisticated by now.

01jun2008

Announcing OEmbed: An Open Standard for Embedded Content, by Leah Culver.

Jesus Christus Erlöser (YouTube), Kinski at his best.

Ruby 1.9.7 NEWS, nice. And #flatten finally gets a level parameter.

It’s all right, ‘cause I love you
And that’s not gonna change
Run me round, make me hurt again and again
But I’ll still sing you love songs
Written in the letters of your name
And brave the storm to come
For it surely looks like rain
— John Barlow, Looks Like Rain

MagLev recap, by Avi Bryant.

Maglev, Charles Nutter’s take: “They haven’t started running the RubySpecs and have no compatibility story today. You can’t actually get Maglev yet and run anything on it. It’s worse than Vaporware, it’s Presentationware. Go to Gemstone’s site and download Maglev (you can’t). Pull the source (you can’t). Build it yourself and investigate what it does (you can’t). You start to understand what I mean. And this is what the “Ruby media” is calling the most disruptive new Ruby technology. Dudes, come on. Were you born yesterday?”

Defunctionalization and Java, no way around.

Online viewer for PDF, PostScript and Word, “Given a URL on the net or a file on your computer, the viewer will try to retrieve the document, convert it and show it to you. No plugin software is required.” Also does .ps.gz!

8 fonts you probably don’t use in CSS, but should, nice list.

So it goes, we make what we made since the world began
Nothing more, the love of the women, work of men
Seasons round, creatures great and small, up and down, as we rise and fall
— John Barlow, Let It Grow

Buildings and books, Geoff Manaugh publishes like crazy.

JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit that implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

RSS 2.0 Atom 1.0 Archives: