Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30aug2008
Math-Intensive Reports with GNU Emacs and Calc, amazing. (OTOH, the Canon Cat could do that too. ;-))
Build a simple Marx Generator, “Do you like the idea of tesla coils and other high voltage sparking stuff, but don’t have the time, money or patience to build something that is elaborate?” Where is the soldering iron?
I remember the golden days when all this was a mystery and
You could write a letter then or god forbid come visit me.
You could write a letter then or god forbid come visit me.
— The Dresden Dolls, Necessary Evil
New Structures for Physics, two introductions to Category Theory, worth checking out.
How I stopped worrying and learned to love errno.h, a plea by Aria Stewart.
You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the stars came fallin’ on our heads
But they’re just old light, they’re just old light
Your hair was long when we first met
— Regina Spektor, Samson
PDF Writer library, written in K.
Destino, a short animated cartoon by Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.
29aug2008
The Ethics of Belief (1877), by William K. Clifford. “But,” says one, “I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.”
m9u is designed to be a music server, much like mpd or xmms2. It sits in the background playing music, exporting an interface that one or more clients can connect to to control playback.
It’s good that I just do this now and then
You know I’m realy not a drinking man
But I can’t bear to talk about us any other time
Until I cross that bourbon borderline
— Gary Allan, Bourbon Borderline
LPeg is a new pattern-matching library for Lua, based on Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs). Following the Snobol tradition, LPeg defines patterns as first-class objects. That is, patterns are regular Lua values (represented by userdata). The library offers several functions to create and compose patterns. Looks a bit confusing, but is nice once understood.
Falling off the math cliff (JPG).
plankton-platform, an Erlang style actor library for Objective-C.
Heteroflexible: Girls kissing girls is the latest trend, By Katherine Kersten. Staged bisexuality is now the norm for what is being called the “post-gay generation.”
He told us he loved us
But that was a lie
There was blood in his pockets
And death in his eyes
— Frank Black, Six-sixty-six
Sequence provides a unified api for access to sequential Ruby data types, like Strings, Arrays, Files, IOs, and Enumerations. Each sequence encapsulates some data and a current position within it.
Hasse diagram of the 2008 Olympic medal table, by Simon Tatham. “How much of the hierarchy in the medal table is indisputable, and how much depends on your point of view?”
The Funny Chip, _why goes Bergsonian.
28aug2008
World’s Smallest Book, “Measuring 2.4 x 2.9 mm and presented in a wooden box including a magnifying glass, this is the world’s smallest book in a published edition.”
Things to say during sex, a map.
Uzaygezen 0.1 is a space filling curve library with support for mapping from a multi-dimensional space into one dimension via the Compact Hilbert Index.
Tonight I will sleep on the beach
‘cause I had too many bottles of rum.
Maybe I’ll sit here and rest for a while
and wait for the dawn of the sun.
— Clare Fader, The Wine
A Scalable, Commodity Data Center Network Architecture, by Mohammad Al-Fares, Alexander Loukissas, Amin Vahdat. “In this paper, we show how to leverage largely commodity Ethernet switches to support the full aggregate bandwidth of clusters consisting of tens of thousands of elements.”
Sudoku Solvers in LaTeX.
Build Those Drinks, “Whether you knew it or not there is a certain underground ethic of what is cool in the world of coffee and particularly espresso. Small is cool. Small cups, small quantities of coffee and small quantities of milk are all very cool.”
Welcome to mySQLgame, “Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there’s a game that just is a database!” WJW.
It’s love that leaves and breaks
the seal of always thinking you would be
real happy and healthy strong and calm
where does the good go
where does the good go
— Tegan And Sara, Where Does The Good Go?
Typographunnies, typographical jokes.
Textext adds re-editable LaTeX objects to Inkscape’s repertoire.
Hug a developer!, <3.
ncdu is an ncurses version of the famous old ‘du’ unix command. It provides a fast and easy interface to your harddrive. Where is your disk space going? Why is your home directory that large? ncdu can answer those questions for you in just a matter of seconds!
27aug2008
The Comparative Literature of Massive Construction Sites, “I thought that perhaps there should be a comparative literature of construction sites: famous monuments, tombs, bridges, houses, and cities throughout history, together with the thoughts of the people who built them.”
Atelier in Ushimado, by Tezuka Architects. Plain awesome.
And it’s so sad that you’re so sad and you’re so bad for me
I followed your perfume as you ran down the street
I caught you and held you and pushed back your fringe and swore undying loyalty
— The Indelicates, New Art For The People
CSpec is a Behavior-driven Development framework for C. It provides a spec framework for describing the behavior of the functions of your system. The syntax is inspired from RSpec to be as legible as possible.
Unobtainium is a humorous neologism that refers to any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.
One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials. Lovely.
You have gone so far
You have gone too far
So tonight
It’s just me and the minibar
— The Dresden Dolls, Me And The Minibar
Pseudo-persuasion in online discourse, David A. Black: “I know it’s pointless—I’m not going to make a dent in it—but I feel moved to say something about the biggest problem in online discourse: pseudo-persuasion.”
Stripped, by John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone, 2006.
How to make a RAILGUN!, “Warning: if you screw up with this you could electricute yourself.”
26aug2008
Setting up a new remote git repository, it’s easy.
gcalc, a small Ruby script to use the Google calculator from the shell.
Free online: Full documentation for the Large Hadron Collider, very nice.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
— Woody Guthrie, This Train Is Bound For Glory
Bathroom Art, WJW.
Jack, write Rack apps in JavaScript.
Opentape, a free way to make and host your own web mixtape. Pretty nice.
A Comic by Larry Gonick about the Weaire-Phelan foam.
CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time, by Dave Shea at A List Apart. “It’s high time to revisit the CSS Sprites technique from four years ago, and see if we can’t interject a little bit of movement of our own.”
Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer, by Aaron Rester at A List Apart. “By adding a new metaphor to our theoretical toolboxes, we can gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of what we create and how our users interact with it.”
‘Bee’ system prototypes represent the future of connectivity in emergencies, “The Bee will allow communication, connectivity and data access in field conditions where such technologies are often difficult or impossible to use.”
Who says we die?
Before we live
I promise you walls of grace
to carry on
When we’re lost
We’ll find a way
— Shiny Toy Guns, I Promise You Walls
fleshmap: listen, “What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre.”
EnRUPT is a new small and simple scalable word-based symmetric cryptographic primitive that can be used to construct fast and secure block ciphers, hash functions, stream ciphers, RNGs and MACs. It accepts keys and data blocks of any size. It is currently the simplest of all the block and stream ciphers and hash functions. PDF paper.
25aug2008
The Monad.Reader Issue 11 (PDF), by Douglas M. Auclair, Kenneth Knowles, and David F. Place. Featuring “How to Refold a Map”, “First-Order Logic à la Carte”, and “MonadPlus: What a Super Monad!”.
And where is the love?
Who knows what to do?
The men and the women carry us through
Across the river, to the promised land
— Dan Bern, Where is the Love?
Directing JavaScript with Arrows (PDF), by Khoo Yit Phang, Michael Hicks, Jeffrey S. Foster, and Vibha Sazawal. “JavaScript, being a single-threaded language, makes extensive use of event-driven programming to enable responsive web applica- tions. However, standard approaches to sequencing events are messy, and often lead to code that is difficult to understand and maintain. We have found that arrows, a generalization of monads, are an elegant solution to this problem.”
Ubuntu Satanic Edition, Linux for the Damned: It brings together the best free software and free metal music on one CD.
You are my whore, you are the one I adore,
you are the one that my twisted heart adores,
like a dog I will gnaw, like a dog I will paw,
you’re the one that my twisted heart adores.
— The Tiger Lillies, Whore
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. Essential.
100 lines of C that can parse any Protocol Buffer, neat.
Tactical Landscaping and Terrain Deformation, “Over on Wired this weekend I read about a game called Fracture, by LucasArts, which features “terrain deformation” as a central factor in gameplay.”
24aug2008
Baynoon is an object database server that understands and efficiently implements relationships (one to one, one to many and many to many) between entities using a simple query language.
Dreimorengesetz is a German term which translates to “three-mora rule.” This name is given to the rule for placing the accent in a Latin word.
Cthulhu For President: The Dawning of a New Era, “Why vote for a lesser evil?”
To make a name for learning
when other roads are barred,
take something very easy
and make it very hard.
— Piet Hein, Wide Road
libjlog is a pure C, very simple durable message queue with multiple subscribers and publishers (both thread and multi-process safe). The basic concept is that publishers can open a log and write messages to it while subscribers open the log and consume messages from it.
Ultralight Backpacking: The “Why” and the “How”, by JackStraw. “This story is about ultralight backpacking: exploring the wilderness with an extreme minimum of equipment.”
The Nationalists, the Socialists,
The Communists, the Capitalists
They all agree you don’t exist
And they all watch as you slash your wrists
— Tiger Lillies, Gypsy Lament
riot gwwwls, “I remember very distinctly the quiet Goth girl who did web design coming in late at night, when I was sitting there working on my own zine, and photocopying hundreds and hundreds of her Goth zine, and no one said anything of course because they were doing the same thing.” (Where are they now?)
Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 2, “As I’ve previously mentioned, you only need twists, antitwists and rotations to untangle a rational tangle.”
First, Second, or Third Person?, Mark Bernstein wonders: “When planning a Web site, when is it best to use first person? When do you choose third person? Under what circumstances is it wise to directly address the reader?”
23aug2008
product placements (2008), 70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA. “If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will—as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.” Plain brilliant.
TinyScheme is a lightweight Scheme interpreter that implements as large a subset of R5RS as was possible without getting very large and complicated. Less than 5kLOC and easy to extend.
Any asshole can open up a museum
Put all of the things he loves on display
So everyone could see them
The house, a car, a thoughtful wife
Ordinary moments in his ordinary life
— Rilo Kiley, It’s A Hit
Notebooks for Left-handed, Right-handed and Ambidextrous People, “For my notebooks, I redesigned traditional looks and made the ruled lines slightly slanted in right angles and direction, through research, for the right-handed, left-handed and ambidextrous people.”
Higher-Order Mixfix Syntax for Representing Mathematical Notation and its Parsing (PS), dissertation by Stephan Albert Missura. This is really awesome.
Tail Call Optimization doesn’t exist in Haskell, this raises a good point.
Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.
How To Launch Software, by Aaron Swartz.
The Freehacker’s Union, by Zed Shaw. “Business Is Killing The Art Of The Hack”.
Wake up in the morning
I shall wake up and so shall you
And I wake up, the sun is beautiful
And it is warming you and I
Fragile as we lie
— Eisley, One Day I Slowly Floated Away
Our writing is now complete!, Real World Haskell goes to copy edit.
Sex and the Olympic city, “Tomorrow night thousands of young men and women with the most fit, toned bodies in the world will mingle for the last time before they fly home. What might they get up to?” Who wouldn’t.
Structurally Recursive Descent Parsing (PDF), slides by Nils Anders Danielsson, joint work with Ulf Norell. “Rule out left recursion by restricting the types.”
22aug2008
iHologram, “I’ve just finished coding an application for the iphone/ipod touch. It gives the illusion of a 3d hologram jumping off the screen.” Very nice.
The SCP parsing algorithm: computational framework and formal properties, by Quesada Moreno and José Francisco. “This paper presents a new parsing algorithm for unrestricted context-free grammars. Basically, it may be described as a bidirectional bottom-up parser that is driven by an event generation strategy and is based on a sophisticated Syntactic Constraint Propagation (SCP) technique which uses strong top-down predictions.”
Don’t move so slow, don’t move so slow,
dont move so slow, dont move so slow
so move, yeah move.
I got nowhwere to go, I’ve got nowhere to go
— Tegan And Sarah, I Can’t Take It
Haskell is an obscure and mostly disused esoteric programming language named after the planet Haskell, a large and moving planet orbiting Aldebaran. It was developed in 1969 by Donald ‘Waddler’ Duck.
A conversation with Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill at ACM Queue. Suck-ass site interface, but worth reading. Just to hear they all still use vi.
Morseall allows you to control your Linux computer by tapping morse code on the mouse buttons. -/…./../… .-./—/-.-./-.-/…!
Melliès on Functorial Boxes, “John once mentioned the slides of Paul-André Melliès’s talk Functorial boxes in string diagrams. Now you can read a 44 page tutorial on this topic.”
Corpse kept upright for 3-day wake in Puerto Rico, why not.
If I had rubies and riches and crowns
I’d buy the whole world and change things around
I’d throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea
For they are mistakes of a past history.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.
— Bob Dylan, Let Me Die In My Footsteps
Websense reports China Netcom DNS cache poisoning, let the games begin.
Chain.js is a jQuery plugin, providing data-binding capability that allows you to generate web contents automatically by binding your data to html.
Package Management Sudoku, WJW. “As it happens, a little-known fact about the Debian packaging system is that you can, in fact, describe Sudoku puzzles in it!”
21aug2008
Rack 0.4, a modular Ruby webserver interface has been released.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), finally open. “Volume storage is charged by the amount you allocate until you release it, and is priced at a rate of $0.10 per allocated GB per month. Amazon EBS also charges $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests you make to your volume.” Fair!
I laid with you for hours
Staring at your face
I laid with you for hours
Remembering your taste
— The Glove, Mouth To Mouth
Unscrambling with Prolog, and Unscrambling without Prolog (but Coq), solving a little puzzle.
wbar is a OS X dock-like quick launch bar for X11 that only needs imlib2.
Henri Cartan 1904–2008, letztes noch lebendes Gründungsmitglied der Bourbaki-Gruppe, ist letzten Mittwoch im Alter von 104 Jahren gestorben.
Scheduling jobs based on filesystem activity with incron, nice tool.
Mormon Church Makes Bid To Acquire Facebook, WJW.
Thank you for the warning
But I still see inside
A little global warming
Never hurt no one
— Dresden Dolls, The Gardener
Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 01 is finally here! Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature.
The 500 Packages: Haskell, Distros and Maintainership, “Monday was something of a landmark for the Haskell community, as the 500th Haskell package was added to the Arch Linux distribution.”
Mayan Muons and Unmapped Rooms, “The first major experiment of the Maya Muon Group will bridge the disciplines of physics and archeology. The particle detectors and related systems are designed specifically to explore ruins of a Maya pyramid in collaboration with colleagues at the UT Mesoamerican Archaeological Laboratory.”
20aug2008
Grandma Emma Gatewood was an extreme hiker and ultra-light hiking pioneer who was the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine solo.
Bear Creek Apartments, a comic by Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley.
She will crush you, she’ll excite you
She’ll destroy you, she’ll ignite you
She’ll take you to a world of darkness
And death, and death!
— Inkubus Sukkubus, All Along The Crooked Way
sleep.fm, a sleep and wake social network, where your friends’ alarm messages wake you up! WJW.
on being a bit of an idiot, Danny O’Brien (who has been blogging regularly again): “I now, at some level, realise that having somebody else go over your code is both humiliating and the best way to learn.” Worth reading.
Concurrent Programming with Erlang/OTP, an alpha book with an emphasis on OTP, the platform/framework/library. That’s good.
People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
— Bob Dylan, Things Have Changed
iPhone SSH review: iSSH v. pTerm v. TouchTerm v. SSH, a comparison. (And ed(1) for the win! Or use C-c in vi instead of ESC.)
What Makes for a Good Blog?, Merlin Mann made a list.
RESTful JSON, a proposal by Joe Gregorio.
19aug2008
Instant origami is the contemporary interpretation of the traditional Japanese paper folding technique – focusing on speed and imagination rather than on the technically brilliant execution. Must see!
newsbeuter is an RSS feed reader for the text console. It is designed to run Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. Not bad.
Not every pain hurts
Deep inside
When you learn to divide
Don’t fear the danger
Follow your heart to the light
Live your dream and learn to carry on
— Lacrimosa, Not Every Pain Hurts
Tunguska is a ternary computer emulator. It is loosely based on the excellent design of the (binary) 6502-processor by MOS Technology, but entirely ternary. So instead of having two memory cell states (0, 1), it has three (-1, 0, 1).
Category Theory Demonstrations, “I’ve been experimenting with category-theory algorithms written in Jan Wielemaker’s SWI-Prolog. Some are adapted from David Rydeheard and Rod Burstall’s book Computational Category Theory.”
p3rl.org is made for short URL redirects to Perl and CPAN documentation, a great idea. Who makes ru8y.org?
Telescopic Text, I love it!
Opis, a functional-reactive approach for developing distributed systems in Objective Caml. In Opis, a protocol description consists of a reactive function (called event function) describing the behavior of a distributed system node. The event functions in Opis are built from pure functions as building blocks, composed using the Arrow combinators.
I really don’t care and neither does he
If this hotel melts into the sea
Polished and so rare, this is the way that we see.
The coldness helps, it’s our favorite remedy.
— Rasputina, The New Zero
full(4): always full device, “Writes to the /dev/full device will fail with an ENOSPC error. This can be used to test how a program handles disk-full errors.” Hooray!
Original & Fälschung: eBoy-NYC-Poster, findet die Unterschiede!
18aug2008
Serving static files with Django and AWS, yay.
Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means, “basically it means removing the single coarse-grained lock around every incoming request and replacing it with finer-grained locks around only those resources that need to be shared across threads.”
And it’s been a long time
Which agrees with this watch of mine
And I know that I miss you
and I’m sorry if I dissed you
— Modest Mouse, Trailer Trash
Towers of Silence are circular raised structures used by Zoroastrians for exposure of the dead. “To preclude the pollution of earth or fire, the bodies of the dead are placed atop a tower—a tower of silence—and so exposed to the sun and to birds of prey.”
Dijkstra award 2008 goes to ‘Sparse Partitions’, by David Peleg and Baruch Awerbuch.
On the App Store, Steven Frank on how it rejects the principles of every software developer. Worth reading.
If it doesn’t kill you
It will shape you
If it doesn’t break you
It will make you
— Siouxsie Sioux, If It Doesn’t Kill You
Tokyo Dystopia is a full-text search system, based on Tokyo Cabinet.
Rules To Follow When Cell Phones Drop Coverage, so obvious, so good.
GIT 1.6.0 has been released. No more path pollution, and more nice features!
It’s Magit!, a Emacs mode for Git, can do hunkwise operations.
17aug2008
War on Terror, the Boardgame, “It’s got suicide bombers, political kidnaps and intercontinental war. It’s got filthy propaganda, rampant paranoia and secret treaties and the Axis of Evil is a spinner in the middle of the board.”
Cratylus, by Plato. Translation by Benjamin Jowett.
Society of Control, by Gilles Deleuze. “Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.”
Now you are punished
For absolutely nothing
And I feel so good
Because once more
I don’t have to be honest
— The Gathering, Locked Away
Btail monitors a logfile for specific events. To do this it uses a bayesian filter to determine what events are worth passing through and which should be suppressed. So it filters out all of the routine stuff, but passes through anything important or out of the ordinary.
AmbientTalk, is a distributed programming language developed specifically for writing programs to be deployed on mobile ad hoc networks.
Maple Phone, I like.
It really does work, yes it does…
Empty set meets Bob the Angry Flower.
Rails 2.2 will be thread safe thanks to the work that Josh has put into it. Only took four years!
All the sense you are capable of
does not seem to save you
You heed the glance of a smile
Was it impossible to float for a while?
— The Gathering, Amity
Phelps Frame-By-Frame, time to use fast motion cameras?
Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 1, “We don’t need anything particularly clever to form our representation as there is a fairly commonplace way to represent connectons between components using monads.”
Die anderen Medaillenspiegel, Anzahl der gemeldeten Athleten im Verhältnis zu den errungenen Medaillen.
16aug2008
HOW TO WORK BETTER, must read.
Monads are Plug-ins, and fun in ML too.
How to Design Worlds: Imaginative Programming in DrScheme, by Matthias Felleisen, Robby Findler, Kathi Fisler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.
I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes I wish I was a mole in the ground
If I’s a mole in the ground I’d root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
— I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground
What Does Michael Phelps Eat for Breakfast? More Stuff Than You Eat All Day, eww.
Tilting at Windmills, Sam Ruby calls BS on the recent REST discussion. And Roy’s thesis (which is really readable) ought to be required reading for everyone speaking of REST.
Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely, by Margaret Mason. Please read.
I want four young ladies to bear up my coffin,
I want three young maidens to carry me on,
And each of them carry a bunch of wild roses,
To lay on my body as I pass along.
— Rally Wood, One Morning in May
Mini vMac, a miniature Macintosh emulator. “Mini vMac emulates a Macintosh Plus, one of the earliest of Macintosh computers, sold between 1986 and 1990. It can run old Macintosh software that otherwise couldn’t be used on recent computers, and so helps to preserve history, from the era when the modern user interface for computers was being defined.” This site has ROMs and working images.
Super Mario Bros. on the Theremin! (YouTube), one of the greatest instruments ever.
Set of TEN Burning Bridge cards, essential.
Multiprocessor streams for Plan 9, by David Leo Presotto. “This paper describes an implementation of Streams for the Plan 9 kernel, a multithreaded, multiprocessor kernel with a system call interface reminiscent of UNIX. Rather than port Dennis Ritchie’s Streams to Plan 9, we changed the abstraction to fit more natu- rally into the new environment. The result is a mechanism that has similar performance and is internally easier to program.”
15aug2008
Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind, a TED talk really worth seeing.
Russian Mod Makes iPhone’s Rear-Side Apple Logo Glow, I like.
Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web, I wholeheartedly support this.
Symbolics Lisp Machine Documents, big set of PDFs.
This is the hammer that killed John Henry
Won’t kill me, won’t kill me, won’t kill me
This is the hammer that killed John Henry
Won’t kill me, won’t kill me, won’t kill me
— Spike Driver Blues
Where do I begin? A problem solving approach to teaching functional programming, by Simon Thompson.
How many atoms of Jesus you eat every day, I love e2.
The Grelling-Nelson paradox is a semantic self-referential paradox formulated in 1908 by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson. “Is “Autological” autological?”
The Arecibo reply was the name given to a crop circle that appeared in farmland next to the Chilbolton radio telescope; home to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in Hampshire, UK, on tuesday 21 August 2001. The design is so named because it appears to be a response to the Arecibo message, which SETI transmitted into space in 1974. Cool prank.
An introduction to SHOES, code and graphical pairs.
LaTeX Equation Editor, online and with real-time update, very nice!
Oh death, where thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?
You thought you had a hold on me but you were wrong, I’ve been set free
— Randy Travis, Oh Death
Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping, “Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property – it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in.”
Library of Dust, “In 1913, Maisel explained, an Oregon state psychiatric institution began to cremate the remains of its unclaimed patients. Their ashes were then stored inside individual copper canisters and moved into a small room, where they were stacked onto pine shelves.” Scaaary.
The First Poem Written for Computers, Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash…
14aug2008
ECMAScript Harmony, ES 3.1 and 4 join forces and try to get rid of bloat. “This means that classes will be a part of the new language but they will be defined as simply being syntactic sugar for a series of plain methods or conventions (such as using closures and Object.freeze to create a Class-like experience).” Yes!
Using Difference Lists in Prolog and Haskell.
Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool
Lovin’ both of you is breakin’ all the rules
Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool
Lovin’ you both is breakin’ all the rules
— Mary MacGregor, Torn Between Two Lovers
The Y Combinator, Mike Vanier derives several versions.
The Paxos Register, by Harry C. Li, Allen Clement, Amitanand S. Aiyer, and Lorenzo Alvisi. “The Paxos register is a write-once register that exposes two important abstractions for reaching consensus: (i) read and write operations that capture how processes in Paxos protocols propose and decide values and (ii) tokens that capture how these protocols guarantee agreement despite partial failures.”
littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.
MAC AND CHEESE, by j1mmy.
How to Participate in the Linux Community, a guide to the kernel development process.
Intuitionistic mathematics for physics, by Andrej Bauer. “I have little, if anything, original to say, so this seems like an excellent opportunity for a blog post. So let me explain why I think intuitionistic mathematics is good for physics.”
Dolt provides a drop-in replacement for libtool that significantly decreases compile times on the platforms it supports. Rather than the libtool approach of running a large script for every compile that repeatedly figures out how to build libraries on the platform, dolt figures out those details at configure time and writes out a minimal doltcompile script containing only the commands needed to build a library on the current platform.
On a rainy day
and as the world will blow to bits
I’ll cradle you and hold you tight
— Eels, Something Is Sacred
Using Google App Engine With Amazon Web Services, THIS IS… CLOUD COMPUTING!!!
Patent Drawings for Geodesic Structures, Buckminster Fuller’s patent drawings for geodesic domes.
Downloaden bleibt verboten, wird aber nicht mehr verfolgt, hurra.
13aug2008
pHash, the open source perceptual hash library. “A perceptual hash is a fingerprint of an audio, video or image file that is mathematically based on the audio or visual content contained within.”
Plz Send Me The Code, a blog devoted to the study of commentary on blogs.
I’ve played cards in England
I’ve played cards in Spain
I’ll bet you ten dollars
I’ll beat you next game
— Clarence Ashley, Coo Coo Bird
How to use Zorn’s lemma, “At some point in the intervening years, I “got” Zorn’s lemma and now find it straightforward to see where it is needed. This article is intended to speed up that process for other people.”
UseitAmp, what if Jakob Nielsen designed a WinAmp skin. Classic.
1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + · · · is -1/2. (The linked paper on Cosmology is worth a read as well.)
Robot Faces of Argentna, Maggie Mason: “One of the very best things about Buenos Aires is the robots in the architecture. These are some photos I took while I was there because I wanted to show you guys the robots.”
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door “y’all remember to wipe your feet”
And then she said “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge”
“Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”
— Bobbie Gentry, Ode To Billie Joe
The Anthology of American Folk Music, was the brainchild of the avant-garde filmmaker, folklorist and anthropologist Harry Smith, the anthology comprised three boxed two-LP sets that contained 84 performances recorded between 1926 and 1933. Included were early black blues and white country music, Cajun recordings, hymns and sacred music, and more, thrown together under a loose framework that almost single-handedly redefined folk music. This is a must have.
Newport Folk Festival Live, NPR has streams of this year’s concerts of Jakob Dylan and others.
12aug2008
“Music to (Not) Code By”, a hardcore Mixwit.
CMUCL and SBCL, a commit chart comparison by Xach.
Church of God, Inflationist, “Using compressed air it takes only five minutes to inflate,” the Times reports, and it “comes complete with an altar, an apse and a confessional.”
Branchless Equivalents of Simple Functions, useful.
And with the horses prancin’ through the fields,
With my knife in my jeans and the rain on the shield,
I sang a song for the glory of the beauty of you,
Waitin’ for me in your dress of blue
— Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Till The End Of The World
2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting, slides and video is available.
Newsticker im neuen Design, wie man Heise.de wieder lesbar macht.
Teaching Programming Languages in a Post-Linnaean Age, by Shriram Krishnamurthi. “Programming language “paradigms” are a moribund and tedious legacy of a bygone age. Modern language designers pay them no respect, so why do our courses slavishly adhere to them? This paper argues that we should abandon this method of teaching languages, offers an alternative, reconciles an important split in programming language education, and describes a textbook that explores these matters.
Two Minutes to Wondermark #422, the creation of a web comic.
Make your own lock picks, “In this series, I’ll show you how to make a set of high-quality lock picks from stuff you either already have laying around the house, or materials that are easy to acquire for cheap.” Nice hobby.
Binaural beats or binaural tones are auditory processing artifacts, or apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli.
Imagination takes the shadows away
Everyday I’ve been without you
Imagination keeps the shadows away
Everday I stay without you
Too many times, without you
— Xymox, Imagination
Blue Screen of Death Strikes Bird’s Nest During Opening Ceremonies Torch Lighting, made my day.
Deafness and the User Experience, by Lisa Herrod at A List Apart. “When we look at accessible design for the deaf, it’s not surprising to see it addressed in a similar fashion: audio captioning is pretty much the equivalent of alt text on images for most designers.”
Putting Our Hot Heads Together, by Carolyn Wood at A List Apart. “How can we transform discussion sections on major sites and online magazines from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration?”
Programming Language Beauty: Look Closure, this is what happens when you try to shoehorn closures onto an object oriented runtime.
11aug2008
Hyperspaces for Object Clustering and Approximate Matching in Peer-to-Peer Overlays, by Bernard Wong, Ýmir Vigfússon, and Emin Gün Sirer. “In this paper, we present a scalable and efficient peer-to-peer system with a new search primitive that can efficiently find the k data items with keys closest to the search key.”
GWEI: Google Will Eat Itself, “We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it!” WJW.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes have come
With your chrome heart shining in the sun
Long may you run.
— Neil Young, Long May You Run
WaveScope is a system for developing distributed, high-rate applications that need to process streams of data from various sources (e.g., sensors) using a combination of signal processing and database (event stream processing) operations. The execution environment for these applications ranges from embedded sensor nodes to multicore/multiprocessor servers.
Beautiful Code, Compelling Evidence (PDF), functional programming for information visualization and visual analytics. By J. R. Heard. Really nice.
Passing the Torch: An Evolution of Form, the Olympic torch from 1936 to the present day.
Mindfuck: The Reverse State Monad, by Luke Palmer. Whew.
Why can’t you just hold me
And how come it is so hard
And do you like to see me broken
And why do I still care
— Maria Mena, Just Hold Me
Chandler 1.0 ships, mwahahahaha.
Orwell Diaries, a daily entry, starting in 1938.
10aug2008
Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 0, “A rational tangle is what you get when you take two initially separate lengths of rope and then allow them to interact while keeping the ends ‘at infinity’. You’re allowed to do whatever tangling you like with the proviso that you can’t pass the ends of the ropes through your tangle.”
Q&A: Slavoj Zizek, professor and writer, so honest it hurts. Must read.
Memories growing so distant with time
No longer do I even care
Still, when I wake up the screams in my head
Remind me of what I left there
— Kiuas, No More Sleep For Me
Darcs Workflow: Completely Distributed Pull-Only Workflow,
darcs get --intersect is awesome.
absurd-time-extensions on GitHub.
Design Matrix of 20th Century, by Eizo Okada and Kanji Oguro.
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! — Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Calculating Compilers (PDF), thesis by Henricus Johannes Maria Meijer. Uses Squiggol and kind of Attribute Grammars to specify compilation schemes. Worth a read!
Tangled Up In Tangled Up In Blue, by Eyolf Østrem. “This short essay was written as a commentary to a tape compilation of selected versions of Tangled Up in Blue, easily one of Dylan’s best songs.”
09aug2008
Chaos Computer Club offers help to victims of censorship in China.
Wow!, beach volleyball!
A fundraising survival guide, by Paul Graham.
The world is neither fair nor unfair
the idea is just a way for us to understand
no the world is neither fair nor unfair
so some survive
and others die
and you always want a reason why
— The Cure, Where The Birds Always Sing Lyrics
Under the Waves, photographs by Asako Narahashi.
Internet memes, a comprehensive time line.
$50 for Worse Brand Name Than Knol… We Have a Winner, heh.
Dead is the new alive
A gothic play revival
The last act of the show
Give in, give in, give in, give in
You play the game
You never win
— Emilie Autumn, Dead Is The New Alive
pTerm provides support for SSH, Telnet and raw TCP client connections from your iPhone.
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard writes about witnessing an eclipse in Washington’s Yakima valley in 1979.
08aug2008
The Tombs of Asciiroth is a free, open source game you can play right now in your browser. It has arcade, puzzle and exploration-style game play in an extensive world of font-based abstraction.
Is Wikipedia saturated? Yep! Last year, should make you think.
TicGit is a simple ticketing system, roughly similar to the Lighthouse model, that is based in git. It provides a command line client that uses the ‘git’ gem to keep it’s ticketing information in a separate branch (called ‘ticgit’) within your existing git repository.
Telemegaphone Dale stands seven metres tall on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. When you dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number the sound of your voice is projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.
This work ‘as-is’ we provide.
No warranty express or implied.
We’ve done our best,
to debug and test.
Liability for damages denied.
Permission is granted hereby,
to copy, share, and modify.
Use as is fit,
free or for profit.
These rights, on this notice, rely.
— Alexander E Genaud, Poetic License
The 100 Most Common English Words, only found 37.
Pydocweb is a tool for collaboratively editing docstrings in a Python module via the web, and merging changes made easily back to the sources.
Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library. Looks cool and nicely works with jQuery.
When you think that you’ll survive
Just don’t try
Run and hide
My eyes are hollow like my soul
— Emilie Autumn, Hollow Like My Soul
Das unkaputtbare Schwimmbad, “Die Pekinger Olympia-Schwimmhalle könnte man auf die Seite kippen und sie würde nicht zusammenstürzen. Sagen die Ingenieure. Hintergrund ist die Geometrie des Schaums.”
The “Endless Accident Events” of Los Angeles, “Artist Luther Thie’s proposed project LA Interchange would install a “gigantic public water fountain” at the intersection of L.A.’s Harbor and Santa Monica Freeways – and then use the fountain’s water supply as a way to graph traffic accidents and fatalities occurring on highways throughout the greater L.A. area.”
Taming $RUBYLIB with the Z shell, a nice trick by me.
07aug2008
lsaquo, this website brought to you by the quo network. Great.
This Week in HTML 5 – Episode 1, by Mark Pilgrim. “Welcome to a new semi-regular column, “This Week in HTML 5,” where I’ll try to summarize the major activity in the ongoing standards process in the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group.” (But seriously, these “{}”-semantics seem to be abuse of a markup language.)
It’s a dream
Only a dream
And it’s fading now
Fading away
It’s only a dream
Just a memory without anywhere to stay
— Neil Young, It’s A Dream
The Ampersand, “This blog is an attempt to give this humble character the respect it deserves.”
Modularer Schrank, von Richard Pink. “Der Schrank ist modular in zwei Bedeutungen. Erstens stammt das zugrundeliegende mathematische Muster aus dem Gebiet der Modulformen; die Symmetriegruppe des Musters heisst die Modulgruppe. Zweitens ist der Schrank auch im technischen Sinne modular aufgebaut: man kann ihn auseinandernehmen und jede kleinere Zahl von vertikalen Elementen alleine aufbauen.”
Dann denk ich mal was anderes
als immer nur an dich,
denn das viele an dich denken
bekommt mir nicht.
— 2raumwohnung, Wir trafen uns in einem Garten
Unusual gas masks, cool.
Sexual Healing x4, a Muxtape. Without Phish!?
06aug2008
Tilings Encyclopedia, cool.
sliderule, this is the part of X11R3’s xcalc(1) utility that features a historic Slide Rule.
As your lips form the words that you won’t say
In the distance, your favorite song plays
I turn you over and look in your eyes
Promise you that this is forever or ‘til one of us dies
— She Wants Revenge, Written In Blood
Body-Mod: Elf Ears, WJW.
Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them. — John von Neumann
A Logical View of Effects (PDF), by Sungwoo Park and Robert Harper. Building on the judgmental formulation and the possible worlds interpretation of modal logic, we propose a logical analysis of effects based upon the view monads are not identified with effects.
cronolog is a simple filter program that reads log file entries from standard input and writes each entry to the output file specified by a filename template and the current date and time. When the expanded filename changes, the current file is closed and a new one opened.
The Secret Working Group, singing “The Day that Routers Died”.
I let out the freak
for all to see
And she won’t let you think that you’re
so much better than me
— Swollen Lyrics, Jack off Jill
GHC goes Git, and there was much rejoicing.
Shutdown of the LHC, by Kevin Black. “No, the paper suggested that future effects caused by the production of particles, such as the Higgs, could ripple backwards in time and prevent the LHC from ever operating.” The future is wild.
05aug2008
Warcarting, the hobo’s approach to wireless communications interception. WJW.
PURE is an Open Source JavaScript Template Engine for HTML. Truly unobtrusive, it leaves your HTML untouched. Pretty nice.
noit o’ mnain worb is a particle automaton which employs pressure as its main computational mechanism.
And everything is changing faster than I can describe
All I really know to do is grab the wheel and drive
I look for love
And some adventure
And I try not to let my own breathing scare me off the road
— Dan Bern, Black Tornado
Gujin is a PC boot loader which can analyze your partitions and filesystems. It finds the Linux kernel images available, as well as other bootable partitions (for *BSD, MS-DOS, Windows, etc.), files (*.kgz) and bootable disk images (*.bdi), and displays a graphical menu for selecting which system to boot.
Feedburner hack: how to get 2500 subscribers overnight, ridiculous.
Announcing the Self-Documenting Code Contest, by Laurie Cheers. “I will be accepting submissions all month, until Monday the 1st of September.”
Way-finding-system for the Eureka Tower Carpark, lovely.
ProjectCecily, an experimental ZoomingUserInterface for TiddlyWiki created by JeremyRuston.
answers to bizarre questions, by danah boyd. Featuring all about belly-button lint. Yikes, don’t click there.
I never see anything I like
I never like anything I see
I never see anything but me
I’d like to see you sometime
— Minuit, Except You
Debatten, die die Welt nicht braucht, “Muß der ‘wahre’ Naturwissenschaftler Kaffee-Trinker sein?”
Some Blog Updates, Charles Miller goes minimalist. “The result was that maintaining my blog became a chore. A lot of things I could have said with just a link, a quote and a (hopefully) pithy comment were never said, or worse were stretched into posts too long to sustain their source material.”
Immigration, health care, corporate malfeasance, and too many attorneys, by sudogeek. “This story has got it all. The executive summary: An illegal alien is involved in an auto accident with a severe injury requiring over two years of hospitalization. After he has somewhat recovered, he is shipped back to Guatemala where he now languishes in a small village with no income or health care.”
04aug2008
TopGit aims to make handling of large amount of interdependent topic branches easier. In fact, it is designed especially for the case when you maintain a queue of third-party patches on top of another (perhaps Git-controlled) project and want to easily organize, maintain and submit them. TopGit achieves that by keeping a separate topic branch for each patch and providing few tools to maintain the branches.
A course of pure mathematics, by G.H. Hardy. Full text scans.
Can’t you see me?
I am your long lost best friend.
Please believe me.
All these things have happened.
— Rasputina, Our Lies
The Monad.Reader Issue 10 (PDF), by Matthew Naylor and Bernie Pope. Featuring the GHCi debugger and a Haskell-in-Haskell using combinators.
Git and rietveld, we need more Git code review tools!
Wake n’ Bacon, WJW.
It all began so easy, with you on the floor
Against your willing flanks and knocking down your door
Until the day it crumbled, no game of win and lose
You told me nothing, you left me confused
— Clan of Xymox, Jasmine and Rose
Mixin’ Up the ML Module System, by Derek Dreyer and Andreas Rossberg. “A MixML module is like an ML structure in which some of the components are specified but not defined. In other words, it unifies the ML structure and signature languages into one. MixML seamlessly integrates hierarchical composition, translucent ML-style data abstraction, and mixin-style recursive linking. Moreover, the design of MixML is clean and minimalist; it emphasizes how all the salient, semantically interesting features of the ML module system (as well as several proposed extensions to it) can be understood simply as stylized uses of a small set of orthogonal underlying constructs, with mixin composition playing a central role.” This could become an excellent foundation.
Not an Apple certified developer?, a Spanish explanation of how to sign code yourself. If it’s really that easy, big yay.
03aug2008
Circle squared, a display hack in Emacs.
Indexhibit is a web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound. A lightweight CMS for artists.
Prawn 0.1.0 is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term goal of providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer.
Esotika Erotica Psychotica, a blog on Sex, Art, Horror and Experimentation in world film. PNSFW.
Oh, I’d follow you to the river, that washes out to the sea
Through the wind, through the rain of a cold dark night
That’s where I’ll be
— Tom Waits, Widow’s Grove
Hopf Algebra = Group + Monad, “I want to apply this monad to talk about Hopf algebras. In particular I want to address the issue of why Hopf algebras and groups are actually the same thing.”
Safecracking for the computer scientist (PDF), by Matt Blaze.
Tetris 1D, WJW.
Treaps in Scheme, by Oleg.
We always run our heads too much
We know the reason, but such and such
On your own,
You will not let your arm go
— Beach House, Master Of None
The Vampire Squid, (Vampyroteuthis infernalis, lit. “vampire squid from hell”) is a small, deep-sea cirrate cephalopod found throughout the temperate and tropical oceans of the world. Awesome.
Night of January 16 is a play written by Ayn Rand, inspired by the death of the “Match King”, Ivar Kreuger. One particularly interesting feature of the play is that members of the audience are picked to take on the role of jury members each night. Depending on whether the “Jury” finds the defendant of the case, as in the play, “guilty” or “not guilty” – the play would have different endings.
02aug2008
Metadata journaling support added to FFS, NetBSD finally has journaling.
libebb is a lightweight HTTP server library for C. It lays the foundation for writing a web server by providing the socket juggling and request parsing. By implementing the HTTP/1.1 grammar provided in RFC2612, libebb understands most most valid HTTP/1.1 connections (persistent, pipelined, and chunked requests included) and rejects invalid or malicious requests. libebb supports SSL over HTTP.
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready, awesome shots.
I got static in my head
The reflected sound of everything
Tried to go to where it led
But it didn’t lead to anything
— Elliott Smith, Tomorrow Tomorrow
knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation, by danah boyd.
More on female characters in fiction, a worrying check list.
Functional Java is an open source library that aims to prepare the Java programming language for the inclusion of closures.
libFirm is a library that provides an intermediate representation and optimisations for compilers. Programs are represented in a graph based SSA form. Also has a C frontend..
Und die Welt dreht in ihren Fugen, bringt sich um
Und ihr glaubt, ihr seid nur Zuschauer,
und ihr klatscht oder bleibt stumm
Und ihr glaubt, ihr seid nur Zuschauer,
und ihr klatscht oder bleibt stumm
— Früchte Des Zorns, Die Welt Dreht In Ihren Fugen
nmdb is a simple and fast cache and database for controlled networks. It allows applications in the network to use a centralized, shared cache and database in a very easy way. It stores (key, value) pairs, with each key having only one associated value. At the moment, it supports the TIPC, TCP, UDP and SCTP protocols.
Garfield Lost in Translation, all cartoons are automatically translated from English to Chinese and back using Yahoo or Google. (Garfield mashups are the new black.)
01aug2008
Long-running averages, without the sum of preceding values, classic trick that is good to know.
levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver. levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. WJW.
Zzyzx Road is a 4.5 mile / 7.2 km long, part paved and part dirt, rural collector road in the Mojave Desert. It runs from Interstate 15 generally south to the Zzyzx settlement.
True love will find you in the end
You’ll find out just who was your friend
Don’t be sad, I know you will,
But don’t give up until
True love finds you in the end.
— Daniel Johnson, True Love Will Find You In The End
True Love x5, plain beautiful muxtape.
A Personal History of APL, by Micheal S. Montalbano.
Interpreting types as abstract values, by Oleg Kiselyov and Chung-chieh Shan.
Delicious is gone! Long live Delicious!, “Delicious, in its former state, was a huge Perl application on top of Apache and MySQL. Since then, its been completely recreated in a tiered system with quite a bit of PHP and c++ with Erlang sprinkled around in various places.” Nice, and now make visited links stand out more, please.
Pointfree Calculator, Ulisses Costa explains how to do it.
The Rubyist is a technical magazine focused on Ruby, Rails, Merb, and anything else that surrounds the programming language that we all know and love.
Don’t Forget About Rubyforge, though I have to admit that pushing a tag is very close to my ideal release effort. ;-)
Do you cry out in your sleep
All my failings expose?
Get a taste in my mouth
As desperation takes hold
Is it something so good
Just can’t function no more?
When love, love will tear us apart again
— Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart
Love Will Tear Us Apart x7, at muxtape.
Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield, awesome.
Conspire is a real-time collaborative editing platform using Git as a transport layer.
Spiral Jetty, earthwork by Robert Smithson.
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