Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31may2006
Slashdot Redesign, yuck. This may be the reason to finally stop reading it. (IMO, the runner-up is far better.)
The Treacherous Optimization, or why grep is fast.
UML Diagrams Using Graphviz Dot, looks pretty good.
Paul Anka sings Smells Like Teen Spirit (MP3). WJW.
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. — Alan Perlis
Simple ain’t Easy: Myths and Misunderstandings about Simplicity, by Brad Appleton. Very good points, with links and quotes.
Fuckweb2.com, protest 2.0?
Lack, Tom Hanks is a wise man.
Refactoring Everything, Day 25, by chromatic. “Today’s task is fixing the NodeBase tests.”
Disrule! special character entities without DTDs, by Rick Jelliffe. Keeping DTDs was the biggest mistake of XML.
The whole world’s a bottle,
And life’s but a dram,
When the bottle gets empty,
It sure aint worth a damn.
— Bob Dylan, Moonshiner
resonator.bldg, really big inflatable speakers. Cool.
All right, I’ll take a chance, I will fall in love with you
If I’m a fool you can have the night, you can have the morning too.
Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow,
Do you understand my pain?
Are you willing to risk it all
Or is your love in vain?
— Bob Dylan, Is your love in vain?
The Celtic Wench, by terryfunk. PNSFW. “Which dream?” — “Oh, it’s the one where I am giving my cousin a blow job, you know…when I was six-years-old.”
The Pitfalls of Bridge Climbing, by pr1mu5. “And with our replies, our first bridge climbing trek sprung from a missed dose of lithium.”
A Visit to The Hitler Bar, a very, um, creative theme for a bar indeed. “After protests from near and far, the owners of the bar first renamed it to ‘Ditler’ and then to ‘Ceasar’.”
30may2006
Firefox for Emacs users, Bill Clementson on Conkeror (an evil beast :P).
(Not) Managing Software Developers, by Steve Yegge. Must read, as usual.
Cat is a stack based functional language by Christopher Diggins, inspired by the Joy programming language Like Joy, Cat is a cross between Forth and the FP language. Nice if you are into concatenative languages.
With a long-distance look
Her eyes was on fire
But the song it was long
And there was more to be sung.
— Bob Dylan, Eternal Circle
Fantazy Land, “The Worst Theme Park in the World?” Amusing.
It Will Get Better (A Series of Agile Development , System Administration, And Company Culture Change On A Small Team) Article 1 of N, by Zach Dennis. The start of an interesting series of posts.
Ice Lens Photography, wonderful shots by Matthew Wheeler.
rcov 0.5.0: cross-referenced reports (code coverage and callsite info), RubyGems, Rant support, improved heuristics, great work, Mauricio.
Own your data: ad-hoc representations, by Ned Batchelder. “Rather than adopting (or worse, adapting) a standard to fit your purposes, you should create your own data representation. It will give you the best fit for the problem at hand.” Often, but not always, a good idea.
GHC-MacIntel port, seems to be freaking fast.
Rooms of algebraic theology, whoo. “The supercomputers I’m showing here are powerful almost beyond human understanding”.
What’s Missing in Web 2.0?, Gabor Cselle wonders. In the end, offline access and encrypted, searchable storage.
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
— Bob Dylan, I Shall Be Released
“Reclaim the Hardware Design Space!” is a breakout group on the 3rd European Lisp Workshop about creating hardware that is suited to dynamic programming languages in general, and LISP in particular. Just cool.
EasyChem is a program designed to draw chemical molecules, written under Linux and using Gtk+ 2. (Note that double-bounds are not WYSIWYG, they will be outputted nicely.)
Embeddable RDF, how a subset of RDF can be embedded into XHTML or HTML by using common idioms and attributes. Definitely a hack, but not too bad.
Necrocard, do you support sexual liberation too? PNSFW.
29may2006
No flowers on graves, a Memorial Day Tribute I can’t resist to spread.
Abstract Algebra, an easy introduction by Joe Mileti.
Going to Google, Douglas Bowman now works for them too.
A Non-Programmer’s Apology, by Aaron Swartz. “When I go to programmer conferences, I’d rather skip out and talk politics than programming. And writing code, although it can be enjoyable, is hardly something I want to spend my life doing.” I notice that too for myself, but it’s not that bad yet.
Absolutely unchanged compiler responses, from a make of umoria 5.4 on an Apollo… Funny.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh’s tribe,
They’ll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.
— Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In
SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL. With regards to ORM, somehow Python is better off than Ruby.
DTrace for FreeBSD, now that’s a fantastic tool to have.
UCSD PASCAL-Version I.5, enjoy. As far as I can tell, this is was the first VM ever.
Ruby Series (“A”..”Z”), featuring a proper LetterSeries class.
Taxbird ist die erste ELSTER-Client-Software, die als freie Software unter der GNU GPL durch Jürgen Stuber und Stefan Siegl mit freundlicher Unterstützung der G-N-U GmbH entwickelt wurde bzw. nach wie vor wird.
Portable Perl, Erica Sadun proves C is more portable than Perl. Or something like that. :-P (Why doesn’t she use a pure-Perl XML parser?)
Htpasswd Plugin for Rails. Hmm, I could use that in the future.
Take 42: vget, nice structure.
You changed my life
Came along in a time of strife
In hunger and need
You made my heart bleed
You changed my life
You changed my life
— Bob Dylan, You Changed My Life
Scripting the wmii-3 window manager with Ruby, Mauricio does it again. :-) (By the way, I’m the one to show him wmii in first place…) Great stuff.
Adventures with an ice pick, a short history of lobotomy. WJW. Don’t read after eating.
28may2006
Taxicab Number, The n-th taxicab number T(n) is the smallest number representable in n ways as a sum of positive cubes.
The first Perl 6 bounty challenge!, write a Wiki and get $1000. Sounds good.
Irrepressible, The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments—with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world—are cracking down on freedom of expression.
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
— Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
Hashapass automatically generates strong passwords from a master password and a parameter. I’ve been using a similar scheme for years.
Ruse Individual Page Feeds, every Wiki should have that.
Text and Collaboration, Part I, by lsanger. “The best, future methods of collaboration online will combine the openness of projects like Wikipedia with expert oversight. I favor open meritocracies.”
Open XML at ISO sideshow, by Rick Jelliffe. My stuff is safe in XHTML.
Summer of Code Project Blogging, by Gabriele Renzi.
Glimmering Road, Ilmari Heikkinen’s Summer of Code blog.
Multi-Cursor window manager is a modified Unix window manager which provides multiple cursors. This allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with a Unix desktop environment.
Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, by Henry Bursill. “A series of novel and amusing figures formed by the hand.”
Well I need a woman, yes I do
Need a woman, yes I do.
Someone who can see me as I am,
Somebody who just don’t give a damn.
And I want you to be that woman every night,
Be that woman.
— Bob Dylan, Need A Woman
Terminal Zen is a feeling of life. In 9 times of 10, when I have to sit down at a Windows box, I open a shell.
27may2006
Musician Jokes, lovely! A young child says to his mother, “Mom, when I grow up I’d like to be a musician.” She replies, “Well honey, you know you can’t do both.”
Unwise microwave oven experiments, High Voltage in the Kitchen.
Hierarchy of Smalltalk Classes, in case you are not alreaddy confused about the Ruby hierarchy.
Lay down your weary tune, lay down,
Lay down the song you strum,
And rest yourself ‘neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.
— Bob Dylan, Lay Down Your Weary Tune
Refactoring Everything, Day 24, by chromatic. Today: “The Great Database Reshuffling”.
Montezuma Heat Death, how canned air improves your benchmarks.
To Hell with WCAG 2, by Joe Clark for A List Apart. Eww eww eww.
Praised be I, writing. Dead already and dead again. — Jack Kerouac
World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web, by Molly E. Holzschlag for A List Apart. “Seriously, we know by now how structure gives us something to hang our proverbial hats on.” Very good points.
Community Creators, Secure Your Code! Part II, by Niklas Bivald for A List Apart. Happy cross-site scripting.
New ruby-lang.org, it’s not official yet, but very promising. Great to see work getting done!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
— Dylan Thomas, Lament
Google Commissions Ten Ruby Libs, _why had a look at the Summer of Code project list.
STREST (Service-Trampled REST) Will Break Web 2.0, RPC will never die.
Space is the machine, Super-Kamiokande, a “particle observatory” in Japan—really a 12.5 million-gallon room filled with “glass photomultiplier tubes.”
Defining the Reals without Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences.
26may2006
Codekunst, Fefe schreibt: “Bei meinen Recherchen zum Literarischen Codequartett kam mir der Gedanke, Stilbezeichnungen aus der Malerei oder der Architektur auf Code anzuwenden.”
America, by Allen Ginsberg. “America why are your libraries full of tears?”
The 3rd European Lisp Workshop will take place on July 3 in Nantes, Frances—co-located with ECOOP 2006.
Well, who’s goin’ to kiss your ruby lips,
And who’s goin’ to hold you to his breast?
And who will talk your future over
While I’m out ramblin’ in the West?
— Woody Guthrie, Hard, Ain’t It Hard
Really Moving Mount Fuji, “It would seem that people are looking for the answer, rather than looking for a review of the book. So I decided to answer the question!”
How To Be Silicon Valley, by Paul Graham. “Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it?”
Building a Self-Healing Network, by Greg Retkowski. Why not just build one that can’t break? ;-)
The Da Vinci Code, a review by Anthony Lane. Read that, I found it pretty true.
MacBook Pro Disassembly, pictures by James Duncan Davidson.
Unix Magic Poster (JPEG). Nice one.
At midnight in a flaming angry town
I saw my country’s flag lying torn upon the ground.
I ran in and dodged among the crowd,
And scooped it up, and scampered out to safety.
— Pete Seeger, Torn Flag
BOINC is an open-source software platform for volunteer computing. You can participate in several projects, ensuring that your computer will be kept busy even when one project has no work.
First impressions of Open XML, by Rick Jelliffe. “4081 pages of PDF, and very impressive for anyone who has worked on specification and standards.” There is no way to justify 4081 pages, really.
CouchDb wiki at Infogami. Lovely slogan: “CouchDb - Like OuchDb, but with a C.” ;-) Looking forward to see it.
“Camping,” Said the Blogs, I guess I should try it someday too.
Ruby Summer of Code 2006 Projects, as you can see, my name is not there. Ah well. Good luck to all participants.
Summer of Code 2006 Projects accepted by the Perl Foundation. Pretty ambitious stuff.
25may2006
Today is Towel-Day, ” A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have.”
Towel Animals, fun stuff on Flickr. ;-)
Software ideals and history, slides by Stroustrup and Aggies.
The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time, by Richard Stallman. “Sun’s Java implementation remains proprietary software, just as before.” He’s right, making proprietary software easier to redistribute is of no use.
Advanced XML validation, validate complex constraints in XML documents using XSLT and Java extensions. By Peter Heneback.
Python Education—Guido van Robot, by Jeremy Jones. Tumbleworthy alone of the title.
Baby, I can’t stay
You got to roll me
And call me the tumbling dice
— The Rolling Stones, Tumbling Dice
Passing parameters, by Dan Sugalski. As usual, everything is not as easy as it seems.
What I hate about my favorite television show, by Rasman. Bah, 24.
Desperate Petunia, how nice a lovely warn notebook is.
Extratextually Terrestial, “Given a certain acquaintance with the Metaphysics of Spirals, it is possible to represent a landscape using one single continuous line…”
Misunderstanding Foreign Keys, by Curtis Poe. “What this all boils down to is a simple rule of thumb: keep your data validation close to your data. It’s easier to maintain and is more likely to be correct.”
Hitch hitch hike baby
Across the floor
I can’t stand it no more
Now come on baby
Now get into your slide
Just ride ride ride
Little pony, ride!
— The Rolling Stones Harlem Shuffle
Befriend a F/LOSS Project on MySpace, how lame. :-P
Exceptional Objects in maths. “What frequently happens is that objects of a certain type are classified into a bunch of series with a handful of exceptional objects left over.”
biergarten statt friergarten, Lydia hat auch geniale Post-Its.
A general theory of markup: attack of the fuzzies, by Rick Jelliffe. Probably the reason many abuse XML and notice it too late, tho.
Refactoring Everything, Day 20, 21, 22, 23, by chromatic. After porting all tests, the real fun starts: Untangling the Database Code.
Ruby Blog.de ist ein deutsches Weblog über Ruby, on Rails und das Web.
24may2006
Bob Dylan turns 65 today. Happy Birthday, Robert Allen Zimmerman!
Cork’d, the simple way to review and share wine. Cork’d is making life easier for wine aficionados.
Circuit Design With Quartz Composer, what data-flow modeling can be good for. Very cool.
Pearl Jam’s “Life Wasted” video released under a CC license, enjoy.
Acme SAC aims to package a version of Acme written for the Inferno operating system as a stand alone editor for multiple platforms to compete against other popular editors: emacs, vim, and jedit. Nifty.
Now they asked me to read a poem
At the sorority sister’s home
I got knocked down and my head was swimmin’
I wound up with the Dean of Women
Yippee! I’m a poet, and I know it.
Hope I don’t blow it.
— Bob Dylan, I Shall Be Free No. 10
Seattle anti-DRM flashmob, by DefectiveByDesign.org.
Instalinux, The System Designer allows you to design a Linux system profile which can be downloaded onto a single network install image.
The Good Girl is the classic “pizza guy” porn flick revisited by Erika Lust, an indy porn director who added humour, passion and a female perspective to this porn cliche. NSFW, first Creative-Commons(!) pr0n known to me.
Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, Maggie Mason reports.
Saying bye to dynamism, and hello to some ground rules, Dan Sugalski makes Tornado more static—very reasonable choices for array processing.
Escape from Fort Carson, by Psycho Dave. “So there I was, sitting on a sidewalk in the residential section of Fort Carson with my hands cuffed behind my back, getting dirt on the seat of my black trench coat.”
Emacs Versor: Versatile Cursors, very interesting idea, I wonder how long it takes to get used to it.
Pigeon-brained birds can think in logarithms, can’t you, too?
Boompa.com Launch Postmortem, Part 1: Research, Picking a Team, Office Space and Money (Internet), “This is a story about how 2 enterprising web developers quit their jobs at CNET Networks and built an enterprise level community driven site (boompa.com) complete with all the modern “web 2.0” bells and whistles in almost exactly two months on the smallest possible budget with open source software.”
Montezuma Charges Along, John Wiseman’s Lucene port progresses.
Google Web Toolkit is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML. Whoa.
Server side Javascript, by Chris Double. Reminds me of the idea of having a webserver running in the browser to simplify AJAX.
Orca is a REBOL-like interpreter which can be used under the terms of either the GPL or LGPL.
EasyExtend is a constructive approach to extend the Python language using pure Python.
Quick miniKanren-like code, written at the meeting of a Functional Programming Group. A daily bit of Scheme.
The Wisdom of Rob Pardo, Lead Designer of WoW.
Pattern Matching, S-Expressions, and DSLs in Ruby by Topher Cyll for Ruby Code & Style. Nice and advanced use of Ruby.
Backyard Hotrodding C++, by Walter Bright. And I’d still take C for the fast and something far higher-level for the speed-doesn’t-matter things. Evilish tricks, though.
alles wird gut, Computer machen doch Spass, gell.
Our First Spam on Ruse, I really hope they now have a reasonable solution against spam.
Direct Shipping Record, PragDave on shipping a complete pragmatic stack.
Zed Goes Off About Mongrel, and explains why a real HTTP parser is a must-have.
Less method_missing in Markaby, which means Markaby can validate as you go.
Closures; an Italian Sonnet, WJW.
rcov 0.4.0: more accurate code coverage scriptability, unrotten internals, another featureful release.
Darcs 1.0.7 is released and got some new features. I guess it’s time to update.
The politics of presentation software, by Jon Udell. “I’ll argue that it’s democratic, not elitist, to believe that presentations ought to be first-class citizens of the web, viewable by any standards-based browser with full interactive fidelity.”
Ongoing Continuations, Avi Bryant on REST and RESTlessness. I tend to disagree…
Rails Day 2006 takes place on June 17th.
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.
— Bob Dylan, My Back Pages
“Idiotic Ruby”.sub( /ot/, ‘omat’), a talk by Toby DiPasquale.
GemJack provides complete Ruby Gem Documentation online.
Two Kinds of Mathematics, “It seems to me that mathematical theorems are either structural theorems or content.”
Ring-structure and the vortex, this just looks lovely.
Tracking Ants, an awesome idea.
Formalizing 100 Theorems, “there exists a “top 100” of mathematical theorems on the web, which is a rather arbitrary list (and most of the theorems seem rather elementary), but still is nice to look at.” They already did 76%. (And HOL is a great prover…)
Absolute Superlinearity, “the longest building I have ever seen.”
The moon landings were faked!, Heroic images or NASA fraud? Just what happened on the moon? At last we have the conclusive proof!
xxl, muahahaha.
tumbleicio.us features reviews, how-to’s, and more—all on tumblelogs. Also offers tumblelog hosting.
Solr is a search server based on Apache Lucene and focused on full-text search, relevancy, and performance.
Stick it in Your ~/.irbrc: MethodFinder, a class for looking up methods based on what they should return.
Tabblo, the next generation of photosharing online. “Start with professionally designed templates and powerful editing tools to compose online photo albums, or tabblos.”
Not your parents’ shell, musing about the Scheme shell. Also mentions Commander S.
Monads Without Types, “The moral is, starting from next to nothing you get a lot more bang for your buck with functional programming.”
16may2006
Off to Berlin: chris blogs and Anarchaia will resume publishing Wednesday, May 24.
DRb Renaissance, a library often forgot about.
Kleiner Katechismus des katholischen Glaubens, aber: “Man kann nicht weitergeben, was man nicht besitzt.”
Dialektik des Dekolletés, Zwischen dem Busenattentat auf Adorno und Marcuses Beharren auf nackter Wahrheit: Marvin Chlada zur kritischen Theorie der Oberweite. Köstlich.
Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Pankow
ich muß mal eben dahin, mal eben nach Ost-Berlin
ich muß da was klären, mit eurem Oberindianer
ich bin ein Jodeltalent, und ich will da spielen mit ‘ner Band
— Udo Lindenberg, Sonderzug Nach Pankow
ikiwiki is a wiki compiler. It converts a directory full of wiki pages into html pages suitable for publishing on a website. Unlike a traditional wiki, ikiwiki does not have its own means of storing page history or its own markup language. Instead it uses Subversion and MarkDown.
Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate: Part II, “Looks like it is microkernel debate time again.”
Geek vs Nerd, “the terms nerd and geek used to be abusive terms used to insult these certain types of people. But nowadays it is more like an achievement of some kind. Hmm.”
If you need a shoulder
Or if you need a friend
I’ll be here standing
Until the bitter end
— Guns N’ Roses, Rocket Queen
Introducing the all-new MacBook, I’m highly sceptical of a “glossy widescreen display”… the black encosure somehow is nice, though.
YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo Videos are online!, just watching Audrey Tang doing her Haskell speech. Matz’s talk is online too.
Refactoring Everything, Day 19, by chromatic. “Day 19: Nodeball and Themesetting”
spiegelegeips, Lydia, wie wäre es blind zu sein?
If You’re Too Small For a Normal Doorway, you need mouse-hole.
The Autobiography Project, the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary and One Book, One Philadelphia (a project of the Mayor’s Office and the Free Library of Philadelphia) invite you to submit a memoir of your own, using no more than 300 words. All submissions are due by May 17, 2006.
Wormholes in Wood on BLDG BLOG. “The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverized wood.”
Programming Language Trends via Google, Java sags and PHP stagnates—nothing new.
Maté, you can’t say Maggie Mason likes it.
Mighty Magic Tricks, impress your friends.
15may2006
Evolution of Parallel Cellular Machines: The Cellular Programming Approach, by Moshe Sipper. PDF available.
I find new heart each time
I think upon that windy day
And if one day she comes to you
Drink deeply from her words so wise
— Uriah Heep, Lady In Black
SHSQL is a standalone SQL database that stores data in ascii text files. It has a small memory footprint and code size and can be embedded directly into applications–there is no server process.
How to Pirate a Vinyl Record, now try that with a CD. ;-)
Not quite a SuperStruct, maybe a SuperClass?, automatic attributes and initialization by Mauricio Fernandez.
Oh yeah
Ooh
Please don’t strip my mind
Leave something behind
Please don’t strip my mind
— Red Hot Chili, Peppers Strip My Mind
Linspire/Freespire Core OS Team and Haskell, “We are redoing a bunch of our infrastructure using Haskell as our common standard language. Our first task is redoing our Debian package builder (aka autobuilder) in Haskell.”
Dear Microsoft, Thank You For the XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest Object, DHTML, and For Letting Us All Use Them And/Or Build Our Own Without Requiring That We Pay You Even A Dime by M. David Peterson. Shudder.
What did you want to bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for? — Paul Halmos on Mathematical Writing
Emacs Est Mort, Vive Le TextMate!, by Joshua Scott Emmons. Not for me. I’d switch to Vim before I go TextMate, and that won’t happen anytime soon.
How to use everyday mindfulness to make life more enjoyable. “An upset person is no longer sane. The problem is, when someone is upset with you, you become upset, don’t you? And therefore not very sane yourself.”
An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations (PDF) by Eugene W. Myers. Git recently uses that algorithm.
a framework for your back button, all these JavaScript hacks…
The Minsky Machine, explained by Mark Chu-Carroll. He also has an implementation.
libgarbagecollector is an incremental tricolor tracing collector using a Baker Treadmill. Written by Steve Dekorte.
14may2006
LIBRA: A Lazy Interpreter of Binary Relational Algebra, by Barry Dwyer.
Tiny Eyes, ever wondered how your baby sees the world—or how they see you?
Gatlin sets 100m world record, Olympic champion Justin Gatlin broke the 100-meter world record Friday with a time of 9.76 seconds at the Qatar Grand Prix.
American Mathematical Society Books Online, by Subject Classification. Among them “A Century of Mathematics in America”, parts 1 to 3.
Egyptian Fractions, Mark Dominus explains: “The Egyptians, at least at that time, did not have a generalized fraction notation. They would write fractions of the form 1/n, and they could write sums of these. But convention dictated that they could not use the same unit fraction more than once.”
Knock to world
Right off its feet and straight onto its head
Oopala, we’re lonely laughing after you are dead
Fascinated by the look of you and what was said
Make a play for all the brightest minds in life will share
— Red Hot Chili Peppers, She’s Only 18
Jailtime.org provides virtual filesystems for Xen. “Here you will find Linux distributions that can run as Xen guests out of the box, obviating the need to create your own custom filesystems. The filesystems on this site have already been tweaked to deal with Xen’s idiosyncracies, and are also designed to be lightweight and minimally divergent from the original distribution.”
The Wicked, “Think without the box”. Pretty difficult web puzzle.
Vista-Entwickler bekommen pro Bug 100 Dollar, und übermorgen: Microsoft meldet Chapter 11 an. ;-P
ViewVC is a browser interface for CVS and Subversion version control repositories. I wished it would support more.
Analysis of the Linux Random Number Generator (PDF), by Zvi Gutterman, Benny Pinkas and Tzachy Reinman.
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert’s Symphony Number 9. — Erwin Dieterich (via Jean-Claude Wippler)
Good Technical Blogs at Microsoft, a list by Rick Jelliffe. I personally like the Excel blog a lot.
Playing God, by Graham Glass. “This seems to include the act of creating new kinds of life that don’t currently exist on Earth, which in turn raises some interesting philosophical questions.”
It looks to me like heaven
Sent this for your roughest night
She looks to me
She looks to me all right
— Red Hot Chili Peppers, She Looks To Me
A Mars Supreme, beautifully stitched.
Building and Testing gcc/glibc cross toolchains, “I call my updated script and associated patches ‘crosstool’. It’s fairly easy to use and can be run unattended as part of an automatic build process, and should go a long way towards making it easier for the average developer to get started with gcc cross-compilers and help test new releases of gcc.”
13may2006
FLAIM is a FLexible Adaptable Information Management database engine for traditional as well as volatile and complex information. Even though FLAIM provides many traditional database features (e.g., transactions, recovery, reliability, scalability), it was conceived with a broader view toward the greater flexibility and adaptability that is offered by an XML data model.
Interviewing Web Developers, 20 Good Questions to Ask. Among them: “How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand?” Oh my.
Best One I Have Ever Seen, what a haircut. WJW.
ARC is a lightweight, SPARQL-enabled RDF system for mainstream Web projects. It is written in PHP and has been optimized for shared (or otherwise performance- or privilege-limited) Web environments.
Jumbo Lambda Calculus, by Paul Blain Levy. “To remedy this, we define a “jumbo lambda-calculus” that fuses the traditional connectives together into more general ones, so-called “jumbo connectives”. We provide two pieces of evidence for our thesis that the jumbo formulation is advantageous.”
Delia, oh Delia, how can it be?
You loved all them rounders, never did love me.
All the friends I ever had are gone.
— Bob Dylan, Delia
Distribution of processing, Dan Sugalski writes the first distributed VM ever?
Refactoring Everything, Day 18, by chromatic. “Today’s task is finish porting the nodegroup tests.”
Microtemplates are templates specified in plain HTML syntax that overload the CSS class attribute to indicate how to display data. Neat idea, would be cool for Ruby too.
xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Gotta love it, highly geeky.
RspecOnRails mashes Rails’ Test::Unit::TestCase fixture loading with RSpec.
And I’ll tell and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my songs well before I start singin’
— Bob Dylan, Hard Rain
Revitalize old web applications with server-side mashup techniques, by Rick Jelliffe. Or: how to move uglyness to the server? ;-)
Thought in case they’re listening, by Andrew Dupont. This is the American spirit. ;-)
The Tumblelist “now” features feeds. Great way to stay uptodate.
The total horizon, fantastic shots by Shintaro Sato.
12may2006
Google Trend: ruby rails, j2ee, *rubs-hands*
MIDAS: Multifunction In-Dorm Automation System, Featuring everything from web control, voice activation, and a security system, to large continuously running information displays, electric blinds, and one-touch parties, the custom designed MIDAS Automation System has brought ease to our lives (if one doesn’t count all the time it took to actually build and program the system).
Ships’ logs give clues to Earth’s magnetic decline, by Patrick Barry. “The field’s strength is now declining at a rate that suggests it could virtually disappear in about 2000 years.”
100 things you should know about DDT, by J. Gordon Edwards and Steven Milloy.
The 2006 University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt will be held from May 11 to May 14, 2006. Please note that this is the end of 7th Week, and not 6th Week as in years past. Scavhunt’s bond to Mother’s Day is stronger than our bond to the College calendar. Awesome list.
Sister has her headphones on
She hears the music blasting
She sees here brother marchin’ by
Their bond is everlasting
Listening to Bob Dylan singin’
In 1963
Watchin’ the flags of freedom flyin’
— Neil Young, Flags Of Freedom
Einheitslook im Klassenzimmer, by Thorsten Stegemann “Deutschland diskutiert über die einheitliche Schulkleidung.” Was bin ich froh, dass ich mir den Scheiß wohl nicht mehr antun muss.
Don’t quit your day job, Gillian Carson says. “Unless you are Google and you do have gazillions of dollars and just as many workers then you will have to build your web app ‘on the side’ and while you are doing other stuff.”
Positive Negative is a great photoblog by Frank Kolodziej.
CPAN Module Review: Data::Dump::Streamer, by chromatic.
Writing PostgreSQL Functions with PL/pgSQL, by David E. Wheeler. More fun doing that in Ruby.
Using PC-BSD, by Dru Lavigne. I’m still unclear about its target audience.
Life just kind of empties out
Less a deluge than a drought
Less a giant mushroom cloud
Than an unexploded shell
Inside a cell
Of the Lennox Hotel
— Aimee Mann, Little Bombs
Go Solo as a Fulltime Rails Developer, by Geoffrey Grosenbach. “Now that you have the basic skills required, it’s time to promote yourself. Write a useful library or plugin. Find a niche, do something unique, fill a need.”
El Circo Loco, “Two weeks ago El Circo Loco was found dead on the sidewalk a block from my apartment. It was saddening and shocking. He seemed unstoppable.” Sad, even if I never had heard of him.
Expressionism, or how Scheme is still cooler than C# 3.0.
11may2006
SimpleFold 0.4.0 and visual comparison of (vim) folding methods, Mauricio Fernandez is productive today. ;-)
Why XHTML Can Save Internet Explorer, by Kurt Cagle. “What this implies is that development of XHTML will necessitate the creation of an entirely new rendering module with the IE framework, one that is completely separated from the HTML renderer.” At least, there is hope.
Ebby is an implementation of the Obby protocol in Emacs Lisp. Obby is a free collaborative editing protocol supporting multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat.
Shangri-La Diet, by Ben Hyde. Highly interesting way to lose weight: “But for me I was particularly taken to see a diet based on such an extremely simple confident application of behaviorism.”
ftpsync, FTP sync or copy tool. Synchronize a remote arborescence from a local directory by using FTP.
SUSE Linux 10.1 is available for download now! Nice.
Debian packages release names, ever heard of “The “Lesbian Seagull” release.”?
I’m living with war in my heart
I’m living with war in my heart and my mind
I’m living with war right now
— Neil Young, Living With War
Don’t Panic, Harzigen Glühstrumpf, Jörg.
New ‘Anti-Abortion Pill’ Kills Mother, Leaves Fetus Alive, “Pfizer, manufacturer of UR-86—dubbed the “last-morning-ever pill”—said the drug is intended only for occasions when the mind-set or politics of the mother threaten the life of the fetus.” I love The Onion!
EvaluatingRuby by Ilias^WMartin Fowler. *scnr* “But overall I’m increasingly positive about using Ruby for serious work where speed, responsiveness, and productivity are important.”
Silence Becomes You, directed by Stephanie Sinclaire. It sounded really good, but: “Unfortunately for ‘Silence Becomes You’ any negative comments are overwhelmingly justified!”
Ubuntu Dapper Flight 7 Mini-Review, by Jeremy Jones. Great news: “For the first time ever, both the installed suspend and hibernate routines work with my laptop.”
Metrics for XML Projects #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, by Rick Jelliffe. What about “counting useless angle brackets”? ;-)
My life as a manga hero, by Rick Jelliffe. I love the web…
Intent is a Ruby library for expressing ‘tests’ in terms of Intents that can be checked for consistency. API rather similar to RSpec.
The Foo who fell from fame, by eavier. “The interesting news is that UFO Evidence reports that public opinion polls from the last 50 years, and from multiple different countries, report that 50% of the population still believes in the reality of UFOs; and 5% of the population has seen one.”
Book Review: C in a Nutshell, reviewed by Ed Schaefer. “If you are looking for a general reference covering the standard “C” library and C99, then this text is your new best friend.”
How to Love a Framework You’ve Never Used, by Curtis Poe. Also stabs COBOL.
ODF: Never Mind … We Have the Plugin, by Kurt Cagle. “What this means is that anyone using any supported and most legacy versions of Office will be able shortly to work with ODF documents in Office, will be able to save out to ODF and will be able to accurately see any ODF content in the same way that they could via Open Office 2.0.” Yay.
ExplorerCanvas: Interactive Web Apps, by Dave Hoover. “I will demonstrate how to handle user input to allow your canvas applications to reach the next level of interactivity.” If it’s fast and portable, likely to be the next big thing.
The three dimensions of proofs, “We prove that the free 3-category generated by this 3-polygraph describes the proofs of classical propositional logic modulo structural bureaucracy.” Aha.
Refactoring Everything, Day 17, by chromatic. “Today’s task is to continue porting the nodegroup tests. This is a great way to test the inheritance of test methods.”
[sangría], Lydia war auf Gran Canaria und hat Geschichten und Bilder mitgebracht.
Bonnie’s Bookstore, by Joel Reymont. “I’m three weeks away from 32, have been writing code since 16, and yet I feel like I have not done anything exciting.”
The 8 phases of goatse, safe for work.
Long-term backup, Mark Pilgrim got a problem we’ll all have pretty soon too: “How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years?”
Triads of bidding, by Cameron Moll. “Recognize how budget, scope, and timeline determine your level of interest in taking on a project.”
Mercurial v0.9 released!, IMO the most promising version control system today.
Writing a pure functional lazy call-by-name compiler, reminds me a bit of the 90-minute Scheme compiler.
RE: mapping the planet, BLDG BLOG has maps of the number of aircraft passengers, container ports, refugee origin, net immigration, expected population and toy import/export.
The organ bank and the bubble, David Blaine is an idiot. :-P But it looks cool, indeed.
Now the only thing a gambler needs
Is a suitcase and trunk
And the only time he’s satisfied
Is when he’s on a drunk
— The Animals, House Of The Rising Sun
Rethinking the Benchmark module, Mauricio Fernandez wrote a statistically more senseful Benchmark module.
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… on the RubyGarden wiki and what can be done against it. By Jim Weirich. Good ideas and nice implementation.
The Least Surprised #12: The Matzster of My Domain, “DSLs are off the hook, people!”
Google Trends, see what the world is searching for. Could be nice for the Futurometer, too…
Announcing RailsConf Europe, Ruby Central and Skills Matter are pleased to announce the First European Rails Conference. The conference will be held in London on September 14-15, 2006.
More on building a rocket ship, by Andy Hunt. “As much as we complain about software projects that go bad, at least we generally don’t end up in charred ruins at the bottom of the lake.”
Front Deutscher Äpfel, Nationale Initiative gegen die Überfremdung des deutschen Obstbestandes und gegen faul herumlungerndes Fallobst. Tolle Idee.
Flood Maps, let the sea level raise! (I feel pretty safe.)
Cylinder Mirror Optical Illusion, just awesome.
09may2006
No Anarchaia tomorrow, I’ll be away all day.
Subfactorial: The number of permutations of objects in which no object appears in its natural place (i.e., the number of so-called “derangements”).
FreeBSD 6.1 is released. “This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features.”
Sex Leads to Boy’s Suspension, Wake County school officials have suspended a boy for having sex during school hours. Fuck for protest! Do it in school, even.
Neil Young—Living With War, “…this is about exchanging ideas… it’s about getting a message out. It’s about empowering people by giving them a voice. I know not everyone believes what I say is what they think. But like I said before.. ya know.. red and blue is not black and white. We’re all together. It’s a record about unification.”
Lemonade Stands and Stupid Movies, by Curtis Poe. Ends up with neuronal networks.
Let’s impeach the president for spyin’
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones
— Neil Young, Let’s Impeach The President
Volity: open-source interactive environment for games, by Andy Oram. “With Volity, for instance, gamers can easily search for other gamers and invite them to games.”
Eclipse v. NetBeans for rich client platforms, by Rick Jelliffe. How about… Emacs? :)
The Nature of Lisp, at defmacro.org. Nothing new, but a good summary.
The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density, the University of Minnesota’s Thomas Holmes Movie of Wal-Mart Store Openings, illustrating each store opening in the United States from 1962 to 2004.
Made With Molecules has neurotransmitter earrings and estrogen jewelry made of silver. Nifty.
Math for the Layman, by Kenneth E. Iverson. Must read: “development of computer programming has provided languages with grammars that are simpler and more tractable than that of conventional mathematical notation. Moreover, the general availability of the computer makes possible convenient and accurate experimentation with mathematical ideas.” Great that this is online.
Computer Science Looks for a Remake, sounds like a good idea. ;-)
The Four-Day Week Challenge, by Ryan Carson on A List Apart. “Why don’t we try working four days a week and see how it goes? It will give us more time to relax.” Great idea.
Calling All Designers: Learn to Write!, by Derek Powazek on A List Apart. “It’s time we designers stop thinking of ourselves as merely pixel people, and start thinking of ourselves as the creators of experiences.”
Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht
aber unsere Liebe nicht
alles, alles geht vorbei
doch wir sind uns treu
— Drafi Deutscher, Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht (Happy Birthday!)
Tales of the Hive: The Drive to Thrive, by xC0000005. “For the colony that passes these trials new challenges await requiring new sacrifices. The greatest of these may fall upon the queen.”
Could a machine think?, by Stephen Law. Roger Penrose formed me a lot with respect to that question.
Refactoring Everything, Day 16, by chromatic. “Day 16: Nodegroup is Complex”, “It’s painful, but it’s good for me. That’s what I keep telling myself.”
iCommons Summit—June in Brazil, Joi Ito announces.
08may2006
Signs You’re a Crappy Programmer (and don’t know it), a list by Damien Katz. But I really do disagree with the 20 LoC functions, except for maybe a state machine.
Silicon Graphics goes titsup, sad sad sad.
Open Subtext, the source of the graphical programming environment Subtext has been released.
Vim 7 is ready! After years of development this feature packed editor is waiting for you. I’ll stick to Emacs, but update nevertheless.
RbYAML, a YAML parser in pure Ruby. If you are sick of Syck. ;-)
Ruby/EventMachine is a fast, simple event-processing library for Ruby programs. It lets you write network clients and servers without handling sockets—all you do is send and receive data. Single-threaded socket engine—scalable and FAST!
Saw my reflection and cried, hey
So little hope that I died, oh
Feed me your lies, open wide, hey
Weight of my heart, not the size, oh
— Alice In Chains, Angry Chair
IndieKarma. Micropayments that work?, a highly interesting idea.
The Scheme Programming Language, by R. Kent Dybvig. I wonder why I never heard of this book before. Features nice, extended examples.
Who the heck is Ovid?, Curtis Poe introduces himself.
Recipe for Tortilla Casserole, by Abominable Abitur. “It contains cheese, tortillas and some kind of meat, what more could you need?”
Wc, some implementations of the ‘wc -l’ program in Haskell, with an eye to C-like performance. This illustrates the balance to be made between performance and elegance, over several increasingly fast (and more complex) examples.
How to customize the syntax of OCaml, using Camlp4, “Everything you always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask”. By Martin Jambon.
Beatnik is a very simple programming language to learn: it has a small set of commands, a very relaxed syntax, and you can find a reference to its vocabulary at any toy store.
Refactoring Everything, Day 15, by chromatic. “Day 15: A Port in an Hour”
Steely and the War, by terryfunk. Read that, alone for the interspersed “Highway 61 Revisited” lines.
You my friend
I will defend
And if we change, well I
Love you anyway
— Alice In Chains, No Excuses
Overplanning The Internet: Is It Time To Give IT A REST?, by M. David Peterson.
Stephen Colbert Musical Extravaganza, “This animated tribute to Stephen Colbert is in honor of his magnificent performance. I’ll have you know I was baked on Cali bud the whole time I worked on this. I left the audio at full quality, because this work is done in the spirit of a Roman triumph. ”
hmake is a compilation manager for Haskell programs.
Another Rake task for Rcov, nice and useful.
07may2006
Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development, by Alistair Cockburn. Classic.
ASCII Maps, Google Maps in ASCII. Awesome.
PNSDW, Philippine National Standards for Drinking Water.
Smart Pointers in C++, by Julio M. Merino Vidal. Ahh, the joys of non garbage-collected languages… :-)
Charting Data at the Bottom of the World, by Alex Gough. “I have an odd job: I’m the only programmer for about 500 miles. I look after experiments on a remote Antarctic research station and look after the data they produce.”
Hast du nur noch einen Tag
nur eine Nacht dann
lass es Liebe sein
Hast du nur noch eine Frage
die ich nie zu fragen wage dann
lass es Liebe sein
— Rosenstolz, Liebe Ist Alles
EigenCharges, using unary operators for defining filters is a great idea.
Grok Haskell Monad Transformers, “I’ve tried a few times to read various documents on the web about Monad Transformers in Haskell. I think that in almost every case the authors are trying to show how clever they are rather than explaining their use.”
A simulated planetary environment in the Utah desert, most important question: “Computer, are you providing enough refrigeration for our beer?”
rcov 0.3.0: happier Rails (code coverage analysis), great!
Open data types and open functions, by Andres Löh and Ralf Hinze. “We present open data types and open functions as a lightweight solution to the expression problem in the Haskell language. The idea is that constructors of open data types, and equations of open functions can appear scattered throughout a program.”
Oblivion, Steve Yegge rants: “Bethesda called this latest incarnation “Oblivion” because it sounded better than “core dump” or “segmentation fault”, but it has the same basic connotations.”
Architectural Criticism, “”It’s not our job to say: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks…” But of course it is!”
Not Yet In A Groove, by Patrick Logan. I always really liked the idea of Groove, I wished there was an open-source equivalent.
Ruby On Rails Reference, sounds very useful.
MiniLight, a minimal global illumination renderer. Just 432 LoC Ruby.
Fictohedron: Writing Team Novels with the Help of a Spam Filter, WJW.
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
Genetics Basics, by Harrison Ainsworth. Featuring UML diagrams(!).
What do you believe about Programming Languages (that you can’t prove (yet))?, John Carter asks LtU.
04may2006
Anarchaia will resume publishing on Monday, May 8.
LinuxTag Live Videostream, irgendwie ist der LinuxTag dieses Jahr wenig medienpräsent…
How to make programming hard for yourself, by Reg Braithwaite.
ECLM2006 Wrap-up, by Michael Weber. Many other reports are online.
Quake 3 Virtual Machine (Q3VM) Specifications, the Q3VM is a virtual machine used by Quake III to run the game module.
Oh when I look back now
That was seemed to last forever
And if I had the choice
Ya – I’d always wanna be there
Those were the best days of my life
— Bryan Adams, Summer Of ‘69
Digital Politics: An Interview With CivicSpace Founder Zack Rosen , by Spencer Critchley. Definitely a kind of software which time yet has to come.
A note on distributed computing, by Samuel C. Kendall, Jim Waldo, Ann Wollrath and Geoff Wyant. As Luke Gorrie calls it, “a classic”.
Park Place Does Torrents, It’s Called 0.7, very cool, _why.
Using ERB with Camping, Christopher Cyll makes a very good point: “Objectively, Rails is a very slim web framework. However the initial code generation phase dramatically increases the perceived complexity.”
Git Wiki, nice to see Git now has one too.
Erlang in Real Time was written by Maurice Castro to support the course `CS584 Real Time and Concurrent Systems’ at RMIT University in 1998. Online edition available.
The Library of Imaginary Machines, by Bill de hÓra. “In software there’s always some machine you’re dealing with that is made from another machine.” Or why languages don’t matter as much as machines. (Funnily, I realized this not too long ago…)
Third DARPA Grand Challenge Announced, John Wiseman says. “After the success of this event, we believe the robotics community is ready to tackle vehicle operation inside city limits.”
Refactoring Everything, Day 14, by chromatic. “Finally Porting without Debugging”.
Greenwich Emotion Map, a hand-held, GPS-based cartographic project centered around the soggy parks and traffic crossings of London’s meridian peninsula.
And I give to you now, sacred sigh, come get in
And then I pray that you are, stay the night, you get it
— Red Hot Chili, Peppers Wet Sand
Dolby Earth / Tectonic Surround-Sound, now visitors to a California museum exhibit can hear virtually every big and small earthquake simultaneously in just a few seconds off real time.
Everything You Wanted to Know about Gnomedex (But Were Afraid to Ask), I really wonder how that turns out. An unconference with 300 people.
p7zip is a port of 7-Zip for POSIX systems.
halostatue, Austin Ziegler blogs again.
Is God a Taoist?, a dialogue from The Tao is Silent, by Raymond M. Smullyan. Highly insightful, recommended reading.
03may2006
The Cyclopedia of Puzzles, or Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks, and Conundrums (With Answers). Fantastic to have that online.
The Origin of the World, by Gustave Courbet. Have a look at the date. PNSFW.
We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work, by Ron Jeffries. “The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work.” Lovely.
Speaking ‘Truthiness’ to Power, by Arvedui. “On Saturday night, Stephen Colbert was (unbelievably) chosen to deliver the annual AP White House Correspondents’ Dinner presidential roast.” (BTW, watch the video if you haven’t seen it already.)
MVC Frameworks in Perl, heretic conclusion by davorg: “Perhaps I should be a Ruby programmer :-)”
And if I saw the sun fall down
I’d pick it up and make a crown,
one that was a perfect fit for you.
— Red Hot Chilli Peppers, If
Ruby at Code Camp, by James Britt. “I prefer to show code. Build an app, go over what what the options are as the code grows, show how Ruby makes it easy to go from simple procedural scripts, to well-order classes and objects, to domain-specific abstractions that enable natural expression of application logic.”
an inconvenient truth, Joi Ito about a movie by “Davis Guggenheim about global warming and Al Gore’s life long effort to learn about and educate the world about the reality and risk of global warming.”
Hedgehog, is a very concise implementation of a Lisp-like language for low-end and embedded devices. It consists of a compiler and a byte code interpreter. The byte code interpreter is written in standard conforming C, is efficient and easily portable, and can be compiled to a very small executable of only some 20 kilobytes in the smallest configuration for the Intel x86 architecture. And it’s got a cute logo too.
Ideals Collide as Vatican Rethinks Condom Ban, must not forget to watch Popetown tonight.
Islands of Total Cartography on BLDG BLOG, “But an island’s spatial limitations also give it a kind of intellectual thrill: by limiting your territory for you, an island seems to promise total knowability.”
AWDwR 2, PragDave says: “To celebrate the release of Rails 1.1, we’re delighted to announce the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails. This is a major update to the original, and we’re releasing it as a beta book.”
Wenn die Mädchen rote Schuhe tragen und der Westwind küßt ihr Haar
Wenn der Ventilator leise summt, in der Acapulco-Bar
Dann ist der Sommer da,
dann ist der Sommer da
Dann ist der Sommer da und er bleibt das ganze Jahr
— Funny van Dannen, Rote Schuhe
Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing, by Philip Wadler. Very good read.
Metaprogramming breakfast , by Gabriele Renzi.
World Press Freedom Day 2006—3 May, UNESCO promotes freedom of expression and freedom of the press as a basic human right.
Greetings Earthlings, a great story. “I AM AN ALIEN! I COME TO YOU IN A GALACTIC STARSHIP.”
Pricing a Project, useful tips at Blue Flavored.
Preventing SVN Exposure, don’t let Capistrano publish possibly sensitive information about your repositories.
02may2006
How to make radiographs on Polaroid film, be careful.
Libunwind, the goal of the libunwind project is to define a portable and efficient C programming interface (API) to determine the call-chain of a program.
Outdoor 2D in 3D (3D Rooms 2), plain cool.
Regrepping and remapping Pugs. Too bad, I really liked being able to drop the comma after blocks…
This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself, LtU at its best.
It’s a shame to awaken, world aflame
What does it mean when the war has taken over?
It’s the same every day in a hell man-made
What can be saved, and who will be left to hold her?
— Pearl Jam, World Wide Suicide
SubEthaEdit experiences of John Wiseman at Y Combinator’s Startup School.
Refactoring Everything, Day 13, by chromatic: “Why Going in Descending Size Order Was a Mistake”.
How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm—a practical guide, by luckbeaweirdo. “It isn’t for the faint hearted and for some should not be read while eating.” Seriously.
The Case For Python, by Caleb Tennis. “In the language issue, you should just choose whatever works best for you.”
Test First, by Intention, A code and culture translation from the original Smalltalk to Ruby. (Who wants to port that to RSpec?)
The Most Amazing Development Environment Ever, that new Inform reminds me a lot of Shakespeare and Chef.
Disappearing Technology, Damien Katz says: “…your job is to take complexity and make it into something others don’t have to think about.”
Western Electric Vacuum Tubes, I wonder how many people saw those in real life.
If I dont lose control
Explore and not explode
A preternatural other plane
With the power to maintain
— Pearl Jam, Severed Hand
Extreme Terror, must see at YouTube.
Discount Stores Of The ’60s, “the saddest loss of all in terms of once-popular shopping destinations was that of the first-generation discount department stores which began springing up in selected areas as early as 1956”
Are Foreign Keys Worth Your Time?, atmos wonders. “I’m sure there are a number of arguments that can be made for using foreign keys etc etc, but it’s just stuff that gets in the way in a framework like rails.” Not sure I like that conclusion.
Cinematic Urbanism, “…and you’ve got a short film that shows off your architectural vision of the city.” Sounds like a plan.
Functional Mathematics: a Unifying Formal Approach to Modelling Systems, Circuits and Programs (PDF), by Raymond Boute.
Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams. Ruby powered, of course.
01may2006
The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn, by Paul Graham.
Why Paul Graham won’t release Arc, pretty wild speculation by David Hoelscher.
OpenBSD 3.9 is released.
Runtime Tags Aren’t Necessary, by Andrew W. Appel. “This paper shows how the use of tag bits, record descriptor words, explicit type parameters, and the like can be avoided in languages (like ML) with static polymorphic typechecking.”
Introduction to the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, by Chris Lattner. “It is aimed at a GCC-centric audience, specifically to follow up a presentation on the GCC Link-Time-Optimization proposal at the 2006 Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo (ICE).”
I live tomorrow,
you I’ll not follow
As you wallow
in a sea of sorrow
— Alice In Chains, Sea Of Sorrow
jQuery is a new type of Javascript library. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write Javascript. Sounds interesting.
Links: Web Programming Without Tiers, ICFP 2006 paper by Ezra Cooper, Sam Lindley, Philip Wadler and Jeremy Yallop.
Matchbox Pinhole, if I had a analog film laying around…
Hazakura is search-based MUA written in Haskell.
Changing filename encodings in a tarball, and a small refactoring tale, Mauricio hacks.
Cocoa Magic for Gruff Graphs, nifty nifty.
Ubasuteyama is a sad story of poor village folk forced to take their parents up into the mountains and abandon them there in accordance with village regulations at a time of famine.
When there is nothing left to burn
You have to set yourself on fire
— Stars, Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
Self-immolation is the act of setting oneself on fire, most often in political protest. It is considered to be among the most powerful symbolic acts of sacrifice.