Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
30jun2006
Formulas in Dabble are implemented in an interesting way.
es gibt nicht nur ding, Fußball-Quotes von Lydia.
What Is It Like to be a Spider?, I’d say: “disgusting.” ;-)
The Long View of Identity, by Andy Oram. “Because I care intently about online identity myself, I was excited to attend the Identity Mashup conference at Harvard Law school’s Berkman Center, one in a series of identity conferences held there.”
Managing Many-to-Many Relationships with PL/pgSQL, by David E. Wheeler.
I’m a rebel, let them talk,
Soul rebel, talk won’t bother me
I’m a capturer, that’w what they say
Soul adventurer, night and day
— Bob Marley, Soul Rebel
Google Checkout API, Hari K. Gottipati had a look.
My Trip to Judecca, or: The Most Disgusting Vacation in History. By falkenberg. “Ever heard of staphylococcal enterotoxin?”
The First 10 Prolog Programming Contests, available for download as PDF. Enjoy. ;-)
The Calculus Ratiocinator is a concept appearing in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, usually paired with his characteristica universalis, which he mentioned much more frequently.
Plugins in your Ruby application, Mauricio Fernandez implments a neat and light plugin architecture.
This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last:
Many more will have to suffer,
Many more will have to die—don’t ask me why.
— Bob Marley, Natural Mystic
Quick list 1, BLDGBLOG all in one.
Prices in Cents, even PragDave traps into rounding issues.
Teius is really a tiny Ruby wrapper around the LibXML C library. The goal was to be able to easily parse XML documents with a minimal API, at breakneck speed.
29jun2006
Tutorial on Geometric Programming, by S. Boyd, S. J. Kim, L. Vandenberghe, and A. Hassibi. “A geometric program (GP) is a type of mathematical optimization problem characterized by objective and constraint functions that have a special form.”
Google Checkout, a new payment system. “Find it with Google. Buy it with Google Checkout.” Doesn’t seem to encourage private transactions.
Title-free, reinventing the tumblelog? ;-)
I’m ahead, I’m a man
I’m the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I’m at peace with my lust
I can kill ‘cause in God I trust, yeah
It’s evolution, baby
— Pearl Jam, Do The Evolution
Bootstrapping a simple compiler from nothing, do the evolution. Impressive and probably painful.
The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4: Generating All Trees, reviewed by Cameron Laird. “To carry a copy of Generating All Trees with you is likely to elicit more suspicion among some managers than if they noticed pornography on your desktop.”
Flash to the Rescue, by Jason Levitt. No, no, NO!
mkrf 0.1.0 Released, the rescue is near, no more mkmf! Very cool and very useful.
Was ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Nilpferd? Gibt keinen, an Land und im Wasser geht es.
Was ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Krokodil? An Land geht es, im Wasser schwimmt es.
Was ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Krokodil und einem Nilpferd? Beim Krokodil gibt es einen Unterschied, beim Nilpferd nicht. — Fritz B. Simon
Try Ruby in Second Life, hail to the bot.
Laws of Form: An Opinion, wondering “is this a crackpot book or not?” Sounds very interesting nevertheless.
Where the hell is Matt?, he’s dancing all over the world!
/var/www, Dave ist virtuell umgezogen und jetzt Ubuntu-Fan.
Etna is an open Source XML Editor built on Mozilla’s core, Gecko. It uses some RelaxNG schema to edit and validate XML Documents.
28jun2006
Ignoring the “Great Firewall of China”, this is plain lovely.
Rudolf Carnap was an influential philosopher who was active in central Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a leading member of the Vienna Circle and a prominent advocate of logical positivism.
The Web Is a Pipe, James Duncan Davidson about deploying Rails apps.
Essentials, 2006 edition, list of applications Mark Pilgram needs.
Don’t say CRUD say FUC’D, read this summary of DHH’s talk just for the quotes. Awwsome.
I’m softly exhaling
You give me release
I’m softly exhaling
You give me release
— Ane Brun, Balloon Ranger
Vector fun for bowling, “Programming problems aren’t normally something that interest me, but having read about one by Ron Jeffries implementing a J algorithm in Ruby I thought I’d try it in C++.”
Discovering a world of resources, DHH’s slides of RubyKaigi and RailsConf.
Hacking a Perl Hack for Python: Autocomplete in vim, a small hint by Jeremy Jones.
And you can knock down a building
You can kill a woman or a man
From the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate
What’s born in love will stand
— Dan Bern, Hometown Of The World
The people, they receive email, however, TV wastes far more time.
Why the World is ready for the Semantic Web, by Dan Zambonini. A pretty Web 2.0-y view of the Semantic Web…
Counting At The Cloak ‘N’ Bind, a piece of evil code.
Four petabytes in memory at Google. WJW.
An Introduction to Ruby/DLX, “Using C libraries in Ruby was never this easy”, by Marcel Toele.
The Notation in Principia Mathematica, “The notation in that work has been superseded by the subsequent development of logic during the 20th century, to the extent that the beginner has trouble reading PM at all.” I already had something about PM this week, but I consider Peano dots very interesting.
27jun2006
Todo.txt, task tracking for command line lovers. Great.
Large Desert Structures, by John Wiseman. “It feels counter-intuitive that a desert has such a rich selection of interesting man-made features.”
Launched and Funded: All Dabblers welcome, DabbleDB went live for the general public.
The Great Lisp to Rails Rewrite, Joel Reymont even likes Active Record. (/me waits for a week or two…)
Chaos? Aber hallo, Dave, alles Gute nachträglich!
Time passes by
And from it I
Can not hide…
— The Subways, Lines Of Light
Nanopass Compiler Framework, awesome resources. Need more time. ;-)
R6RS Status Report, they are on the way.
The Artistic License 2.0 has been finalized.
Ruminations on Turning 43, by Kurt Cagle. “Forty three is, as my father-in-law put it, an odd age.”
Insight from an 8 year old, “Comic book stores are kind of scary.”
TuneCore is a music delivery and distribution service that gets artist’s original music (even cover versions) and record label releases up for sale on iTunes, Rhapsody, MusicNet and Napster without asking for your rights or taking any money from the sale or use of your music.
Go DHH Yourself, _why summarizes RailsConf 2006.
The Egyptians built their pyramids
To keep the devil out of their house
Me, I’m scared to have a house at all
So I keep driving and I’m careful who I stop for
— Dan Bern, Swoosh
Earth Surface Machine, an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future. Hack the planet?
Multiversioning and qualified packages for Perl 6. Interesting.
k-calculus and Special Relativity, “It’s all very elementary stuff.” Aha.
DownThemAll is a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser. Unfortunately doesn’t support recursion yet.
26jun2006
International Day In Support Of Victims Of Torture, “This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable.”
Braunbär “Bruno” ist tot, oh wenn sie sich doch um die Menschen kümmern würden wie um die Tiere…
Real-Time Programming Competition, sounds exciting. “Presenting real-time programming madness as teams from across Melbourne battle for $600 worth of prizes, with live visual feedback on Loop’s 23 foot screen.”
Richard Stallman, interviewed at GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona, by Sean Daly. “No surrendering others’ freedom”
Sealand in ruins after blaze, that’s just too bad: “The so-called Principality of Sealand, seven miles off the coast of Felixstowe and Harwich, was evacuated at lunchtime yesterdayafter a generator caught fire.”
She’s sitting on a city pavement
Like she sits in the back of my mind
A little smile is the only saviour
A little kiss is what she came here for
— The Subways, City Pavement
Best Note from a Daughter Ever, WJW.
The Online Encyclopaedia of Mathematics is the most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language graduate-level reference work in the field of mathematics today.
The Power of the Marginal, essay by Paul Graham based on his RailsConf talk.
Securing the .NET Programming Model, by Andrew J. Kennedy. “A number of failures of full abstraction are identified, and fixes described.”
The mountain, the mountain, the mountain of untruth
The mountain, the mountain, the mountain of untruth
God himself could never have created such a place
Get ready now to climb up the mountain of untruth
— Dan Bern, The Mountain Of Untruth
Scream “Hello”, the TFT Field Guide to Audience Participation. Must read before you go to a Pearl Jam gig.
RailsConf 2006: Day 3 (last day), by Curt Hibbs. Nice quote: “The notion that you’d never want production systems to be introspectable has to be one of the worst premature optimizations of all time!”
persönlich und intern, Lydia bloggt keine privaten, geheimen Stories. Schade eigentlich. ;-)
25jun2006
NILFS is a log-structured file system developed for the Linux, and it is downloadable on this site as open-source software.
FreeNode, has been hijacked and I missed it. Too bad, I’d have loved to see the show.
Rails Guidebook, PragDave notes: “The Rails community raised over $8,000”
Thank God for dracula
He sucked the shit outta me
Now i can leave my work for nights
And leave my day for sleeping
— The Subways, Young For Eternity
unpaper is a post-processing tool for scanned sheets of paper, especially for book pages that have been scanned from previously created photocopies.
1+1=2, Mark Dominus about Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. “A huge amount of other machinery goes away in 2006, because of the unification of relations and sets.” So, who’s gonna do the second edition? ;-) (Heck, anyone thinking of APL reading those proofs?)
Permutations of Iteration, a comparision of loops by Stuart Sierra (great blog).
Using SLIME to Front-end your App, while probably not regarded as user-friendly, this is a nice idea to get started quickly.
Hitler cats!, a blog dedicated to cats that look like Hitler. WJW!
Blow your mind, some great Haskell idioms.
The 2006 GHC hackathon: 14, 15 September 2006, I hope they’ll publish some slides or other documentary material.
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
— Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna
Penny Boston’s Buzzing Tunnel, beware of claustrophobia.
RailsConf 2006: Day 2 (part 1), (part 2), by Curt Hibbs. First mention of “Active Resource”.
Glue That Doesn’t Set, PragDave about Perl and other glue languages: “Ruby is the glue that doesn’t set.”
Here’s Ruby 1.8.5 Preview 1, please help testing.
24jun2006
Architecture 2030: Research/Design Position, “Using passive solar power, better site orientation, regionally appropriate materials, self-ventilating designs and so on, the architectural world can easily reduce its dependence on electricity.”
Wehrschach, auch einfach Bumm genannt, war im Deutschland des Zweiten Weltkrieges eine bei Soldaten verbreitete Schachvariante.
The Bhagavad Gita online with commentary.
But why do I see you when I shut my eyes
Why do I see you at night
When I turn out the light
Can t you wear a disguise
When I shut my eyes
— Dan Bern, When I Shut My Eyes
Understanding XForms: Components, by Kurt Cagle. Another technology that never really seems to take off.
Refactoring Everything, Retrospective, by chromatic. “Here’s what I learned about programming, refactoring, and 30-day projects during this series.”
What’s New in Python 2.5, by A.M. Kuchling. Nothing really exciting.
RailsConf 2005: Day 1, by Curt Hibbs. Nice overview, check yourself.
Wir haben ihn endlich wieder
unseren Nationalstolz
wir atmen auf
es stirbt der Wald
wir sind eben aus ganz besonderem deutschen Holz
— Herbert Grönemeier, Tanzen
Blogging RailsConf, by the Softies On Rails.
Sex in Zion, by Rae Meadows. “My jot at an escort agency for Mormons.”
23jun2006
The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. “April is the cruellest month, …”
Software Wars, A graphic map depicting the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft. Been updated recently.
Indie Podcasting with Open Source, by John Littler.
Ardour is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record, edit and mix multi-track audio. Produce your own CD’s. Mix video soundtracks. Experiment with new ideas about music and sound. Generate sound installations for 12 speaker gallery shows. Have Fun.
Vindaloo a l’Agni, by Trollaxor. “The name for this dish comes from Agni, the Hindu deity of fire.”
I’m waist deep, waist deep in the mist
It’s almost like, almost like I don’t exist
I’m twenty miles out of town, in cold irons bound
— Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound
Delimited dynamic binding, final draft for ICFP 2006 by Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan, and Amr Sabry.
McCloudian Classification for comics. Found by John Wiseman.
Goodbye to 6 months, and I actually admired Joi Ito for backing up to lots of different computers. Sucks.
The DVD Shelf—Leon: The Professional (1994), by Psycho Dave. “The film in question is one that had hetero men waiting seven years for a time when it would no longer be disgusting to fap to Natalie Portman.”
Tomorrow’s Edges for the Black-Diamond Runs, Patrick Logan digs up a nice analogy by Ward Cunningham.
I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down
Feel like I’m drifting
Drifting from scene the scene
I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?
— Bob Dylan, Highlands
alles wird gut im internet, Lydia guckt Parallel-Fussball.
RailsConf 2006: Day 0, Curt Hibbs reports. “Wow… what a crowd! It was a veritable who’s who of the Ruby/Rails world.”
22jun2006
DABlog is David Alan Black’s new blog about Ruby and other things.
Making Senses, Matt Webb’s reboot8 slides.
Translate Haskell into English Manually, by Shannon Behrens. “Write a program in Haskell that translates C type declarations into English.” Neat start.
Matt Webb’s Wikipedia Contrail, this is mine: Alternative algebra, Kris Kristofferson, Modular arithmetic, Quadratic reciprocity, Sedenion. Scary.
Obst in den Po und Paddel drauf, dafür wäre man früher erschossen worden: Fallschirmjäger sollen sich auf einer Feier Obst in den Hintern geschoben und mit einem Paddel drauf gehauen haben.
I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn’t do
Go to the ends of the earth for you
To make you feel my love
— Bob Dylan, Make You Feel My Love
The Traditional Vi, Source Code for Modern Unix Systems. Ick, at least use vim.
Git-Perl, interface to the Git version control system. By Petr Baudis.
How Does a Programming Language Stagnate?, by chromatic. “I’m not the person to ask about the viability of using Perl 5 for new development projects in your own environment (and I can’t wait for Perl 6), but I had an interesting thought about how to gauge the suitability and evolution of a language today…”
How to Divide by Three, it’s not as easy as it seems.
Scaling Up with XQuery, Part 2, by Bob DuCharme. “This week, we’ll see how to perform the same setup and usage tasks with two more servers: eXist and Sleepycat’s Berkeley DB XML.”
A How Big Are Things? Cube provides a nicely tangible and compact presentation of size. Each face shows a different scale. It covers atoms through Jupiter. The 10cm paper cube can sit on one’s desk, providing an attractive and handy reference. Nice idea.
auf jeden fall:
geht in den copy shop und legt eure köpfe
auf die glasflächen der geräte und kippt
die deckplatten über eure frisuren nach dem neuesten
schnitt
und schliesst die augen—
der blitz der erkenntnis brennt sie euch sonst
aus ihren höhlen
— KD Diedrich, Dunkle Zeilen
In memoriam K.–D. Diedrich, † 2006, leider etwas verspätet.
21jun2006
Weirdness on my MacBook Pro, Joi Ito found some annoying things.
BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype, must see. This is the first 3D-Desktop I could imagine using.
Symbolic links, your file system can compute. That’s crazy. WJW.
Mojikyo Fonts for TeX, great for eastern typesetting.
Eddie Vedder’s Embarrassing Tale: Naked in Public, Pearl Jam’s leader talks about writing lyrics, yoga and a hotel lobby visit without his pants.
Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t
Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t
I need something strong to distract my mind
I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind
— Bob Dylan, Mississippi
Refactoring Everything, Day 30, by chromatic. The saga ends.
Dell laptop explodes at Japanese conference, eeeek.
Offener Brief an Musikschaffende, von Johnny Haeusler.
Microsoft Robotics Studio Announced, John Wiseman says: “It looks pretty Microsofty.”
Microsoft ECS talk, by Audrey Tang. Very comprehensive talk about Pugs.
Well, that was when someone turned out the lights
And I wound up in jail to spend the night
And dream of all the wine and lonely girls
In this best of all possible worlds.
— Kris Kristofferson, The Best Of All Possible Worlds (Happy Birthday!)
Automagic (generalizable) working set discovery, improved ruby-wmii WM scripting 0.2.1, use Markov chains to improve your desktop efficency.
Interoperability and DRM Are Mutually Exclusive, John Gruber says and is right.
Carbone is a vmgen based, efficient virtual machine for Ruby. It targets compatibility, performance and portability.
20jun2006
What If Unix, Patrick Logan asks the best question this month: “What if the first shell language had been a simple lisp interpreter, along the lines of elisp.”
Coin in the Couch, Damien Katz explains how he wants to make money from CouchDb.
Chinese Death Vans, this totally gives me the creeps.
CPAN Module Review: Class::MOP, by chromatic. “Perhaps my keenest frustration with Perl 5 is its lack of a clean metaprogramming facility.”
The power of groups, by Colva Roney-Dougal. A bit math can’t hurt.
Now the bonds are broken, but they can be retired,
by one more journey to the woods, the holes where spirits hide.
It’s a never ending battle for a peace that’s always torn
“Come in,” she said,
“I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”
— Bob Dylan, Shelter From The Storm
Why Apple Won’t Open Source Its Apps, by John Gruber. Ah yes, the evilness of commercialism. ;-)
Functional Programming For The Rest of Us, “It’s true that FP articles and papers are hard to understand, but they don’t have to be. The reasons for the knowledge gap are purely historical.” Highly, highly recommended.
Viberavetions Community Development Blogs, Forums, and File and Photo Sharing Server is Now Live!
Your Concrete Utopia, wanna buy an artificial atoll? Maybe rather not.
Time, spent waking off shore
The calm, before the storm
My take, from you is simple
— Chevelle, Comfortable Liar
Speeding Up Builder 2.0, _why optimizes Markaby.
How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team, by Shane Diffily for A List Apart. “Fortunately, the problem of defining the number of people required on a web team is not insurmountable.”
Prettier Accessible Forms, by Nick Rigby for A List Apart. “I’ve tried to create a form-styling solution that is both accessible and portable.”
Behavioral Separation, by Jeremy Keith for A List Apart. That’s the right way to use JavaScript.
19jun2006
Goodness Gracious, Scary Nuclear Power, by circletimessquare. “Hydrogen, biodiesel, hydro, coal, wind, tidal, geothermal… the list is endless.”
LOC, John Wiseman calculates his LOC rate per year. Far too much IMO, he should use more metaprogramming. ;-) jk.
A kernel of truth: the plot thickens, replacing Mach for OS X with L4? Hrm!
A life without left turns, by Michael Gartner. A beautiful story about driving and getting old.
Juggling oranges, by Mark Pilgrim. The switch saga continues. (Lession learned: use ASCII and mbox.) Must read.
The road is hard the road is long
It tears you up and wears you down
It feeds you hope and then make you blue
This dirty road where I met you
— Lars Bygdén, This Road
Time to start referencing ISO standards?, Rick Jelliffe wonders. “Did you know there are ISO standards for the following: PDF, HTML and Dublin Core Metadata?”
Seventh Draft is a webcomic about lovable characters from educational media who were made obsolete or were fired for completely justifiable reasons. Rocks.
tovid is a collection of video disc authoring tools; it can help you create your own DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs for playback on your home DVD player. It has a command-line interface as well as a graphical frontend. tovid is free software.
May I come in, how long just once
Can’t I come in grab thy hand and
May I come in, how long just once
Can’t I come in grab thy hand and
Walk through
— Chevelle, Grab Thy Hand
im juni, Lydia hat sommerliche Bilder.
Alak is a one-dimensional game of Go. “Captures take place by surrounding your enemy with your own pieces or capturing against the board’s edge. A player is not allowed to move to a location that was recently captured.”
18jun2006
Is Web 2 causing the dissolution of the mega-corp?, by Kurt Cagle.
Why only ‘minimal’ languages, very good thread on LtU.
Sand/Rake Diptych, looooovely.
Lightning Map, a very interesting map of global lightning strikes. Cool, er, hot.
Ruby2CExtension is a Ruby to C extension translator/compiler. It takes any Ruby source file, parses it using Ruby’s builtin parser and then translates the abstract syntax tree into “equivalent” C extension code. Very good documented, you can learn something there.
Remember me
Remember me
But ah…
Forget my fate
— Ane Brun, Laid In Earth
The Little Book Of Ruby, by Huw Collingbourne. Small and concise introduction.
Schwarz, Rot, Gold: Farben der Demokratie, sagt Stefan Scholl. “Deutschland ist nicht perfekt. Aber eine Eigenschaft, auf die wir stolz sein können, ist die Selbstkritik der Deutschen. Es wird viel hinterfragt und in Relation zu unserer Geschichte interpretiert.”
And then I would tell the world
Tell the world
About the way you hold my hand
And they would
They would understand
— Ane Brun, Song No. 6
Zen: The Art of Disconnecting?, by Berin Loritsch. “Our brains need rest, just like our bodies do. To much active thought can cause you burnout, stress, and/or panic.”
TagTriples is a structured metadata format, similar to RDF, but intended to be simpler to understand and generate.
17jun2006
EFF: The Corruptibles, I, for one, don’t need more arguments against DRM.
The ultimate and final monolithic operating system?, Rick Jelliffe wonders about Vista. IMO, unless they seriously go Singularity, no.
Exact Math, Patrick Logan shows how beautiful a numeric tower is. ;-)
Come Back, Zinc! by chomatic. Apparently, Perl 5 is not dying. I’d still not use Perl 5 for anything non-legacy.
Monotomy makes me weary
Assurance awakes distructiveness
As I lie in my diary
To justify the choices I make
— Ane Brun, On/Off
Eclipse Camps, includes nice shots of the dark sun.
A Taylor Series for Types, this is just sick.
Powers Of Ten at YouTube. Classic must-see.
extortr, the most efficient way to blackmail the world. Whee!
The envelope paradox, explained by Mark Dominus. Crazy.
Time after time I’ve tried to walk away
But it’s not that easy when your soul is torn in two
So I just resign myself to it every day
Now all I can do is to leave it up to you
— Sam Brown, Stop
The Rise and Fall of CORBA, by Michi Henning. “Given that only a few years ago, CORBA was considered the cutting edge of middleware that promised to revolutionize e-commerce, it is surprising to see how quickly the technology was marginalized, and it is instructive to examine some of the deeper reasons for the decline.” Not sad.
On the Impossibility of Obfuscation with Auxiliary Input (PDF), by Shafi Goldwasser and Yael Tauman Kalai. So don’t waste your time trying.
NPW’06 lightning talk, Audrey Tang translated the ppencode talk. Very funny, for Rubyists too.
16jun2006
Accidental entrepreneur David Weekly sets a new record for startup failure, hear the story behind Singlestat.us.
Time to Switch?, Tim Bray [pw]onders too. Sounds a lot like my thoughts…
And Oranges, by John Gruber. Really extensive and in-depth analysis of Mark Pilgrim’s reasons to switch.
How to Stop Laughing when You Laugh at Inappropriate Times, my personal tip: Stick your tounge behind your lower lip, and softly bite onto it. Laughing is not possible that way.
Re: What You Can’t Say, Paul Graham revisits his essay.
ChangeLog for Emacs, taken from the Mercurial mirror. Nice. (also see the mirror notes.)
I hope that you’ll
Be careful wherever you go
I keep seeing crosses
On the side of the road
Them crosses
On the side of the road
— Dan Bern, Crosses
Banana slug on Wikipedia. On the German version they note that it’s penis can be upto twice as long as the slug itself! Unfortunately, sometimes they can’t get the penis out anymore and then the other slug will bite it off… ouch.</biology-lession>
10 things to change in your thinking when building REST XML Protocols, by Kimbro Staken. A good list.
Fabric Tests shows some example of Fabric, the CouchDB query language. All these semicolons, sheesh…
darcs-graph is a tool to draw pretty graphs of a darcs repository’s activity, including sliding averages.
Cities of Amorphous Carbonia, “Under extreme pressures the researchers found that CO2 forms a crystalline solid, dubbed ‘amorphous carbonia’ (a-CO2).”
This is true
I am fragile just like you
You and me
We are love and misery
— Tobias Fröberg, Love & Misery
NPW’06 talk, by Audrey Tang. I’d really like to see her presentation toolchain.
Gates Easing Out at Microsoft, “Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Thursday he will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company he co-founded to spend more time on global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” I’m really curious about what Ray Ozzie will change…
15jun2006
The Viberavetions Project, A Call Out To Artists/Musicians, Music Industry Profressionals, and Pure and True Fans Of The Art and Music These Same Folks Create.
A Look at Common Performance Problems in Rails, by Stefan Kaes. “On top of that, there are still some problem areas within the Rails framework itself, where I’d like to see improved performance in the future.”
Escher for Real, This work below presents some of these three-dimensional models that were designed and built using geometric modeling and computer graphics tools.
CACAO is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which uses Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation to execute Java methods natively. Since release 0.93 a Vmgen based interpreter is also integrated. CACAO uses GNU Classpath as Java core library. Why did I never hear about it before?
I met this cool girl
And I told her I’d been blinded
I said I’ve lost my innocence
But you could help me find it
— Dan Bern, Thunder Road
Monsterz is a little arcade puzzle game, similar to the famous Bejeweled or Zookeeper.
give me some water, *trink*.
If It Bleeds, It Leads (To Less Money For The Artists), M. David Peterson says. “How on earth are the artists that RIAA represents making any money?”
Shipping Rails Recipes, PragDave made a presentation of how it works. Very grass-roots.
Ruby 1.8.5 in time for the Lantern Festival, let’s see if they can keep up.
Scaling Up with XQuery, Part 1, by Bob DuCharme. Nice to read more about this technology.
Refactoring Everything, Day 29, by chromatic. “Today’s task is to get just one single test running against the live, not a mocked, database.”
It’s never
As good as the first time
As the first time (Never as good as the first time)
The first time
— Sade, Never As Good As The First Time
Fun with Derivatives of Containers, at A Neighborhood of Infinity.
HOWTO make the perfect fruit salad and get laid, by Mark Pilgrim. Good one.
Good Responses, Damien Katz blogs on about Erlang.
Back to the Future: The Story of Squeak, A Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself, by Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace, and Alan Kay. Paper outlining the implementation.
HSV color space on Wikipedia.
14jun2006
Labs compete to make new nuclear bomb, oh my.
The eXtensibility Manifesto, for the poor(?) XML guys out there.
ISO Schematron standard published, Rick Jelliffe proclaims. To save the 98 bucks, go find a draft online.
The High Level Virtual Machine is a complete compiler developer’s toolkit for creating new languages easily based on LLVM. I don’t really believe in that…
The Euston Manifesto, very insightful. Must read.
Oh I, oh, I’m still alive
Hey, I, I, oh, I’m still alive
Hey I, oh, I’m still alive
Hey…oh…
— Pearl Jam, Alive
Line numbers, error reporting and backtraces, Mauricio hacks parse.y.
The cantilevered void house, fantastic.
Scannt Eure Tickets, ehe es wer anders tut!, tolle Aktion des CCC: “Auf den WM-Tickets ist ein RFID-Chip eingearbeitet, dessen gespeicherte Daten wir näher analysieren wollen. Ein Auslesen dieser Daten ist an mehreren CCC-Anlaufstellen in Deutschland möglich.”
Pairing Wine and Microformats, about the markup of Cork’d.
CoddFish is a Haskell library that offers strongly-typed support for database programming.
And I will mount you
Press my knees on both sides
And you will let me
Let me, let me ride
— Ane Brun, The Fight Song
Take 42: lazy operators for Vlerq. They are essential for Brne too.
13jun2006
Richard Feynman: The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, a set of four priceless archival recordings from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) of the outstanding Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman – arguably the greatest science lecturer ever.
Sieben Geisslein an object store implemented in java. It tries to achieve orthogonal persistence.
A Few Wmii-3 Hacks, seems like _why got hooked too.
Opinion: Final should be default, not deprecated, posted by Floyd Marinescu. Evil. Luckily, I don’t use Java.
In my mind I’m crawling on your floor
Vomiting and defeated
Total absence of grace
Your reluctant voice saying
You decide your own fate but
— Ane Brun, Rubber & Soul
Open Up Google.com!, chromatic requests. Just edit your damn /etc/hosts, eh? Best comment: “This may be the stupidest thing that I’ve ever read on O’Reilly.”
Storing Dates, by davorg. Classic user problem.
Terrorism? I don’t care…, by konrad. “Though acts of terrorism are spectacular and get an amazing amount of media-coverage they actually have very little real impact compared to other factors. It’s just not very likely to ever affected by an act of terrorism, let alone be killed in it.”
RubyQuestions for the RubyQuiz Master, Pat Eyler interviews James Gray.
Transformer Houses, a nice idea: “In 1987, Canadian photographer Robin Collyer began documenting houses that aren’t houses at all – they’re architecturally-disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, blinds, and bourgeois landscaping.”
Feng Shui Detector, WJW.
Nearing RubyGems 0.9.0, and still so many things needed…
Alle Leute herbei,
Schlagt die Brücke entzwei.
Und sie schwangen das Beil,
Und sie tanzten dabei:
Fa-la-la-la-la,
Fa-la-la-la.
— Es führt über den Main
Infinite Order Logic and the Church-Turing Thesis (PDF), by Dimitris Vyzovitis. For your amusement.
ML Modules and Haskell Type Classes: A Constructive Comparison , by Stefan Wehr and Manuel M.T. Chakravarty. “The work at hand fills this gap by presenting a constructive comparison between ML modules and Haskell type classes; that is, it introduces two formal translations from modules to type classes and vice versa, which enable a thorough comparison of the two concepts.”
One reason I chose Erlang, by Damien Katz. “What I found surprised me big time, the Erlang OTP platform has completely changed the way I view reliable software construction.”
12jun2006
Time for rethink on the clitoris, by Sharon Mascall. “The clitoris rivals the penis in size.” Finally, boys can compare themselves to girls too!
Which is more effective: Debuggers vs. Print Statements, first of all, you need a reasonable debugger.
Agile people still don’t get it, Cedric Beust says. A call for pragmatism.
Ooh—I’ll protect you from the wind
Ooh—I’d listen to your stories ‘til my head spins
‘Round and ‘round and ‘round and ‘round and…
— Dan Bern, Dress
SMS in Japan, by Joi Ito. Doesn’t seem to be the big hit there.
Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis, by Daniel Jackson. The first book about Alloy.
rcov 0.6.0: “differential code coverage”, full (faster) cross-referenced reports, vim integration, but when will it read my mail? ;-)
Java Generics FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions, the longest FAQ I ever saw. Makes you wonder, hmm?
Sometimes I forget
Sometimes I remember
My favorite time is when I’m
Half awake and half in slumber
— Dan Bern, Thunder Road
Mixing in Class Methods, a good technique I’ve been using for some time too.
11jun2006
Esterel is both a programming language, dedicated to programming reactive systems, and a compiler which translates Esterel programs into finite-state machines.
You won’t look like a dick!, “Overcome the effects of circumcision with an artificial retractable foreskin.” WJW of the month.
Caffeine makes people more open to persuasion, want another cup?
Dissecting matz’s monster patch: lots of activity in 1.9, Mauricio Fernandez had a closer look at the recent Ruby development.
All we did was kiss
Days and days and days like this
All we did was kiss
Days and days and days—
All we did
— Dan Bern, All We Did
The Power of Prototype.js, by Kurt Cagle.
Symbol#to_proc Exonerated, all in all, a good idea.
Shiny and New: Emacs 22, Steve Yegge recommends. I’ve been using it for almost an year too, and can only advise updating. (And why does noone tell me about the new replace-regexp? Cool.)
She took away your troubles
Oh, but then again
She left pain
So, please save your life
Because you’ve only got one
— The Smiths, This Night Has Opened My Eyes
Stupid Hash tricks for parameter passing. Not bad.
Monads, Kleisli Arrows, Comonads and other Rambling Thoughts, “I realised that I had rediscovered comonads and they now seemed entirely natural.” Even ordinary people can understand this good post.
Riby[sic] Conference 2006 with DHH, notes by Stoyan Zhekov.
10jun2006
XHTML effort bears fruit, by Rick Jelliffe. “Glad to see the National Toilet Map is producing XHTML.”
A skateboarder though?, by Gregory Brown. On the cover art of Agile Web Development With Rails, 2. Ed..
15th World Puzzle Championship, Borovets (Bulgaria), enjoy.
Day One of RubyKaigi2006, RedHanded has coverage of the first conference dedicated to Ruby in Japan. A Ruby 1.9.1 stable release, fun.
lastnightsparty, “Where were you last night?” Great shots, NSFW.
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the fear that originates in the the Biblical verse Revelation 13:18 which indicates that the number 666 is the Number of the Beast, linked to Satan or the Anti-Christ. Outside the Christian faith, the phobia has been further popularized as a leitmotif in various horror films.
Firefox for Emacs users, Part 2 (Tips and Techniques). By Bill Clementson.
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, by K. Eric Drexler. Now available online.
Termite is an Erlang-like distributed programming system written in Scheme. It requires the latest version of Gambit-C. The source now can be downloaded!
And though I walk home alone
I might walk home alone …
…But my faith in love is still devout
— The Smiths, Rusholme Ruffians
SvnX is an open source GUI for most features of the svn client binary.
wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest how-to manual.
Thune is an experimental interpreted language mixing ideas from Forth and Rebol. Sounds pretty nice.
Schematron Implementer’s FAQ, by Rick Jelliffe. Would be nice to see more usage of this interesting thing.
On XSLT 2.0 and Office 2007: Words Of Wisdom From The Trenches , by M. David Peterson. Now, all you need is a BibTeX parser for XSLT. ;-)
Some More Ruse Related News Items, by Jim Weirich. Looks like the spam problem is solved.
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
Drafi Deutscher, Ruhe in Frieden.
Rapid Ruby spread! Warning: Ruby is contagious!, Phil Tomsom seems to have a nice job.
META Insanity, John Wiseman says: “I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Henry Baker is insane.” But hey, that paper is way cool.
09jun2006
The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web, by Dan Zambonini. “When it comes to the Semantic Web, you might call me a disillusioned advocate. I’ve been dipping in and out of the technologies for the last 5 years or so, but am increasingly frustrated by the lack of any visible progress.”
A Brief History of Scala, by Martin Odersky.
How to Shoot People (and Places and Things), by Khoi Vinh. (With a camera, not a gun.)
Wedding Vows, “Our wedding vows were written under constraint. The constraint is explained at the bottom of this page. At our wedding, we asked people to read the vows and try to guess the constraint before we revealed it to them. You might find it fun to do the same.” Awesome.
Oh, shoplifters of the world
Unite and take over
Shoplifters of the world
Hand it over
Hand it over
Hand it over
— The Smiths, Shoplifters Of The World Unite
Breaking News: GNU/Hurd 1.0 Released!, it’s been time. :-)
What’s a MacBook Pro doing in my fridge?, Jonathan Rentzsch wonders. WJW.
The struggle within, Joel Reymont goes Rails. *sigh*.
Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7, by Liza Daly. It’s a pretty exciting DSL.
Design Tips for Building Tag Clouds, by Jim Bumgardner. Are tags on the decline already, somehow?
Gummi bears defeat fingerprint sensors, the CCC figured this out some time ago already.
“Freiheit statt Sicherheitswahn” – Demonstration gegen den Überwachungsstaat, “Um gegen Sicherheitswahn und die ausufernde Überwachung zu protestieren, gehen wir am 17. Juni 2006 in Berlin unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Sicherheitswahn” auf die Straße. Treffpunkt ist der Alexanderplatz um 14 Uhr. Der Protestzug beginnt um 15 Uhr.”
Planets, bridges, rings, where are the elefants and the tortoise?
I’m an addict, I’m saying no to letting it go
whatever happened to sex, drugs and rock’n’roll
now we just have AIDS, crack and techno.
— Guns N’ Roses, Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll
Gegen Fußball-Print, ein must have für die WM.
Ruby Inside, daily Ruby tips, news, code and frivolity.
Structure and process in patterns, by Ralph Johnson. “A pattern description should tell the reader how to create the pattern in a system where it doesn’t exist, and many pattern descriptions do not.”
08jun2006
Anatomy of a Red Hat Linux Developer, by Patrick Chalmers. “But, as opposed to the stinking, polluted Linux hippies and BSD beards which infest the Internet, I had a very real, very American reason for my rampant evangelism and arrogant ‘tude.”
Object-Oriented JavaScript, by Greg Brown. Also includes an comparision with C#.
Episode 23 of the TakingNotes podcast is an interview with Damien Katz – former Iris/Lotus/IBM smart guy, current heads-down coder on his own CouchDB project.
Oh my god
I can’t deny this
I’ve been taught just to kill and fight this
To bury it deeper where nobody can find it
Like nobody wouldn’t know
— Guns N’ Roses, Oh My God
Student projects 5: ship.bldg, not everyone living in a submarine?
Charity is a categorical programming language currently being developed by The Charity Development Group in The Department of Computer Science at The University of Calgary, Canada.
It happens. Not here, but now., a great campaign by Amnesty International.
Why the light has gone out on LAMP, cute: “I’ll start with MySQL. I learned databases on MySQL and used it for several years. Then I discovered PostgreSQL and realized that in fact, I’d learned nothing of databases.”
Google Spreadsheets Hands-On, and I still don’t need spreadsheets.
Refactoring Everything, Day 28, by chromatic. “Today’s task is adding a SQLite backend.”
Sun should Open Source Swing: what is bad for Gosling is good for propaganda, by Rick Jelliffe (he really liked MockLisp? Ugh.)
Scrap your Nameplate, by James Cheney. “One particularly intractable kind of boilerplate is nameplate, or code having to do with names, name-binding, and fresh name generation. One reason for the difficulty is that operations on data structures involving names, as usually implemented, are not regular instances of standard map, fold , or zip operations.”
A better Kernel#caller, Mauricio Fernandez cleans up some dark corner of Ruby. (And he learned something. ;-))
Ithaca, NY, it has that certain “on the road” feeling.
Arschlochmenschen, allein wegen des Begriffs ‘Be”zieh”ung’ erwähnenswert.
It lives, Damien Katz got CouchDB running.
Fun with Infogami feeds, Gregory Brown uses Ruby to convert Atom feeds to RSS (hell, no!).
Listening to a machine made entirely from windows, a synthesizer called the ANS, built in 1950s Moscow by Eugene Murzin and “constructed around a unique and incredibly intricate photoelectronic system.” Amazing.
Take 42 is a completely rewritten core engine for Vlerq. A lot more sane and readable implementation, IMHO.
And I ain’t standing, never standing
in the shadow of your love
shadow of your love
shadow of your love
shadow of your love
— Guns N’ Roses, Shadow Of Your Love
Seventeen Years Later, June 4th is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Thank you, Tim Bray, for reminding us.
Sage: A Programming Language With Hybrid Type-Checking, that sounds like an awesome type system: “Sage allows a programmer to specify not only simple types such as “Integers” and “Strings” but also arbitrary refinements from simple ranges such as “Positive Integers” to data structures with complex invariants such as “Balanced binary search trees.””
Nested commits for mobile calculi: extending Join, by Roberto Bruni, Hernan Melgratti, Ugo Montanari.
04jun2006
I’m camping until Wednesday, June 7 and can’t update Anarchaia in the meantime.
Software Transactional Memory comes to Pugs, yay.
Talk.org, a new twist on forums.
Piratbyran’s speak at Reboot, under the title The Grey Commons.
Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken, and you thought it was trivial to do. (What you really want is a language with Bignums.)
Gonna call the President
Gonna call a Private Eye
Gonna get the IRS
Gonna need the FBI
— Guns N’ Roses, I.R.S.
The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments, “What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It’s amazing and completely insane.” WJW. F’in awesome.
sudokubundle is a set of sudoku-related packages for LaTeX.
The Architecture of Fight Club, must see yourself. Awesome, somehow.
OpenXMLDeveloper.org is a site for people interested in Office’s new file format.
That whole ‘outside world’ thing sounds like a good idea, you don’t need IO for data crunching. The approach remotely reminds me of Vlerq.
Einstein, the NewtonOS emulator, now runs on OS X (PPC and Intel) too.
The surface of the earth, transformed into objects, how easily you forget about all those minerals.
You’re been in my life so long, can I get through to you
I touch you eyes and it shades my life blue
There’s something I need to say before it’s to late
But I won’t hold you back, while I’m begging you to stay.
— Guns N’ Roses, Just Another Sunday
A Monadic Lightswitch, embedded functional programming, woohoo.
Unlockupd works around a bug in lookupd, a system service which is required for proper operation of Mac OS X. If lookupd fails, the system quickly becomes unusable. Unlockupd periodically checks lookupd’s status and forces it to restart should it fail. The mere fact that I need this gives me the creeps, but I am sick of rebooting.
03jun2006
Das Keyboard Clone, make your own Das Keyboard. (Alternatively, use your iBook long enough and you get that for free. ;-))
The PracTeX Journal, 2006/2, features “Presentations in ConTeXt”.
On Grids, how could I miss this important post by Tim Bray?
When the bough breaks, Mark Pilgrim stops using OS X. It’s not like I use a lot of their software either.
Chaosradio interviews The Pirate Bay, The most recent episode of the Chaosradio International podcast features an interview with The Pirate Bay project that just had been shut down by Swedish authorities.
I think about you
Honey you’re the time my heart says ‘yes’
I think about you
Deep inside I love you best,
I think about you
You know you’re the one I want
I think about you
Darling you’re the only one, I think about you…
Yeah! Hahaha!
— Guns N’ Roses, Think About You
Mosquito & Decamp, _why found some cool Camping-related blog posts.
I still think Kelsey was right all along, Patrick Logan wants to mix Smalltalk and Gambit.
Multidimensional Virtual Classes, by Vaidas Gasiunas, Klaus Ostermann and Mira Mezini.
The Screening Room, by Jon Udell. #5 May 2006: LINQ, with Anders Hejlsberg and Paul Vick.
Take hold my hand, and hold it tighter, ever tighter
You must believe that I love you still
But my strength, it grows weaker, and weaker
And my body has lost its will
— Guns N’ Roses, Dust In The Wind
Grooks by Piet Hein, by far not all, but a good start. Must read.
KLone is a fully-featured, multiplatform, web application development framework, targeted especially for embedded systems and appliances. Written in C++(!).
02jun2006
Stealing it back, the Lisp empire strikes back!
Web 2.0 -> Web 2.71828 18284 59045 23536 -> Web E, genius.
Schreibrecht 2006, “Wenn Orwell die Realität ist—wie sieht die Zukunft aus?”. Wichtig.
Using Forth as a VHDL, by John R. Hart.
The Real Hot 100 shows that young women are “hot” for reasons beyond their ability to look cute in a magazine. That’s a fantastic idea, really.
Refactoring Everything, Day 27, by chromatic. “Today’s task is to test the new Workspace code.”
HTML Slidy: Slide Shows in XHTML, by Dave Raggett. Somehow I like that even more than S5, very cool.
But if this ever changin’ world
In which you live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die
Live and let die
— Guns N’ Roses, Live And Let Die
Why We’re Not Really Engineers, by Curtis Poe. Mentions Alloy, the model-checker.
Designing Components with the C++ STL, by Ulrich Breymann. PDF available for free.
komm du mir mal nach hause, sehr geil, Lydia.
New York, NY 10001, Hanna reports. Really sad to miss the ice cream sleeping on the plane. :-/
Ach komm
Oh komm
Komm mit
Ins Wasser
Weil du
Und Sex
Und wasser
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im wasser liebst
Das schönste was es gibt
Wenn du mich im wasser liebst
— DAF, Sex unter Wasser
Hop is a new higher-order language designed for programming interactive web applications such as web agendas, web galleries, music players, etc. It exposes a programming model based on two computation levels. The first one is in charge of executing the logic of an application while the second one is in charge of executing the graphical user interface.
Macro Facility And Loop Support, by Denys Duchier. “This document presents the experimental and rudimentary macro facility now available in Mozart.” Oz’s syntax is perfect for macros, of course.
Portable entryways, how could we live without them? Just great.
Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.
01jun2006
The Pirate Bay will be up and fully functional within a day or two. Hooray?
Ubuntu 6.06 ‘Dapper Drake’ LTS released, providing five years of support.
xsugar makes it possible to manage dual syntax for XML languages. An xsugar specification is built around a context-free grammar that unifies the two syntaxes of a language. Given such a specification, the xsugar tool can translate from alternative syntax to XML and vice versa.
The Weird World of Bi-Directional Programming, by Benjamin C. Pierce. Excellent slides of an ETAPS 2006 talk. Read them.
Marilyn Monroe didn’t marry Henry Miller
She lived outside the Tropic of Capricorn
Marilyn Monroe didn’t marry Henry Miller
I don’t even know if she knew Henry Miller
— Dan Bern, Marilyn
The Iran Badge Hoax, by Hung Fu. “The world reacted with shock and dismay last month to the news that Iranian Jews were being forced to wear yellow badges, a policy made infamous by the Nazis.” It was a hoax, but I didn’t hear of it at all.
Converting Between XML and JSON, by Stefan Goessner. The whole situation is a bit ironic and screams for E4X.
Re-examining message passing, Dan Sugalski sees the light: “So, this morning when I got off the train it hit me that making message passing really really lightweight is a Good Thing.”
The end of an era for Times New Roman?, Office 2007 will have a sans-serif default font. OMG.
Refactoring Everything, Day 26, by chromatic. “Today’s task is removing around a thousand lines of code while improving test coverage. Really? Really!”
How to reduce base OSX install from 18Gs to 10Gs., by Steve Mallett.
Document Oriented Development, by Damien Katz. “It felt like I had a term to concisely describe the sorts of applications CouchDb is made for.”
So if you want to love me
Then darlin’ don’t refrain
Or I’ll just end up walkin’
In the cold November rain
— Guns N’ Roses, November Rain
teTeX is de-supported as of May 2006. This is very sad, I hope a new maintainer can be found.
MolTalk is a computational environment for doing Structural Bioinformatics. It interprets PDB formatted files and creates an object representation of the structure-chain-residue-atom hierarchy. Through the use of MolTalk, the PDB suddenly becomes an object-oriented database.
The Illustrated Nethack Monsters, a picture for each monster. Nice nurse. ;-)
Manufacturing arches, better preserve those National Parks.
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