Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
28feb2007
Indians shed tears over onions, this one is for Aria.
99 Cent, by Andreas Gursky is the most expensive picture of a living photographer.
A modern eye on ML type inference, by François Pottier. Features many interesting ideas, including a constraint-based view of Hindley-Milner typing that includes ‘let’ generalization.
Hey man, it’s rainin’
It’s rainin’ outside man
Aw, don’t worry ‘bout that
Everything’s gonna be everything
— Jimi Hendrix, Rainy Day, Dream Away
How did Dow computer systems handle February 27 downturn?, by Andy Oram. The stock market is the biggest wtf.
Replacing AppleScript with Ruby, Matt Neuburg tells how.
Trockenes Wasser, praktisch.
PyCon 2007: The Untold Stories, funny and interesting.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica, how nice girls got so casual about oral-sex. PNSFW. Good read, though.
An Analytical Approach to Programs as Data Objects, dissertation by Olivier Danvy. “This work presents an analytical approach to programs as data objects, i.e., to programs whose representation is operated upon by other programs.”
Crochet Atari, WJW.
Minding Your Business With Smalltalk (Part 1 of 4), an interview with Michael Rueger of Impara.
Well I realize that I’ve been hypnotized,
I love your gypsy eyes
I love your gypsy eyes
Alright!
— Jimi Hendrix, Gypsy Eyes
rcov 0.8.0 (Ruby code coverage): new output modes, fix for RSpec woes, superior emacs integration. rcov becomes even more useful.
Mars Bungalow and the Prison of Simulation, a new attempt at a future Martian architecture.
HaskellScript is collective name for Haskell libraries and software that enable the integration of Haskell with the COM/ActiveX framework.
27feb2007
Another Blow to Emacs, Tim Bray likes the new NetBeans. But does it read my mail?
Powerbooks Are Also Bulletproof, gimme one, or I’ll get shot!
Life-Long Computer Skills, a time to agree with Jakob Nielsen. “Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can’t be learned from reading a manual.”
Some drink to remember
Some to forget
Some for satisfaction
Some to regret
I hope a brighter
Day to you I’ve shown
— Ben Harper, Bring The Funk
The flipping ship, WJW. Just look at the toilets!
Sleep Labs of the Soviet Empire, nuts: “the building consisted of two large dormitories either side of a central block,” and the dormitories each “had sloping floors.” This would “obviate the need for pillows.”
Community Doesn’t Scale: Why k5 Is Perpetually Dying, by LilDebbie. With lots of links. :-)
“Pure Virtual Function Called”: An Explanation, by Paul S. R. Chisholm. C++ is sooo nice.
Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet, by Dan Mall. As a supplement, it probably is okay. But pure Flash sites? Ugh.
Krall dich an mich und danke, dass du mir vertraust
Ich will dein fester Boden sein
Obwohl ich selber schwanke
Obwohl ich selber schwanke
— Element Of Crime, Schwere See
Where Our Standards Went Wrong, by Ethan Marcotte at A List Apart. “This is the silent weight of invalid code, a hidden cost we don’t discuss nearly enough.”
Lore is a very new ORM for Ruby.
26feb2007
Humanity Lobotomy, on Net Neutrality.
Why Americans Don’t Like Jazz, it’s all about the lyrics.
Just How Many Drinks A Day Is Bad?, *getsadrink*.
Meine Sitten sind verlottert
Mein Weltbild ist verdreht
Und schmutzig meine Phantasie
Bin schuldig groben Unfugs
Der Voellerei
Und gut zu Tieren war ich noch nie
— Element Of Crime, Sperr Mich Ein
PyCon: Day 3, Jeremy Jones reports. Gotta see r0ml’s talk.
I wasn’t sure it would ever happen: a computer can play Go, wow. But then, I play so bad I even lose against GNU Go.
A brief SASS introduction, SASS is HAML for CSS. Neato.
ODF is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of OpenOffice, while OOXML is an XML-based dump of the internal data structures of Microsoft Office. — Håkon Wium Lie
ODF versus OOXML: Don’t forget about HTML!, by Rick Jelliffe. Finally, the sane format…
Vitaver are Spammers, spread the message and don’t use their services.
Sudoku solutions: who cares?, David A. Black. “And after you’ve worked on a crossword puzzle – more to the point, after you’ve given up – you want to see the solution.”
If you’re happy with nothing you’ll be so very happy with me
The less you expect the more you’ll be pleased
The more you’ll be pleased
— Ben Harper, Less
Some Agile History, by PragDave. Featuring original notes of the Agile Manifesto.
Monads for vector spaces, probability and quantum mechanics pt. I , an intro.
25feb2007
PyCon: Day 2, Jeremy Jones reports.
XP Minimal-Requirement-Test, it runs on 8 MHz and 20 MB RAM. WJW.
The Future of OpenID, talk by Simon Willison. “What it is, how it works and the exciting new things you can build with it.”
Oh diamonds
She had diamonds
She wore diamonds
Diamonds
— Ben Harper, Diamonds On The Inside
Tuples are a handy construct found in many programming languages. Oddly enough, they are lacking in mainstream languages like Java, C#, C++ etc. Says Gilad Bracha.
Website.RenameTo(“Worse Than Failure”), the Daily WTF is not a what-the-fuck anmore.
How to Quickly Open a CD, essential.
We stopped and sat beside a river
He said Jackson Pollock, now, that old boy could paint
I said tomorrow’s Sunday, should we go to church
He said what do you think I am, some kind of saint
— Dan Bern, Jesus’ House
Jesus’ burial site found – film claims, sure.
More logical programming in Ruby: solving Einstein’s riddle (Zebra puzzle), by Mauricio Fernandez.
Interchange Tiles, really great would have been if they’d fit to each other.
24feb2007
Stamping on Hitler, must have.
Shor, I’ll do it, an excellently understandable explanation on how to factor big integers with quantum computers.
lift is yet another web development framework. lift runs inside a Java web container and uses the Scala programming language for coding.
A windhexe is an industrial waste processing machine. It uses high-speed air to turn the waste into a fine powder (often cited examples being: shoes, concrete, old tires).
So won’t you show me a little shame
Won’t you show me a little shame
Won’t you show me a little shame
— Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame
A sight as elusive as a Cheshire cat, photographer spots rare heavenly arc. “[W]hat Saffas saw was what scientists call a circumzenithal arc.”
A 330-foot-deep sinkhole killed at least two teenagers as it swallowed about a dozen homes early Friday and forced the evacuation of nearly 1,000 people in a crowded Guatemala City neighborhood. Officials blamed the sinkhole on recent rains and an underground sewage flow from a ruptured main. Surely the entry to hell!
libxac, provides a mmap with transactions.
amazon db, I’m not really satisfied with that trivialization. How do you query it?
Why be with strangers
When you can be with your friend.
If you’re ever lonely
You know I’m lonely too
— Ben Harper, Brown Eyed Blues
XQilla is an XQuery and XPath 2 library and command line utility written in C++, implemented on top of the Xerces-C library. Gotta try that.
psDooM is a process monitor and manager for *nix systems. It could be considered a graphical interface to the ‘ps’, ‘renice’, and ‘kill’ commands. psDooM is based on XDoom, which is based on id Software’s ‘Doom’. Whoo!
PyCon: Day 1, Jeremy Jones reports. Sounds like a lot of nice talks.
23feb2007
Medieval Muslims made stunning math breakthrough, they had darts and kites, too!
Tumblr hosts tumblelogs for free.
Schoolyard penis seen from space, hooray for mapping.
They say time will
Kill the pain
I say pain is gonna
Kill my time
— Ben Harper, Bring The Funk
How Open Formats Encouraged Open Source, by Mark Rosenthal. Starts with ASCII…
Dabble Commons: Call For Contributors, providing CC-ed data. “Functionally, it’s the same as our paid service except that data you keep in a free application is publicly accessible.” Great!
North America vs. the A-241/BIS Device, “secret Russian plans” for the “complete removal of [the] North American continent.” WJW.
The DVD Shelf: The Departed (2006), by Psycho Dave. I really liked the movie.
Is Snap Preview the most hated Web 2.0 function ever?, Charles Arthur wonders, and explains how to disable it. Yay.
Bayes’ rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don’t work, FDist really is an useful monad.
The decline of rape, what the sharp decline in reported sexual assaults reveals about today’s youth.
Damien has a new job!, Damien Katz now works at MySQL.
I walk down these roads, you drive them like highways.
Not a care in your mind if you’re doing the right thing. In all of my life,
I’ve never been so ashamed to say that I was right.
— Tom Waits, Fall Of Troy
Are our tools making us dumber?, Kathy Sierra explains why I prefer building tools over using them. ;-)
Group Theory, online book by Predag Cvitanovic about Birdtracks, Lie’s and Exceptional Groups.
NZ fishermen land colossal squid, WJW.
22feb2007
March 24 is Shutdown Day, “It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible. If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?”
Vint Cerf: Das Internet ist ein Spiegel der Gesellschaft, da hat der gute Mann recht.
And to the great roll call before him; Engels, Lenin, Trotsky
Castro, Che Guevara, Emma Goldman, Woody Guthrie
After Breznev and Chernenko, after Mao and Ho Chi Minh
Add the name of the last Communist
Add the name of Tom Bodine
— Dan Bern, The Last Communist On Earth
Black Forest Cherry Pie, by bottlefucker. NSFW.
Europe’s Geological Attics, it looks awesome in the altitude.
OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization, by Andrzej Zydron. Uses DITA and xml:tm.
Daniel P. Friedman: A Celebration, slides and video are online. And they played klezmer, yay.
Generalization of Deferred Execution in Python, by Glyph Lefkowitz. “This paper describes the mechanism used by the Twisted framework for waiting for the results of long-running operations. This mechanism, the Deferred, handles the often-neglected problems of error handling, callback juggling, inter-system communication and code readability.”
It s good to have a time clock
Installed on the wall of your house
I punch in whenever I want to
And punch out when it feels right
— Dan Bern, Time Clock
A Freelance Programmer’s Manifesto, by Warren Seen.
First woman honored with Turing Award, “Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers.”
New controversial default rails session storage: cookies, I don’t think that’s too bad.
21feb2007
Aria tumbles at Livejournal. And hungarian popcorn seasoning is totally horrible.
4.2.2.2, finally an IP even I can remember! (When heise.de is down. ;-))
Noncommutative geometry, a free book by Alain Connes.
Oh, how we danced and we swallowed the night
For it was all ripe for dreaming
Oh, how we danced away all of the lights
We’ve always been out of our minds
— Tom Waits, Rain Dogs
AdultSheepFinder helps you meet sexy sheep in your area at the touch of a button!
CommitBit is an administrative interface for software projects.
UNIX Load Average Part 1: How It Works, good to know.
Door of Snow, neato.
I Don’t Know What This New Internet Will Look Like, MichaelCrawford says, “… but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.” Uh.
First Nontrivial Arc Application, a Reddit clone.
Using Category Theory to Design Implicit Conversions and Generic Operators, by John C. Reynolds. “A generalization of many-sorted algebras, called category-sorted algebras, is defined and applied to the language design problem of avoiding anomalies in the interaction of implicit conversions and generic operators.”
CCC warnt vor biometrischer Vollerfassung, “Es hat nur wenige Monate gedauert, bis die vom Bundesministerium des Innern (BMI) versprochene Zweckbindung der für die Reisepässe erhobenen biometrischen Daten der Bürger abgeschafft wird.”
Hey little bird, fly away home
Your house is on fire, children are alone
Hey little bird, fly away home
Your house is on fire, your children are alone
— Tom Waits, Jockey Full Of Bourbon
SpiderTest is an automated integration-testing script that iterates over every page in your application. Checks for validity and broken links.
Transparent Soil and the Gardens of Tomorrow, a small island in a river running through a large European city.
Algebraic Topology, course by John Baez, Mike Stay, Christopher Walker. Here are some notes for an introductory course on algebraic topology.
20feb2007
java2python translates Java to Python.
Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design, by Tantek. Very good.
My Evolution as a Haskell Programmer: Factorial with Arrows, yum.
The Official God FAQ, I couldn’t resist posting that one.
Choppity chop goes the axe in the woods
You gotta meet me by the fall down tree
Shovel of dirt upon a coffin lid
And I know they’ll come lookin for me boys
— Tom Waits, Get Behind The Mule
Intermission over, Audrey is back to Pugs. Yay!
The Design and Implementation of a Dataflow Language for Scriptable Debugging, by Guillaume Marceau, Gregory H. Cooper, Jonathan P. Spiro, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Steven P. Reiss. “Debugging is a laborious, manual activity that often involves the repetition of common operations. Ideally, users should be able to describe these repetitious operations as little programs. Debuggers should therefore be programmable, or scriptable.”
A new proof that the square root of 2 is irrational, great.
Stream Copy YouTube, Revver, Etc., more drawn code by _why.
Never had no destination, could not get across.
You became my inspiration, oh but what a cost.
‘Cause every time I hear that melody,
well, something breaks inside,
And the grapefruit moon, one star shining,
is more than I can hide.
— Tom Waits, Grapefruit Moon
A Noogler’s View of Google, by Steve Yegge.
The Essence of Quantum Computing, “A popular view of quantum computation is that its power (at least the power of certain well known quantum algorithms) derives from a form of parallel computation coming from the fact that the state of a quantum computer can be a superposition of many classical states. I want to argue that this is in fact a bit of a red herring because there are other models of computation that allow formal superpositions and yet clearly don’t provide a form of parallel computation.”
19feb2007
Ruby Implementations Shootout: Ruby vs Yarv vs JRuby vs Gardens Point Ruby .NET vs Rubinius vs Cardinal, by Antonio Cangiano.
VioLet Composer is a tool for writing music from scratch using only a single x86 compatible PC with a soundcard. Nice demo track, too.
Radical Changes and the path to 1.0, news from Ruport, the Ruby report package.
God said, OK, I think you’re projecting
You just like saying his name
I said this dream is mine it isn’t yours
You may be God but this is my game
— Dan Bern, Venus And Serena
Introducing Another Wildly Ambitious Database Project, a database implemented as a RESTful HTTP service. The idea is getting popular.
Bounded space memoization, another new twist, Mauricio does it right.
Tersumus eraser, want have.
Fake drug, fake illness – and people believe it!, hehe.
Modular arithmetic with regular expressions, “Find a regular expression, compatible with GNU grep, that recognises strings of 1’s and 0’s that form the binary expansion of multiples of 7.” Great stuff.
Are you gonna scribble in the dark with a marker,
or do you gotta have the latest pen
If you tell a good joke and somebody laughs,
do we gotta hear it over again
If you give someone a present is it just to make ‘em happy,
or just to keep ‘em at bay
— Dan Bern, Soul
Robot Bombing Game, yay!
The Magic Pens of Ruby, by David A. Black. “I’ve recently found myself describing single objects yielded by iterators as “magic pens.” Though it may sound more psychodelic than technical, it’s actually proven to be a good way to explain these objects and give people a feel for why an iterator would only yield one object in the first place.”
Bistro is a new programming language that integrates the best features of Smalltalk and Java. Bistro is a variation of Smalltalk that runs on top of any Java virtual machine (VM) that conforms to Sun’s Java specifications. That’s great!
18feb2007
Foorore: because notes are already hyperdata, Manuel’s latest heuristic semistructured data format. Looks very good, when I get the time, I may do a Ruby parser for it.
Quantum hype, a grab bag of links, also for quantum programming language extensions.
Using XSLT 2.0 To Optimize Linux Distributions, by M. David Peterson. Kind of sick.
Fall out of the window with confetti in my hair
Deal out Jacks or Better on a blanket by the stairs
I’ll tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past
Send me off to bed for evermore, send me off to bed for evermore
— Tom Waits, Tango Til’ They’re Sore
The Museum of Assassination, “Leaving aside for now whether or not this is the real deal, the window through which JFK was assassinated has been purchased on eBay for more than $3 million.” I still think it was suicide, or am I confusing something?
My Microsoft Google Yahoo Stories, a comparision. (Personal summary: Either go to MSFT Research, or Google. Easy.)
Top YouTube videographers descend on S.F., let’s hope the commenters don’t follow them?
Lesarion ist eine deutsche Lesben-Community.
Aventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming: 6.891, looks like a great Scheme course: “Applications include compilers, computer-algebra systems, deductive systems, and some artificial intelligence applications. […] Topics include combinators, generic operations, pattern matching, pattern-directed invocation, rule systems, backtracking, dependencies, indeterminacy, memoization, constraint propagation, and incremental refinement.”
Complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch
never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to
start over with a working simple system.
— Gall’s Law
wfo is a offline frontend for wikis and blogs. You can checkout a wiki page to a local file, edit the file, and commit to the page. Useful.
The JavaScript knowledge gap, I notice that myself: “So JavaScript is one of the world’s widest-deployed programming languages, and also one of the least-well-known, in the sense of the base of programmers who can competently work with it. That’s a problem.”
killnine is an ASCII art comic.
The Kashering of Coca-Cola, WJW.
The Program.exe Problem, I didn’t know Windows was that evil. Another reason to ban whitespace in file names.
Declutter Your Desk, by Van Mardian. Lovely hack.
17feb2007
Daytrotter is a music blog which features a different band every week.
A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels, by Jason Hoffman. 4000 req/s, whoa!
Cuba Embraces Open-Source Software, with help of RMS.
God builds a church
The devil builds a chapel
Like the thistles that are growing
‘round the trunk of a tree
— Tom Waits, Misery Is The River Of The World
Line Rider “Discarded”, best one ever.
ONE: A Space Odyssey is a minute-long animated LEGO parody of Stanley Kubrick’s Sci-Fi masterpiece. Awesome.
Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Macrovision CEO Fred Amoroso’s Response to Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’, by John Gruber. Excellent, Must read.
Wikisky consolidates astronomical, astrophysical and other information about different space objects and astrophysical facts.
Random Number in a Feed (for Pipes Maybe?), crayon code by _why.
The freedom to be unpopular, “A German court today sentenced infamous Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel to five years in prison for holding a particularly unpopular opinion. […] Whatever happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I admit I have a kind of bad feeling about this, too.
I’m singing this song, it’s time it was sung
I’ve been putting it off for a while,
But it’s harder by now, ‘cause the truth is so clear
That I cry when I’m seeing you smile.
— Tom Waits, Tom Waits Old Shoes (& Postcards)
Cover the Earth, “A mountain quarry in the county of Fumin, China, has been “artificially painted green by the local forestry bureau” as a way “to simulate planted trees.”” WJW.
Churches of remathematization, we had these pictures this week, but they are worth another look.
Pilot and Passengers Thwart Hijacker in Canary Islands, well done.
To check whether people are actually reading long technical requirements or design documents, liberally sprinkle the text with ridiculous quotes, like “My HoverCraft is Full of Eels.” — Elizabeth Hendrickson
Editing Stretchfilm, by Anders Fagerjord. Stretchtext is an amazing way to write.
16feb2007
Self-organizing Stores, PragDave wonders: could the same organizing principles that work for community web sites work for retail stores? I’m sceptic.
Sophie is a digital media assembly tool which allows you to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document. It is an easy-to-use program that let’s you put together documents, slideshows, presentations, annotated videos, and more. Squeak-based, BSD-licensed and RC1 has been released.
An old black tree, scratching up the sky
with boney, claw like fingers
A rusty black rake
Digging up the turnips of a muddy cold grey sky
— Tom Waits, Don’t Go Into That Barn
Apple to re-enter the sub-notebook market, yay…
Why Digg Failed, by David Marcus. Okay, I admit reading it for the first two weeks.
Exploring the Edges of the Metaphorical Web, by Kurt Cagle. “[T]he elegant solutions are the ones that last, the ones that stand most effectively under the stresses of that which is built on top of them.”
With nothing else to do but sit here and grow old, I really like these small houses.
Uncle Biltmore and Uncle William
Made a million during World War Two
But they’re tightwads and they’re cheapskates
And they’ll never give a dime to you
— Tom Waits, Cemetery Polka
Haskell Study Plan, by alpheccar. “So, to understand Haskell you need to forget time, control and state and think about data flow, data transformer, algebra of programming.”
C Is The New Assembly, not really news.
15feb2007
Lowering: A Static Optimization Technique for Transparent Functional Reactivity, by Kimberley Burchett, Gregory H. Cooper, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. “We present a static analysis that guides the sound application of this optimization, and we present benchmark results that demonstrate dramatic improvements in both speed and memory usage for real programs.”
The Water Integrator was an early analog computer built in the Soviet Union in 1936. It functioned by careful manipulation of water through a room full of interconnected pipes and pumps. This machine was capable of solving non-homogeneous differential equations.
Is It Worth Being Wise?, essay by Paul Graham. “A few days ago I finally figured out something I’ve wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.”
And you know that its beginning,
And you know that its the end
When once again we are strangers
And the fog comes rolling in.
— Tom Waits, Strange Weather
Programmable water, WJW.
Programming Language Stories, by Reg Braithwaite. Funny.
SimpleHttp aims to reduce the complexity of Net::Http while providing the most commonly used (by me) http functionality. Nice.
What Firewall Rules?, Kristy Westphal says: “As I prepare to do an audit of my own firewall rules, I’d like to remind everyone that this is a must-do annual exercise for your networks.”
I’ve seen all the highlights,
I’ve been walking all around
I won’t make a fuss, I’ll take a Greyhound bus,
carry me away from here:
Tell me, what have I got to lose?
— Tom Waits, Virginia Avenue
Funky Little Shack, neato.
We Have a Winner (for January) at the “How Rails made me a better programmer”-contest, Pat Eyler says. And it’s me! *g*
14feb2007
Introducing RDFa, by Bob DuCharme. Embed RDF into XHTML.
The Mozilla Manifesto, draft. “The Mozilla Foundation is committed to advancing the principles set out in the Mozilla Manifesto. We invite others to join us and make the Internet an ever better place for everyone.”
Test::Spec on Rails, an extension for test/spec for better Rails testing.
Stranded in the storm trying to see through the rain
Looks like my life’s coming ‘round again
I wouldn’t stop it now even if I thought I could
I was one of the remnants from a burned out scene
— Dead Moon, Down The Road
Special Sauce, by Uncle AngryHands. NSFW.
É®ßπ, the perils of tokenization.
RESTful JSON, this is a really good idea.
Refactoring REST: searching for an abstraction, by Luke Redpath. Could become a Rails hit.
Ragel, everyone’s favourite state machine compiler, now can experimentally generate Ruby code.
Dark days
It’s just a target on their displays
It’s sweet diplomacy in old ways
With just a touch of Vietnam…
— Mardi Gras.BB, Dark Days
Threads in JavaScript?, how to do them with generators.
When You Wish Upon a Beard, Chapter 7 of _why’s Poignant Guide is released! Even starring himself!
Valentine’s Day at xkcd. Truth be said.
13feb2007
Stop-Piracy-Plakate kommentiert, sehr schön.
Frets on Fire is a game of musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible.
Reinventing programming, on Alan Kay’s NSF grant. (Read the paper if you haven’t done it yet.)
I found it in the street
At first I did not see
Lying at my feet
a trampled rose
— Tom Waits, Trampled Rose
MountainWest RubyConf will be held March 16th and 17th in Salt Lake City, UT. It is accepting registrations until Feb 23rd. It’s only $50.
The largest drain hole in the world, wow.
Developing Applications With The Web Server Gateway Interface, EuroPython slides by James Gardner.
Re-usable Web Components with Python & Future Python Web Development, slides by Ben Bangert. An introduction to WSGI.
Alpha Males, Open Source, and Women, Dru says: “What about harassment? What about the whole sexuality thing? […] The simple fact is these are issues when you aren’t respected within the group, and they are non-issues when you have gained the group’s respect.”
Gradual Typing for Objects, by Jeremy Siek and Walid Taha. “Gradual typing provides the benefits of both static and dynamic checking in a single language by allowing the programmer to control whether a portion of the program is type checked at compile-time or run-time by adding or removing type annotations on variables.” Likely to be the future of pragmatic languages.
Camping CRUD for the Lazy, by Gregory Brown. Nice.
Mines of medicine, a “contaminated lake” in Montana is actually “turning out to be a source of novel chemicals that could help fight migraines and cancer.”
MicroApps are small REST applications that are designed from the ground up to be integrated with other applications. Usually, they are not directly useful on their own, but must be integrated into other applications (this is what differentiates a MicroApp from a regular REST application). Great idea!
Must be blind love, only kind of love is stone blind love
Blind love, the only kind of love is stone blind love
With your blind love, oh it’s blind love, stone blind love
It’s your stone blind love
— Tom Waits, Blind Love
Things That Shouldn’t Be in File Names for $1,000 Alex, yes yes yes yes yes! Now do it!
Even better Eratosthenes sieve and lucky numbers, Oleg is amazing. “The algorithm only relies on the successor, predecessor and zero comparison. The predecessor can be easily eliminated. Thus the algorithm can be used with Church and Peano numerals, or members of Elliptic rings, where zero comparison and successor take constant time but other arithmetic operations are more involved.”
Threads suck, a JavaScript implementer says.
DRM in Windows Vista, Bruce Schneier warns. “These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure.”
Top 10 Fashion Suggestions for Nerds, I’m nearly following all of them already!
12feb2007
Solaris Telnet 0-day exploit, WJW. “What’s even more scary is that no exploit code is required to execute, only a telnet client.”
A New Visualization for Web Server Logs, by Raju Varghese. “This article presents the same data in those logfiles in a very different way: as a 3D plot.”
Ruby, SEX and STDs: infectious practices, by Mauricio Fernandez. What to do against warnful code.
Make a pile of trunk tires
and burn ‘em all down
bring a dollar with you baby
in the cold cold ground
Cold cold ground
— Tom Waits, Cold Cold Ground
Rubedo is a source client for Icecast, written in Ruby, that provides a web frontend (running on Camping).
How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise, by Po Bronson. Hmm, I know that effect.
In science, we reserve our highest honors for those who prove we were wrong. But in computer science… — Rob Pike, Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
Making a monad: Martin Erwig’s Dist, “I’d like to eventually turn this into Control.Stochastic; it’s not a Data.* library, as it allows for transititions, functions whose outcome depends on stochastic variables.”
I can’t wait
To see you all
And I’m counting the days dear
— Tom Waits, Day After Tomorrow
LDAP vs relational database, it may sound nice at first, but in the end, LDAP is an even bigger PITA, IMO.
Almost everything happened in the Golden Age, right?, “The decade 1964–1974 seems to have been a “Golden Age”: most of the good ideas of programming languages appeared then.” Very true.
sie haben das recht, Lydia linkt nochmal auf Udo Vetters 23C3-Vortrag zum Thema Hausdurchsuchung. Must see.
11feb2007
Astronomers Report Unprecedented Double Helix Nebula Near Center of the Milky Way, beautiful.
The Definitive ANTLR Reference, beta-book by Terence Parr. That was much needed, and the author sure knows his child.
You ask what is the quality of life?
Seeking to justify the part you play
And hide, fearing it incomplete, to try
To make it any more or less than short and sweet
— David Gilmour, Short and Sweet
The Naked Truth: Authors Who Write in the Buff, “Writing takes a lot of focus – here are a few authors who got rid of all sorts of distractions, including their clothes, while writing.” WJW.
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’, by John Gruber. A careful analysis.
The Missing Link: Dynamic Components for ML, by Andreas Rossberg. “Despite its powerful module system, ML has not yet evolved for the modern world of dynamic and open modular programming, to which more primitive languages have adapted better so far. We present the design and semantics of a simple yet expressive first-class component system for ML.”
Dee, a relational algebra system for Python.
Map fusion: Making Haskell 225% faster, yay for pure languages.
Top 10 Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian, by Heidi Lore. Point #1 is good, the rest is the usual stuff.
She’s a blue light, yes it cannot be denied
She will give you back your pride
She squeezes, she freezes, she does what she pleases
But she says she thinks of others, all the time
— David Gilmour, Blue Light
The Next Big Language, by Steve Yegge. I’m not gonna use it.
Kugelmugel ist ein im Wiener Prater auf einem kleinen Grundstück mit Stacheldraht umzäuntes Kugelhaus von 8 Meter Durchmesser, das von dem Künstler Edwin Lipburger errichtet wurde.
10feb2007
Gyre, the open source, web-based IDE and debugger for Rails. IDE in a browser? Yikes.
The Botanical Arctic Ark-Archive and the Coming of the Space Seed Garden, meet the Doomsday Vault.
Urban encrustations, “Less of a new building type than a kind of architectural fungus spreading across the roofs and walls of the city, Somnath Ray’s design for a “skyscraper of the future” won First Prize this year at eVolo Architecture’s annual design competition.”
Wer Sicherheit der Freiheit vorzieht, ist zu Recht ein Sklave. — Aristoteles
Vieux is a html-template system for Haskell. The basic idea is to define a xhtml template which is used to generate a xhtml document by Vieux. Inspired by Nevow.
A Guide to Grading Exams, by Daniel J. Solove. Explains a lot. ;-)
Babyzeichensprache dient der Verständigung von Eltern und ihren Babys, bevor die Kleinen sprechen können. Sie ist eine sehr wirksame Methode für die zweiseitige Kommunikation mit Ihrem (noch) nicht sprechenden Kind.
Over and over we call… no one hears
And further and further and further we fall
And though we pray that we soon will awake
It is clear, that it’s no dream at all
Our lives are at stake
— David Gilmour, Out Of The Blue
Inverted Drops #002, this time at the Mall of America.
DBM::Deep is an interesting pure perl multi-level hash/array DBM that supports transactions.
Euruko 2006 Videos are online. Unfortunately, mine was lost. :-(
09feb2007
Internet Weather Forecast Accuracy, comprehensive comparison.
Quark is an audio player, for geeks, by geeks. It runs in the background with access provided via a FIFO in the filesystem.
Sedna is an open source XML database management system. It is a XML-native system developed from scratch in C/C++ and Scheme. Sedna is a full-featured database system that supports queries, updates, ACID transactions, security, etc. Direct download.
A Normal Form for XML Documents, formalistic.
Gardens Point Ruby.NET Compiler, “We are pleased to announce the release of a new Beta (version 0.6) of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Implementation is not yet complete but we have now implemented the vast majority of Ruby’s builtin classes and modules.”
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The nights of wonder
— Pink Floyd, High Hopes
The biggest myth in Project Management…, expressing the “done”-part in percent. True.
An Introduction to openQRM, by Kris Buytaert. “Imagine managing virtual machines and physical machines from the same console and creating pools of machines booted from identical images, one taking over from the other when needed. Imagine booting virtual nodes from the same remote iSCSI disk as physical nodes.” Looks neat.
I got somethin’ in my heart, I been waitin’ to give
I got a life I wanna start, one I been waitin’ to live
No more waitin’, tonight I feel the light I say the prayer
I open the door, I climb the stairs…
— Bruce Springsteen, Leah
YouTube and Sequoia file to sell every single Google share they got from the buyout, mwahahaha.
Cheese on Toast, PragDave has a dangerous recipe. Please try it and flickr the results. C’mon!
The £84 million flat, “Four flats overlooking Hyde Park are on sale for a rumoured £84 million each”, WJW.
London as it could be, Richard Rogers “put forward a series of visionary, but not impractical, proposals for transforming a large area of central London.”
08feb2007
R U ‘N Love w/Dynamic Languages?, “Building your own dynamic language is fun and easy!” For people near Stanford.
GMail moved to public beta from private beta in some countries, by Hari K. Gottipati. WJW.
Compiling Embedded ML, “For my master’s thesis I implemented a compiler for Embedded ML, a functional language with a powerful type system that guarantees termination, and gives an upper bound of memory requirements.” Yum!
Don’t Mess With the Brain, by Abanti. “Being awake for brain sugery is interesting but not fun. Actually I’d describe it as terrifing.”
Deep Data: Locations, Maps, and Charts, DabbleDb got first-class location types and simple charts. Bye, bye, Excel?
My overall view of Dave Winer is that he has brilliant ideas ahead of their time and then does such poor implementation that other people must send years cleaning up the mess created by the early adopters on the basis of his half-written, barely-thought-out specifications. — Paul Prescod (thanks!)
Shaun Inman did a really great redesign of his site. Wonderfully elegant.
Inverted Drops #001, a proof-of-concept “geocomic” by me. Comments are welcome!
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. Nifty.
Misguided: The Road Not To Be Travelled, Patrick Logan contra STM.
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby
Ahaa-ahaa-aaaa
Do ya, do ya, do ya, do ya
Ahaa ahaa aaaaa
Now what ya doing, doing to me
— Kaiser Chiefs, Ruby
What’s Wrong with the For Loop, but folds can be curried, and for-loops cannot.
1 liter Bottled Water uses 26 Liters Water + 1 Kg Fossil Fuel + 1 Pound CO_2, evil.
07feb2007
Useless Account, very Web 2.0.
Delete! — Delettering the Public Space is a huge public installation that takes place on Neubaugasse in Viennas 7th District from June 6 20. During this two-week period, all signage will be covered by yellow foils and plastic. Awesome effect.
Skid Mark Safe: Disgusting, But If It Works…, WJW.
XUL-Enhanced Web Apps, by Cedric Savarese. “This article presents a little-known use of XUL (Mozilla’s user-interface language) and shows how to take advantage of its superior performance and accessibility over HTML while maintaining cross-browser compatibility.” Interesting approach.
Mine brain has meditated on the spinning of The Chao;
It is hovering o’er the table where the Chiefs of Staff are now
Gathered in discussion of the dropping of The Bomb;
Her Apple Corps is strong!
— Lord Omar, The Battle Hymn Of The Eristocracy
What’s new in Ruby 1.9, Feb. 07 update. Excellent work by Mauricio Fernandez.
Programming Shorthands, by Todd Proebsting and Ben Zorn. “We propose programming language mechanisms to reduce redundancy in program source code. These abbreviation mechanisms, shorthands, make programs shorter and easier to write and read.” For Perl people.
Brevé is a Python template engine that is designed to be clean and elegant with minimal syntax. I like that.
The Absolute Need To Understand, “One sign of a good programmer is their absolute need to understand.” Full ACK.
Hiroshima, the pictures they didn’t want us to see, scary.
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. — Emma Goldman
Hpricot goodness, Hpricot on JRuby thanks to the Java backend of Ragel and Ola Bini.
Thoughts on Music, by Steve Jobs: Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly. Yum!
OO programmers fall into two categories: Smalltalkers and those who don’t get it, pretty true. ;)
Parasite turns Rails into a Camping creator. Use generators, config files, and rake tasks to build Camping apps faster and better.
And sweet, sweet as a mountain stream, we’ll look
Toward a new day breaking in the east
We’ll meet as every future dream unfolds
And surely quality that is the very least
— David Gilmour, Short And Sweet
My save-excursion, by Steve Yegge. A meta-long post…
Manscape, landscape on skin. Crazy.
Lazy Sunday Review: Nintendo Wii, by GhostOfTiber. “What do we do on the weekend with $250 and enough beer to drown a horse? — Buy a Nintendo Wii.” It’s fun, yeah.
06feb2007
Programming Language Usage Graph from SourceForge, by François Labelle. Interesting, but not representative.
The good ol’ Seattle, Lars hat entdeckt, dass Pearl Jam zum Southside kommen. Da müsste man eigentlich nicht lange überlegen.
The QEMU Accelerator version 1.3.0pre10 is available as Open Source under the GNU General Public License. Now all I need is a x86… ;-)
Ach Deutschland, deine Mörder!
Es ist das alte Lied
Schon wieder Blut und Tränen
Was gehst Du denn mit denen
Du weißt doch was Dir blüht
— Wolf Biermann, Drei Kugeln auf Rudi Dutschke
$foo ist ein neues deutsches Perl-Magazin.
Ehrenbürgerwürde für Biermann, begrüßenswert.
Row and Array Comparisons, PostgreSQL can search in Arrays. Whoo.
The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev.
The micro compact home is a lightweight compact dwelling for one or two people. Its compact dimensions of 2.6m cube adapt it to a variety of sites and circumstances, and its functioning spaces of sleeping, working / dining, cooking and hygiene make it suitable for everyday use.
ECS: Moving from Well-Formed XML to Amply-Tagged XML, by Rick Jelliffe. Hell, nooooo!
Flash Embedding Cage Match, by Bobby van der Sluis at A List Apart. “How can you best embed Flash content?”
Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box, by Alan Pearce at A List Apart. “Create an elastic multi-column layout of equal height.”
timbuktu, Lydia erzählt einen Witz. “Schaffen Sie es, innerhalb von fünf Minuten einen Vers auf das Wort “Timbuktu” zu reimen?”
Two Hands Bad: The Frustrations of Dreyfus Level One, PragDave on playing the piano.
What was it brought you out here in the dark?
Was it your only way of making your mark
Did you get rid of all the voices in your head?
Do you now miss them and the things that they said?
— David Gilmour, Murder
The Great String versus Numeric URL Key Shootout, by Bill Venners. “In his RailConf keynote, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson explained his reasoning for preferring numeric entity IDs in URLs as opposed strings. What’s your opinion?” I prefer strings.
6.189 Multicore Programming Primer, Learn and Compete in Programming the PlayStation 3 Cell Processor. “This course is a brand new IAP 2007 class offering open to all MIT students (undergraduates and graduates).” Wow. And all slides online.
05feb2007
Firebug now lives at Google Project, with public SVN.
First they came for the hackers, but I never did anything illegal with my computer, so I didn’t speak up…
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide, how evil.
I asked God
Do one thing for me
Send me back in time
Send me to Berlin
Let me find
The one they call Hitler
— Dan Bern, God Said No
The ’20s Come Alive, by oldwinebottle. “The roaring ’20s – where jazz took over from ragtime. It was the era of wonderful nonsense, of celebration. These were the years of Louis Armstrong, Jerome Kern, of George and Ira Gershwin, of Richard Rodgers and Lornez Hart, of Vincent Youmans, and Cole Porter.”
RabbitMQ is an MPL-ed Erlang implementation of AMQP, the emerging standard for high performance enterprise messaging.
Urban Knot Theory, “Rumor has it that a university outside Manchester teaches courses in mathematics and knot theory not inside comfortable, well-lit classrooms – the university has none – but down in the sewers, drains, valves, and storm tunnels built long ago beneath the city.”
I’m all tied up, tied up in a knot
And I can’t decide just what it is I’ve got
Did I get out of touch? Did I lose my way?
I’ve not forgot, no, not a single day
— David Gilmour, No Way
BGH-Entscheidung zur Online-Durchsuchung: Schnüffeln auf privaten Rechnern, “Der Chaos Computer Club (CCC) lehnt derartige Online-Durchsuchungen entschieden ab. Es wäre ein weiterer Schritt zur Abschaffung wichtiger Grundrechte, insbesondere des Grundrechts auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung.” Ihr kommt hier nit rein!
04feb2007
The New Atlantis is a quarterly journal devoted to science and technology issues and their relation to social and political affairs.
Liskell is a new syntax frontend for Haskell. Next to its syntax in the form of symbolic expressions — which is known from Lisp — Liskell also features an extended meta-programming facility. Can I get a Hisp, please?
LispMachinery: A wiki for LispM hackers, yum yum.
Love leaves nothin’ but shadows and vapor
We go on, as is our sad nature
Now it’s some old Stones’ song the band is trashin’
If you feel like dancin’, baby I’m askin’
— Bruce Springsteen, All The Way Home
Deductive Mathematics—an introduction to proof and discovery, PDF by Andrew Wohlgemuth.
Conway’s Game of Life in one line of APL, lovely.
Teen girl charged with posting nude photos on Internet, your own pictures are child porn? WJW.
A 3-Instruction Forth for embedded systems work, by Frank Sergeant. “You don’t have to do without Forth because of memory or time limitations. It only takes 66 bytes for the Motorola MC68HC11.”
Riscy Pygness is a Pygmy Forth for the ARM.
We’ve got God on our side
We’re just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
— Bruce Springsteen, Devils and Dust
Abstract Geology, “it occurred to me that you could cover the entire state in an artificial glacier of translucent plastic, preserving the various landscapes of the state.”
Comonads and reading from the future, comonads rock.
03feb2007
Jim Gray Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery, “You will be presented with 5 images. The task is to indicate any satellite images which contain any foreign objects in the water that may resemble Jim’s sailboat or parts of a boat. Jim’s sailboat will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 10 pixels long and 4 pixels wide in the image.” WJW, in a good way.
Animated Engines, by Matt Keveney. I like Wankel’s most.
Now you have your cake
Don’t hesitate
Come on just do it,
Come on just do it
— Bright Eyes, Devil In The Details
delta, an imperative object based calculus, by Christopher Anderson and Sophia Drossopoulou.
CryoPID allows you to capture the state of a running process in Linux and save it to a file. This file can then be used to resume the process later on, either after a reboot or even on another machine. Awesome.
Erlang: parallel-map and parallel-foreach, the joy of side effects…
Software is hard, Salon’s Scott Rosenberg explains why even small-scale programming projects can take years to complete, one programmer is often better than two, and the meaning of “Rosenberg’s Law.”
NoDaddy, “Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names”. Guess where anarchaia.org is registered, hrm…
Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates, by John Gruber. “In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.”
Windows Vista: a Cautionary Tale, “It took another half an hour and one of our savvy developers to explain that this was a feature, not a bug.” Sick.
Jean Ichbiah passes away, he was the lead designer of Ada.
Meta-Compilation of Language Abstractions, a dissertation by Pinku Surana. “High-level programming languages are currently transformed into efficient low-level code using optimizations that are encoded directly into the compiler. Libraries, which are semantically rich user-level abstractions, are largely ignored by the compiler.”
So I’m drinkin, breathin, writin, singin
Every day I’m on the clock
My mind races with all my longings
But can’t keep up with what I got
— Bright Eyes, Road To Joy
Japanese racism: available now at convenience shops near you, says Joi Ito: “I raise this issue whenever I can and have been labeled a “public enemy” by at least one prominent politician because of this. More people need to speak up spread the word.”
Station Z, “an alternative centre of government” located “in the western counties,” consisting of “bombproof underground citadels.”
PL/I for GCC 0.0.14 has been released. It is a PL/I front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection. Whoo…
02feb2007
CSS techniques I use all the time, by Christian Montoya.
Thinking in Erlang (PDF), a guide to functional programming in Erlang for the experienced procedural developer.
A spark printer uses a special paper coated with a layer of aluminium over a black backing, which is printed on by using a pulsing current onto the paper via two styli that move across on a moving belt at high speed. It was a simple and inexpensive technology which produced fairly good results.
Mit fünfzehn hatte ich eine Idee,
ich wollt’ zum Theater, Mama sagte Nee,
man hätt’ mich enterbt, doch wir hatten kein Geld,
und ich folgte dem Ruf auf die Bretter der Welt:
von nun an ging’s bergab.
— Hans Hammerschmid & Hildegard Knef, Von nun an ging’s bergab.
Ubuntu Vista, a lovely story: “My father heard about Vista coming on the news. Since he was interested in getting it, he asked me to obtain it and install it on his computer and he would give some cash in return. I told him I was going to do that, but instead I burned an Ubuntu CD and installed it.”
RSS & Atom — kurz & gut, Jörg Kantel hat ein Buch geschrieben.
A Prompter, is a Teleprompter software, enabling a Macintosh computer to work as a teleprompter. Can you see Web 0.5 calling?
Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X, the newly updated version by Dan Benjamin.
Free FON Wi-Fi routers for America, neato.
When Rageling, Bring a Bird Beak, _why discovered a nice Ragel feature.
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes
Drown her children in the ocean
Manufacture motion lotion
She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes
— Dan Bern, Mountain
Desert elevator, part spaceship, part organism.
CSS Reset, zero all CSS properties in five lines. Very useful.
Leselotte, die bequeme Lesehilfe für Bettleser. Ein Buchkissen!
01feb2007
Dashboard Widget Proposal, “Last night I proposed to Jenny using a Dashboard Widget. Fortunately she still said yes.” WJW.
Mongrel 1.0.1 Baby!, a week ago, why did I miss it?
You don’t have to be afraid, I don’t need you to bow down
I m not god, I’m just the king I realize
Well it might be kind of nice though, if you’d kiss my feet, and call me
all-knowing leader of men.
— Dan Bern, King Of The World
Making Apache httpd Logs More Useful, by Rich Bowen. “You may not know that there are several additional logging modules that provide information about certain types of things that happen on your server.” Contains some useful hints.
Vista Speech Command exposes remote exploit, by George Ou. Big big ouch.
Priceless, chuckle.
I feel like the pinata
Once you take a swing at me
If you could just crack the shell open
I think inside you would find something sweet
— Bright Eyes, Theme From Pinata
And Now, Hpricot 0.5 is Yours, yum yum.
Ruby vs. Haskell: Choose what works, and use both, recommends Adam Turoff.
Leap of Faith, how the popular photo was made.
meld3 is an HTML/XML templating system for Python 2.3+ which keeps template markup and dynamic rendering logic separate from one another.
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