Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31mar2007
ZFS and OS X, growing closer all the time, great news. I guess I’ll have to start saving.
Post-It Sortable Cards, that stick to vertical surfaces, not each other. I wonder how that works.
Swiftcore Analogger implements a fast, flexible asynchronous logging system for Ruby programs as well as client library for sending logging messages to the Analogger process.
All this automatic writing I have tried to understand
From a psychedelic angel who was tugging on my hand
It’s an infinite coincidence but it doesn’t form a plan
So I’m headed for New England or the Paris of the South
Gonna find myself somewhere to level out
— Bright Eyes, If The Brakeman Turns My Way
The Democratic Cannibals, by harrystottle. How to be an anarchist and a democrat at the same time.
Nix is a purely functional package manager. It allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software, and has many other features.
The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. This is so totally awesome!
libpolyml/power_dep.cpp only with -O1, or the
build fails.
Windows Vista restricts GNU GCC apps to 32 MB, Thomas R. Nicely says. Who wants to use Vista anyway…
Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. — Ted Nelson
My first HDR, by Joi Ito. Nice one, but is there a good open-source alternative to Photomatix?
Return to Cinemapolis, the use of video surveillance as a new form of urban analysis. Sick.
30mar2007
Talking to God…, “I met god the other day.” On the train. Great read.
HaMLet-S and Successor ML, “Andreas Rossberg has updated HaMLet, a reference implementation of SML in SML, to support many of the suggestions for Successor ML (sML).” Somehow I now like the syntax…
And I can change the world,
I will be the sunlight in your universe.
You would think my love was really something good,
Baby if I could change the world.
— Eric Clapton, Change The World
Deep Fryer PC, even better than the fish. WJW.
ICANN Board votes against .xxx, Joi Ito says. Great!
XInclude Processing in XSLT, by Erik Wilde. “The XInclude Processor (XIPr), written in XSLT 2.0, implements XInclude and thus may help to reduce the dependency on numerous software packages if XInclude is used in an environment where XSLT 2.0 is used anyway. XIPr is implemented as a single XSLT 2.0 stylesheet.”
Introducing Regular JSON Expressions, for matching null, true or false, integer, double and decimal, irregular and regular strings, numeric ranges around and from zero, collections, relations, dictionaries and namespaces.
…weil sich – glaub ich – durch Twitter tatsächlich unsere Wahrnehmungskompetenz von atomisierten Informationseinheiten verschoben hat. — Timing II
World’s hardest Sudoku puzzle: AL Escargot, nice one.
It’s late in the evening; she’s wondering what clothes to wear.
She puts on her make-up and brushes her long blonde hair.
And then she asks me, “Do I look all right?”
And I say, “Yes, you look wonderful tonight.”
— Eric Clapton, Wonderful Tonight
Fish hatcheries, barrier trees, and a new architectural Tokyo, sketches by Mark Goerner.
Why was Rails only possible with Ruby?, by Curt Hibbs. It is possible in every proper language. Of which there are not many.
29mar2007
The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient, explained by PragDave. “The browser is really not much better than a 3270 (except the resolution is better when displaying porn).”
Homeland Security Classifies TRON as “Sensitive” by ewhac. Classified as fiction.
Emulating Analytic (AKA Ranking) Functions with MySQL, by Stéphane Faroult.
Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
‘Til greed got in the way.
— Bob Dylan, Union Sundown
C/C++ Programming 2: Course Pretest, by Ray Mitchell. Damn, I only got 27 of 35 right. Tricky.
Jesus Myth: The Case Against Historical Christ, by R. G. Price. Just because I like such stuff.
Deep-fry diving for goldfish in Japan, how mean!
Segfaulting own programs for fun and profit, cool tricks with virtual memory.
Rails dropped the use of ; as a separator of non-crud actions on resources and went back to the vanilla slash. This is very good, and actually more in the spirit of REST.
Eva’s such a lucky girl
She don t have a care in the world
She sets fire to the foot of her bed
Leaves the righteous shaking their head
— Dan Bern, Eva
die geschichte der kommunikation, Lydia contra T-Online. Helden.
Goodbye Document-class! (And other RDoc improvements) for the RDoc C parser, by Daniel Berger.
28mar2007
The secret White House comunication system, nice uncovering…
Jen Stark, paper sculptures. WJW.
Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator. Varnish is targeted primarily at the FreeBSD 6 and Linux 2.6 platforms, and will take full advantage of the virtual memory system and advanced I/O features offered by these operating systems. Looks very impressive.
CPAN Module Review: TAP::Parser, by chromatic. I’m still in search of a TAP parser from stdin, so I could just pipe TAP from other languages…
AFNIX is a multi-threaded functional programming language with dynamic symbol bindings that support the object oriented paradigm. The language features a state of the art runtime engine that supports both 32 and 64 bits platforms. Worth a look.
Me, I romp and stomp,
Thankful as I romp,
Without freedom of speech,
I might be in the swamp.
— Bob Dylan, Motorpsycho Nightmare
Hacking John McCain, lovely, lovely, lovely! Hack on.
Rails on 1.9: first benchmarks, YARV exposed to non-synthetic tests, by Mauricio Fernandez. The Rails source code is pretty un-YARV-ishly written, it could be lots faster, I think. (E.g. ERB is a total VM killer.)
“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”, by el fauno. “Not so long ago, after a night of heavy drinking during my self-destructive years, I climbed over a chain-link fence and cut both my hands while negotiating the difficult maneuver. Difficult for a drunk young idiot anyway. When my buddies berated me for doing something so dumb instead of just walking 20 feet around, I remember answering “I just wanted to know how it’s like for the illegal immigrants.” Last February, I got the chance to really learn what’s life like for an illegal in the US. And getting your hands cut is not the worst of it, by the way.”
The BinProlog Experience: Implementing a High-Performance Continuation Passing Prolog Engine, by Paul Tarau.
Why To Not Not Start a Startup, essay by Paul Graham.
Words have power
Words have meaning
Words become things
And words become actions
— Dan Bern, Hiroshima
Disturbed About Reactions to Kathy Sierra’s Post, by Stephanie Booth. “[O]ne quick look at most of the posts coming out of Technorati or Google Blogsearch shows (still now, over 15 hours after Kathy posted) a collection of knee-jerk reactions, side-taking, verbal lynching, and rising up to the defense of noble causes. […] I tend to despise the mainstream press increasingly for their use of manipulative headlines, but honestly, what I see some bloggers doing here is no better.”
My Type Design Philosophy, by Martin Majoor. We should mix more serif and sans-serif fonts.
Agitation, Power, Space: An Interview with Ole Bouman, co-founder of Volume, both a magazine and a “global idea platform… dedicated to experimentation and the production of new forms of architectural discourse.” Wonderful typography, too. (And a butt-ugly website.)
I hope you take Anarchaia out tonight and get it drunk. — Gavin McGovern on yesterday’s anniversary
Plopp, The Cool 3D Painting Tool is now available for download “Plopp is the first painting tool for kids where you can paint 3D objects very easily! Just paint in 2D and Plopp will transform your paintings into 3D objects!”
TumbleWalls are physical tumblelogs!
27mar2007
Celebrating Two Years of Anarchaia, this tumblelog is now two years old, but shows no sign of age. Tumble on!
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
Which nobody can deny.
— For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow
Croquet SDK 1.0 released, “The Croquet Consortium has released version 1.0 of Croquet, the 3-D virtual environment based on Squeak.”
Semi-identical twins discovered, “They are the result of two sperm cells fertilising a single egg, which then divided to form two embryos – and each sperm contributed genes to each child.” They still teach here that this is impossible…
Teenage eyes were open wide
Don’t you think we know by now
How foul and plagued our future cries
From what you’ve handed down
— Dead Moon, 13 Going On 21
What makes a great photo?, with truly awesome examples. Must see.
DocBookWiki can display DocBook documents online. Different from the other applications, which convert a DocBook document into HTML first, in order to display it online, DocBookWiki converts it on the fly, so that the format for saving the document will still be XML (DocBook). DocBookWiki can also be used to edit a DocBook document online, from the web.
jQuery OSCMS presentation slides, by Steve Wittens.
Applied Web Heresies, Avi Bryant’s Etech 2007 slides. I’m rather skeptic, especially about the URIs.
How Naming Works At Microsoft, ehehehe.
No sex, please: we’re Japanese – and married, “The secret of Japan’s exceptionally low birth rate is out – more than a third of married couples do not have sex”. It’s more fun not to be married, anyway. :-P
Ruining the User Experience, by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart. Most don’t need a tutorial for that. ;-)
Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe, by Ruth Stalker-Firth at A List Apart. “Cultural probes are a “quick and dirty” way of looking into users’ thoughts.”
Cross-Browser Scripting with importNode(), by Anthony Holdener at A List Apart. “I ran into difficulty with the DOM-compliant approach I had envisioned. A two-day journey into the world of XML DOM support for web browsers lay between me and a satisfactory solution.”
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. — Isaac Asimov
Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech”, why Kathy Sierra cancelled her ETech presentations. This really really sucks. Shame. “Freedom of speech—however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life.”
MasterView: Evolution of a WYSIWYG Template Engine, Jeff Barczewski’s talk at the Mountain West Ruby Conference.
26mar2007
Predicate Dispatching: A Unified theory of Dispatch (1998), by Michael Ernst, Craig Kaplan, and Craid Chambers. “The method selected to handle a message send can depend not just on the classes of the arguments, as in ordinary object-oriented dispatch, but also on the classes of subcomponents, on an argument’s state, and on relationshipsbetweenobjects.”
Metaprogramming JavaScript Presentation, by Adam McCrea.
Ubuntu 7.04, “Feisty Fawn” has been pre-released.
I drop things out of windows
I wrap things ‘round my head
And you would too
It’s what you’d have to do
You would–too
— Dan Bern, Comme Vous Le Faites Tous
Re-starting the HTML Engine, by Kurt Cagle. The code rots already. :-)
Barcamp LA 3, John Wiseman was there. Sounded good. I wish it was easier to find slides etc.
The PostRailsMonkey Manifesto, Mauricio seems to be bored. ;-)
It’s a hard life and no one’s to blame
When God’s not on the morning train.
If Cain don’t kill Abel, Abel kills Cain
And tears now shed are shed in vain
For Kennedy, and Jesse James
And Joan of Arc and Kurt Cobain.
— Dan Bern, Kurt Cobain
Amplifier House: Original Domestic Soundscapes, get a loud house.
Delegation and Inheritance, Patrick Logan on Pepsi and Coke. (I’ve been thinking about delegation-only object systems lately, and they are not trivial to design propely.)
25mar2007
How to Sketch a Polynomial, useful.
mod_line_edit is a general-purpose Apache filter for text documents. It operates as a simple on-the-fly line editor, applying search-and-replace rules defined in a configuration or .htaccess file. A bit like sed.
Distributed revision control with Mercurial, a book by Bryan O’Sullivan. Has made great progress since I’ve last looked at it.
Turning over upside down
Blowin round and round and round
Turning over wrong side up
Can barely fill my coffee cup
— Dan Bern, Turning Over
We just got xvid working on the Apple TV, yay!
The Mexican Goat Roast, “In the mountains of Mexico the villagers gather and celebrate together on births, on weddings and funerals, high days and happy days. They celebrate with blue corn tortillas, mashed beans, chicken. For the main meal, however, there is the goat, Mexican roast goat. Eating it might be half the battle, with its strong gamy taste. The other half, as GI Joe knew, is knowing how it got there.”
In retrospect, “Light Jazz” was not such a good choice., “It turns out an MRI is like a colonoscopy; Everyone’s had one, but no one talks about it.”
Silver Anniversary, Patrick Logan uses Emacs for over 25 years. Well, I’m not even that old, but of these, I have used: TECO EMACS on ITS (emulated), ZMACS (emulated), Micro Emacs, XEmacs and now for a long time only GNU Emacs.
Welcome to OS History, beyond Unix. (Nothing important other than ITS, I’d say. ;-P)
Python web development and frameworks in 2007, a good overview.
Roger and out good buddy
I feel you in the air today
I know you gave for your country
I feel you in the air today
— Neil Young, Roger And Out
20 things to keep in mind when visiting Germany, reasonable items.
Zsh lovers at grml.org. Lots of useful stuff.
xmonad is a lightweight X11 window manager, written in 400 lines of Haskell.
24mar2007
ZIRC is a 100% Zsh IRC client. Yikes.
Reasons to Live, by Sherman T. Biswick. SMUG classic.
Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a scale rating the relative pain caused by different Hymenopteran stings. “3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.” WJW.
Thoughts like a thread through a foam device
Liquid bread and rubber ice
Make a promise, grow teeth, go to bed
Wake up when you’re dead
— Meat Puppets, Station
The AuthenticationFairy, by Curtis Poe. How to teach OO with fantasy figures.
Squawk: Twitter Growl notifications, by Damien Tanner. Yay!
Why use Atom Publishing Protocol for REST?, David van Couvering explains. I think it adds quite some complexity…
OHM is a library for serving Python objects as REST-style HTTP APIs, and for consuming REST-style APIs as Python objects. Looks a bit like ActiveResource.
Take Control of SSH, Draft Excerpt: Reverse Tunnels, this will be a useful ebook.
And wanting something warm and moving
Bends towards herself the soothing
Proves that she must still exist
She moves herself about her fist
Sweet communist
— Neutral Milk Hotel, Communist Daughter
Chatroom users ‘egged on father to kill himself live on webcam’, a father-of-two hanged himself live over the internet in Britain’s first ‘cyber suicide’. Reminds me of ripper
Patterns from the Alhambra, Moresque tiles.
SwiMP3 and other waterproof MP3 players, by Joi Ito.
Hpricot and Markaby Elope, _why draws Hpricot with a builder syntax.
23mar2007
Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation, base2 by Dean Edwards.
Sudokuto is a game for 2 players. The game starts with an empty (or given) Sudoku-board where the players shall fill in the numbers. The winner is the persons who either manage to fill in a whole row, column or box, or inserts the last legal number. I came up with that, too.
A Tattoo for the Educated Man, that one’s cool.
There’s a crack in the smoky air
And the sound from the outside stair
Electricity fills my mind
Lost in time, that’s all I seem to need
Blind me, blind me
Blind me
— Eyes Adrift, Blind Me
The Smalltalk Archeology Archive, “On this page you will find information about various old implementations of Smalltalk with screenshots.”
Message-oriented (duck-typed) exceptions, nice trick by Mauricio Fernandez.
The Contemporary MCL Situation, from Kafka’s point of view: “Are the Lords of Lisp up there in the turrets of the castle looking down at them and laughing? Or is the castle actually abandoned, vacant, falling to ruin?”
No Ifs, Ands, or Buts: Uncovering the Simplicity of Conditionals , by Jonathan Edwards. Very interesting approach, and the new Subtext looks great.
Some Thoughts on Semantics, by Kurt Cagle. “[W]e walk around with an array of symbols in our head, each of which have a cloud of associations that are tied into those symbols, and those associations are not just other words but emotions, remembered sensations, memories comic or tragic.”
SqueakFest ‘07 at Columbia College Chicago, on August 1, 2 and 3.
I’ll never be your beast of burden
My back is broad but it’s a hurtin
All I want is for you to make love to me
— The Rolling Stones, Beast Of Burden
Wondermark 285: In which a Lot of Words elbow for Room, I so identify with this one.
Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me, a useful list by Andrés Taylor.
22mar2007
Anarchaia on Twitter, if you are not being interrupoted enough. (C’mon, add yourself as a friend!)
The Klezmer Shack is a blog about Klezmer. “Best viewed with a Tuba.”
Niccolo Paganini: Virtuoso or Devil?, “Paganini’s demonic reputation became so widespread that his talent was often attributed to the belief that he had help from the devil.”
Pipes and bathtubs, sprinklers and fountains!
Freshwater used as a dump for oil and nuclear waste!
Desert people turns humble he said
They know what they have
But do they know what they lose when we flush?
— Pain Of Salvation, Water
Sudokube is effectively a Rubik’s cube, but instead of being made of colours, it is made of numbers. The idea of the game is to get the numbers 1-9 on each side of the cube. Great idea.
Gewaltbereitschaft kann auch durch Lektüre von Texten verstärkt werden, Florian Rötzer sagt: “Nach einer Studie, die die Wirkung von Gewaltdarstellungen in der Bibel untersuchte, können nicht nur Filme oder Computerspiele aggressiver machen, sondern auch durch Gott sanktionierte Gewalt in Texten.” Gottesdienst FSK 16? :-)
SYWTWAB 7: Reviewers, And How Not to Kill Them, by PragDave. “It’s really quite a shame that you have to show it to other people.”
I now issue the call, are you ready to fight
Fight all together as one for the right to be free once again
Tonight we will win
— Manowar, Call To Arms
Science Fiction and the City: Film Fest Update!, with great screen shots.
Google’s Next-Gen of Sneakernet, disks on trucks. Imagine the bandwidth.
Top 15 Unintentionally Funny Comic Book Panels, very funny.
21mar2007
The Angel Problem has been Solved! (Maybe), still seems like a fun game to play.
I am agnostic but I hang on a cross
Faithless saintless my sin stabs
I wear the crown of oblivion
Rule and aching void watch my sun burn out
— The Distillers, Sing Sing Death House
Rich exception hierarchies, multiple inheritance in Ruby, Maurico Fernandez shows a nice trick.
How popular are various programming languages?, based on comp.lang newsgroups.
Tracula is a Ruby library to make working with Trac easier, by James Britt.
My eyes start to flicker flicker
My mouth starts to drip
My heart starts to tinker tinker
What can I do when I’m bound like this with you
— The Distillers, I Understand
oc-FP: An OCAML implementation of John Backus’ FP system, by Christophe Deleuze. Cool toy.
The Science of Swearing, “Stop giving god free publicity”. OMS.
20mar2007
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, full-text PDF available.
Summer of Code 2007 Ideas for Ruby.
CCCeBit 2007: Verantwortung für den Bundestrojaner abgelehnt, “Beim diesjährigen Versuch des Chaos Computer Club (CCC), dem Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz Nordrhein-Westfalen ein symbolisches Trojanisches Pferd zu überreichen, stießen die verblüfften Chaoten auf einen leeren Stand.” Feiglinge!
Highrise has been launched.
Now, I want you to know that while we watched,
You discover there was no one true.
Most ev’rybody really thought
It was a childish thing to do.
— Bob Dylan, Tears Of Rage
The Great Lua Language, Michael Neumann found out what Lua means in Hawaiian. Hehehe.
Grids are Good (PDF, 8.3 Mb), Khoi Vinh’s and Mark Boulton’s grid talk from SXSW 2007. Highly recommended.
Greek Gods Family Tree, most important: Chaos. Surely the old Greek didn’t like to clean up their rooms.
A One Word Meta Compiler, one of the finest Forth achievements ever.
Vista Smalltalk: In Browser, Lisp Syntax, it’s nice how the syntax can be unified.
Joining Sun, Ian Murdock goes Sun.
Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (PDF), John Backus’ Turing lecture.
I know what you words can mean
Call me call me any anytime
Call me for a ride
Call me call me for some overtime
Call me in my life
— Blondie, Call Me
John Backus has passed away, sad to hear. His work on functional languages like FP must not be forgotten, and the liberation from von Neumann style is still in progress.
Expressing untested and untestable constraints in Schematron, by Rick Jelliffe. Not many testing things support these declarations.
Adventures in Real Estate, I want a house-in-the-sky too!
19mar2007
Symmetry on Wikipedia.
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
Where have all the Flowers gone…, by Peter, Paul and Mary with Pete Seeger. Gives me the creeps, in a good way.
Type foundry design procedure, this is not obvious.
[Knuth’s WEB] idea is retrieving programs from document. Mine is making programs to tell what they do, by choosing proper programming languages. — Yukihiro Matsumoto, ruby-talk:243781
Career advice for Nish, most useful Venn diagram I saw for some time.
Category Money forgery on Wikipedia. So useful!
The EURion constellation is a pattern of symbols found on a number of banknote designs since about 1996. It is added to help software detect the presence of a banknote in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers.
It’ so amazing
When you’re feeling strong
It’s so amazing, yeah
It’s so amazing
Don’t you get me wrong
It’s so amazing, yeah
— Juliette & The Licks, So Amazing
Rejoice!, a really good Indexed card by Jessica Hagy.
The Shor Quantum Error Correcting Code, and a Monad for Heat.
Perl in the News, Dave Cross writes that as if it was good.
Amazon Susceptible to Cross Site Request Forgery, Nitesh Dhanjani says, and they didn’t fix it in over a year. Ouch.
FizzBuzz 2.0: Adventures in Beautiful Code, by M. David Peterson. FizzBuzz in XSLT. Oh yay.
And I know you got the feeling,
You know, I feel it crawl across the floor
And I know it got you reelin’
And honey honey the call is for war
And it’s wild wild wild wild.
— Patti Smith, Ask The Angels
MountainWest RubyConf, Day Two, by Gregory Brown. Really too bad that Kirk Haines was sick, he wanted to tell a bit about Rack.
Mathematicians Map E8, an 248-dimensional Lie group.
SYWTWAB 6: Wrandom Writing Wrules, by PragDave. Essentially he says “Don’t use Word”. :-)
18mar2007
Computer Literacy, (PDF, 33 MB!), r0ml’s PyCon 2007 keynote. Worth the load.
Happy Birthday RMS, two days late, but let me gratulate too.
It’s a long road out of here
Don’t leave the light on
I ain’t coming home
You gotta be strong
— Juliette & The Licks, Long Road Out of Here
CEAN 1.1, the Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network, is online, with 200 packages. The base distribution is a mere 3.3 Mb, yay. But it does not run on OS X 10.3.9. :/
After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration (PDF, 13.5 MB), awsome SXSW 2007 slides. Enjoy.
MountainWest RubyConf, Day One, good overview by Gregory Brown.
I still feel the beat
By the heat
Of your light
— Juliette & The Licks, By the Heat of Your Light
Primality regex, WJW.
Evolution of Man, warning: big picture.
Intelligent people tend to be more secular, “The broad consensus of research shows that people with higher IQs tend to be less religious, not more so.”
17mar2007
Sudoku by Regexp, WJW.
X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2, a comparison.
SQL Injection Cheat Sheet, neato.
We don’t need no side effect-ing
We don’t need no scope control
No global variables for execution
Hey! You! Leave those args alone!
— Another Glitch in the Call
Instacalc provides an on-the-fly evaluating web calculator. Nice thing.
Feeling unhappy? Try ligatures, “Surprisingly, participants turned out to frown less, and could therefore be said to have been “happier”, when reading text with the enhanced typography.” The s-t and c-t ligatures plainly rock, too bad there is no real support for such stuff outside of OS X.
Cover Bands of Space, Brian Eno on sound and the city.
Comedy Gold, s/cat/poop/g must be funny for three year olds.
How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup, essential trick shown at Position Is Everything.
There are roadblocks everywhere and only suffering on TV
Neither side will ever give up their smallest right along the road to peace
— Tom Waits, Road To Peace
Managing U.I., slides by Khoi Vinh at Future of Web Apps 2007. Heck, even the slides use a grid!
Five Principles to Design By, by Joshua Porter. Very good points.
16mar2007
StudiVZ: Hacken verboten, WJW.
cmsbox, ein Seaside/Squeak-basiertes Content Management System. Frontseite validiert XHTML 1.0 Strict, nett. Leider aber weder Open-Source, und es hat grottige URLs.
A Relational View of the Semantic Web, by Andrew Newman. So, where are the suitably fast SPARQL engines for our web apps?
One day
It will happen
One day, one day
It will all make sense
— Björk, One Day
An Efficient Implementation of Self, a Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Language Based on Prototypes, by Craig Chambers, David Ungar, and Elgin Lee. Finally I found that great paper again.
Red Pill… or how to detect VMM using (almost) one CPU instruction, Joanna Rutkowska explains how to figure out if you are virtualized.
You have won second prize in a beauty contest; collect $10, how to play Monopoly quicker. But that’s the whole fun of it!
WOW! Best Rube Goldberg Ever!, “This is from the guys that brought you the Dorm Room Rube Goldberg. They continue to amaze us with their intricate set ups and execution.” Really good one!
I remember how we used to sing
Writing poems in your bed sit
Finding time to be the passenger
But there you are you never saw me leave
— The Kooks, See the World
Web Typography Sucks, SXSW 2007 slides by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton. Includes a great way to grid design.
HTMLEntities is a simple library to facilitate encoding and decoding of named (ý and so on) or numerical ({ or Ī) entities in HTML and XHTML documents. Good stuff by Paul Battley.
15mar2007
Bruce Sterling gives blogs 10 years to live, “SXSW Science fiction writer and professional pundit Bruce Sterling has cracked bloggers with the extinction stick, saying the plebs will crawl back into their ooze by 2017.” It won’t hurt, and the hard core will stay.
The Riemann Hypothesis, by Tribikram Pati. Abstract: “We give a disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis.” Exercise for the interested reader: Prove the proof.
Metahyping, aaaah!!! Metahype!!!1einseinself!!
Confirmed: Google Hates XHTML, I still send XHTML as text/html, and you are not gonna stop me.
Acid morning starts in bathroom, WJW. Must have!
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
— Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma
Web censorship spreading globally, Tor while you can.
Kaspersky: Sicherheitssoftware-Anbieter könnten Kampf verlieren, s/Kampf/Arbeitsplätze/
Langes s auf Wikipedia.
Anyway, as might be usual if more people celebrated Pi day, I give you pi * thanks = thanks thanks thanks tha — Adrian Cachinero
Heysesche s-Schreibung in Frakturschrift, die sollte jeder richtige Deutsche beherrschen.
picol, a Tcl interpreter in 550 lines of C code, interesting one.
Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States, good idea.
Oh when I’m feeling lonesome and I’m feelin’ blue
there’s only one way to change
Now I walk down the street now lookin’ for a man
one that knows my Mary Jane
Mary Jane, Mary Jane it’s my Mary Jane
— Janis Joplin, Mary Jane
Fort Bourtange, a Dutch star fort, nifty!
Your GMail and Google Desktop Data is Vulnerable. Again, Nitesh Dhanjani says. Just use POP. :-)
es wurde ein problem festgestellt, argh, Lydia!!
14mar2007
Today is π-Day!, enjoy
Independence, entanglement and decoherence with the quantum monad , more Haskell magic.
CruiseControl.rb is a continuous integration tool. Its basic purpose in life is to alert members of a software project when one of them checks something into source control that breaks the build. Rails-based and from ToughtWorks.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
— Bob Dylan, Blowin’ In The Wind
Virb puts all of the things that make you you – photos, videos, blogs – in one place. A tasteful MySpace? Neato.
Second OpenBSD remote hole in more than a decade!, Pwned!
High-Rise, about tower demolition, not 37signals.
bubbl.us is a collaborative brainstorming and mindmap application that uses Flash and has a really good interface. Well done! (Export is coming soon, I hope it will do XOXO.)
Sidewards expansion, awesome pencil carving.
Myths, GUID vs Autoincrement, yeah, primary keys better be random.
And them distant ships of liberty on them iron waves so bold and free,
Bringing everything that’s near to me nearer to the fire.
— Bob Dylan, Caribbean Wind
Let free music files ring, thanks, rms.
Top 5 Things That Should Be Taught In Every School, I completely agree.
2000 Years and the Spread of Religion, “an interesting attempt at showing the spread of today’s religions over Eurasia.”
The self-organizing map (SOM) is a subtype of artificial neural networks. It is trained using unsupervised learning to produce low dimensional representation of the training samples while preserving the topological properties of the input space. This makes SOM reasonable for visualizing low-dimensional views of high-dimensional data, akin to multidimensional scaling.
Death and Passion, James Britt stepped down being the editor-in-chief of Ruby Code & Style, but he says it will live on.
13mar2007
30 Strangest Deaths in History, let me embrace the moon… blubb blubb… blubb.
Order Of The Science Scouts Of Exemplary Repute And Above Average Phsyique, get me #1, #8 (*g*), #9, #13, #18, #20, #24, #32, #35, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41 (see #8), #43, #47, #50, #56, and #70. Awesome!
Bite the hand that feeds
Tap the vein that bleeds
Down on my bended knees
I break the back of love for you
I break the back of love for you
— Placebo, Post Blue
monit is a utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and devices on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations.
Sex 2.0 auf mundmische, einer Art deutschem Urban Dictionary.
Unit testing FizzBuzz is like drawing up blueprints when you need to make a sandwich. — Giles Bowkett
Thanks, Make!, chromatic thanks for GNU Make. I’ve yet have to see a better build system, too.
Oh, sister, when I come to knock on your door,
Don’t turn away, you’ll create sorrow.
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow.
— Bob Dylan, Oh, Sister
Ruby 1.8.6 released, yum!
So. A Tumblelog, Bob Hutchison starts tumblin’ too. And I love what he says about Anarchaia: “Even though most of what he posts I’ll come across anyway, I hate it when Christian takes a vacation.”
12mar2007
HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST), an activity diagram by Alan Dean to describe the resolution of the response status code, given various headers. Print it and hang it on your wall.
OpenID screencast, by Simon Willison. Must see. Essential.
Jyte allows you to make claims and share credibility. Uses OpenID.
Most Realistic CG Render Ever, the beard is a bit wrong, but it’s awesome.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh’s tribe,
They’ll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered.
— Bob Dylan, When The Ship Comes In
Rethinking Homework, by Alfie Kohn. Anyone still doing it?
SYWTWAB 5: Finding Your Voice, “First and foremost, always remember that the book is about the reader, not the writer.”
Intellectual property 2.0?, Matt Asay wonders. The time has come…
Why Publish CS Papers Without Code?, I really hate that, too.
Couple times a day–I want it so bad I can taste it
Couple times a day–Just as soon burn it up and waste it
Rest of the time, I’m just kinda
Drifting along
— Dan Bern, Drifting Along
Ruby in Google’s Summer of Code 2007, call for mentors.
Earth’s magnetic field reversals mimicked in the lab, “The switching of the poles can be studied in a tub of molten metal.”
Dynamic DST, Patrick Logan says: A fairly good indication of software brittleness reared up today in the US, and anywhere else time is computed for the US. Dealing with times and dates totally sucks.
11mar2007
Indexing Heterogeneous Data (PDF), by Nilesh Dalvi and Dan Suciu. Essentially everything I should have needed to know about implementing semistructural databases…
The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. Great idea.
I need a chorus, a theme
Something to make all this tie together and make sense
But for now I got no chorus and no theme
I keep running off to someplace that I’ve never been
To do something quite unimportant, to stay out of sight
So people other places might think I’m somewhere
Doing something quite important
— Dan Bern, Anger
Functional Family: Mock theta mystery solved, says Erica Klarreich. “It is the so-called final problem of the legendary Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Meet the one wheel balancing scooter: suck it, Segway, want have!
Throughout IRAN, “This is a gallery intended to show views of other side of Iran, different with what you may have seen in the media.” Beautiful stuff.
Sound of silver talk to me
makes you want to feel like a teenager
until you remember the feelings of
a real life emotion of teenager
then you think again
— LCD Soundsystem, Sound Of Silver
Lib B is Joost’s RDF triple store. Looks rather good.
When you just need a bunch of gems quick…, by Gregory Brown. Eeeech!
10mar2007
How to remove a security ink tag, always good to know.
The Thinking Machine, Jeff Hawkings wants to mimic the human brain, using a Hierarchic Temporal Memory.
X-ray Kiss Photo, sweet.
Oho-ho-ho, we got nowhere to go
And it may sound funny, but it’s true
Hangin’ out in 100 B
Watching Get Smart on TV
Thinkin’ about
You and me and you and me
— Ramones, Danny Says
Problems of Data Access Layers, Lemonodor once extactly wrote what I could need now.
SYWTWAB 4: Readers on Your Shoulders, “When we write a paragraph, wouldn’t it be nice if we could test it with readers?”
Architectural Divorce Court, “A 43-year-old German decided to settle his imminent divorce by chainsawing a family home in two and making off with his half in a forklift truck”, WJW.
Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin’ to wipe out ev’ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this’ll be the saturday
You’re reachin’ your peak
— Tom Waits, The Heart Of Saturday Night
09mar2007
Call for Participation Chaos Communication Camp 2007, to Infinity and Beyond!
Heresy and Fried Onions, Avi Bryant says: “A lot of the design decisions that are unconsicously adopted by modern frameworks like Rails or Django were made 10 or 15 years ago.”
Now the big bang was like a baby getting born
And the parents who gave it birth just kind of went away
And the baby just keeps getting bigger and bigger
And the parents just never came back
— Dan Bern, I Believe
Is death a human right?, gndn asks. “I propose that anyone who honestly wishes to terminate their own life should be provided with the means to do so humanely, reminiscent of (though perhaps more gentle than) the infamous suicide booths popularized by Futurama.”
Monads through Pictures, by Azad Bolour. Rather confusing explanation, I think.
Well maybe God himself is lost and needs help
Maybe God himself he needs all of our help
And he’s lost upon the road to peace
And he’s lost upon the road to peace
Out upon the road to peace.
— Tom Waits, Road To Peace
Seven habits of effective text editing 2.0, video and slides for a talk by Bram Moolenaar, the author of Vim.
Narrow habitation, nah thanks.
08mar2007
The Role of Programming in the Formulation of Ideas, Google video of a Gerald Jay Sussman talk given at Dan Friedman’s 60th birthday. Good one, but SICM is still all glibberish to me.
SYWTWAB 3: The Hero’s Journey—Are You Experienced?, “You also have to allow your hero to develop. A hero starts off uncertain, and will take whatever small victories that she or he can take.”
International Women’s Day is today.
Agarrame, mi vida
Soon the desert will be gone
Soon you will be dancing the fandango.
— Bob Dylan, Romance In Durango
Fennel is a library of C++ components for data storage and processing. Could be useful.
Spreadsheet error rates, they are all wrong. Wow.
Super-Close Google Maps Zooms, this actually scares me a bit.
China’s Nuclear Threat, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb and STFU, by nostalgiphile.
Gebete statt Punk, Peter Nowak über die Räumung des Ungdomshuset.
Everybody said don’t run off like that
Leave something behind for the birds
I said man, whatever, I ain’t nailed down
The wind is bound to take it anyway
— Dan Bern, Learning To Drive
Contraption Structure Bridge, that building looks exactly like what I wanted to build once…
An enemy machine gun post on the dome of St. Paul’s, I didn’t see it when I was there. :-)
07mar2007
Google Spreadsheets Go Camping, “I’m starting to use Google Spreadsheets more and more and have very little to complain about. However, the interface leaves much to be desired. My chief problem is the reliance on opening up multiple tabs (windows for non firefoxers) for each spreadsheet.”
Kaivo supports an architecture for information systems in which the data is always kept in a single data model which is RDF.
Where have all the good databases gone, Adam Bosworth made a list of three reqirements in late 2004, and not a single one has been solved so far. Major suckage.
One more cup of coffee for the road,
One more cup of coffee ‘fore I go
To the valley below.
— Bob Dylan, One More Cup Of Coffee
LMX is a reverse XML parser. Whereas most XML parsers parse the XML data from the start to the end, LMX parses it from the end to the start. Pretty sick.
Blank Slate, John Gruber on how to design a blog: “Default templates are terrific for people who can’t or don’t want to design their own – but they’re terrible starting points for anyone attempting to establish their own unique brand. If you start with nothing, you’re forced to think about everything.”
GCX is an efficient open source in-memory XQuery engine implemented in C++. The philosophy of the GCX engine is to minimize the amount of data that is kept in main-memory at runtime.
Using mutt on OS X, I use Gnus, but it’s a good howto, and the MTA stuff is client independent.
Faster Adaptive Set Intersections for Text Searching, by Jérémy Barbay, Alejandro López-Ortiz, and Tyler Lu. Everyone doing database stuff please read this.
Meh: the word that’s sweeping the internet, Michael Hann. I use that in my daily life, too…
The things my friend did later on
Were not exactly pretty
He trashed my great grandparent’s house,
Then he trashed New York City
— Dan Bern, The Beagle Song
u8u16, a high-speed UTF-8 to UTF-16 conversion software based on the parallel bit stream technology. Well, nice, but who converts so much data this matters?
SYWTWAB 2: The Hero’s Journey, “[A] good technical book is also a hero’s journey.”
Towers of Silence, mystic.
06mar2007
An Exact Value for Avogadro’s Number, how could we live without it…
Dekonstruktion ist nicht was Du denkst, von Geoffrey Bennington.
Three things I don’t understand about monads, advanced algebra.
Across to Mississippi, across to Tennessee
Across the Niagara, home I’ll never be
Home in ol’ Medora, home in Ol’ Truckee
Apalachicola, home I’ll never be
— Jack Kerouac, Home I’ll Never Be
JRuby 0.9.8 released, featuring 98% RoR-test coverage.
The Sights and Sounds of the ’30s, by oldwinebottle. “The stock market crash of 1929 brought the end of wonderful nonsense and the jazz age of the Roaring Twenties. A very different world now lay ahead in the years called “The Great Depression.””
Oh what fun
At the same time that I find a time machine
I also discover sexual liberation
— Dan Bern, Bonnie and Clyde
Towards compatibility with Ruby 1.9: Rails, Rake, RubyGems…, at least porting Rack should be easy.
SYWTWAB 1: So You Want to Write a Book?, by PragDave. “I don’t pretend to know too much about writing in general, but I have learned what works for me, and what seems to work for most Pragmatic Bookshelf authors.” I hope to do that some day…
05mar2007
Great Works in Programming Languages, list collected by Benjamin C. Pierce. Fantastic.
Zentralrat der Ex-Muslime, danke für euren Mut.
one column layouts: the new web designer drug, Manuel says. Look e.g. at Anarchaia. :-)
I seen a python swallowing a Dobermann whole
Piranhas swimming in a mixing bowl
Buzz Fledderjohn
— Tom Waits, Buzz Fledderjohn
Hbase provides Bigtable-like structured storage for Hadoop HDFS. “Data is organized into tables, rows and columns, but a query language like SQL is not supported. Instead, an Iterator-like interface is available for scanning through a row range (and of course there is an ability to retrieve a column value for a specific key).”
Steaming compost makes Joi Ito happy.
By indirections, find elevators out, “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is being performed in an elevator somewhere in Manhattan. You have ten hours to find it.”
I’ll dare you to dine with the cross-legged knight
Dare me to jump and I will
I’ll fall from your grace
But I’ll never let go of your hand
I’ll never let go of your hand
— Tom Waits, Never Let Go
Audit your gems, Evan Weaver says, or you’ll install malice! (Big Ouch, really.)
Programming in Haskell, a new textbook by Graham Hutton.
Meta-Sinfest, very good one.
04mar2007
You want me to put radium WHERE?, fucking awesome.
Rivva, ein deutsches Techmeme von Frank Westphal.
Verbarius electronic clock, I like it.
An Emacs Client For Google Services, looks very powerful.
Neodarwinist theory is said
To explain shapely legs on coeds.
Over many a year
Nicer legs bring more cheer
So they tend to become more widespread.
— Jill
How to tell a person’s language of choice by looking at their keyboard, neato.
10 Linux commands you’ve never used, well, I used 9 of them…
Forth as a Haskell DSL, or Lambda: The Ultimate Stack?, nice if you have a currying language.
Bypass Vista Activation with Paradox, good to know, even if I don’t need it.
Ruby interpreting Prolog’ interpreting Lisp interpreting Lisp solving FizzBuzz, Maurico Fernandez becomes a real language hacker. :-)
You can put all of my possessions here in Jesus’ name
And nail a sign on the door
Bright and early Sunday morning with my walking cane
I’m going up to see my Lord
— Tom Waits, Take Care of All My Children
A topos foundation for theories of physics, by Andreas Döring and Chris Isham.
The Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5), RFC 4120.
03mar2007
Thought your shoes were uncomfortable?, ouch. Beauty suffers.
Brazil vs Argentina, WJW.
Rack 0.1.0 has been released.
Showdown, is a javascript port of Markdown. Yum.
Got a head full of lightning
A hat full of rain
And I know that I said
I’d never do it again
And I love you pretty baby but I always take the long way home
— Tom Waits, Long Way Home
swfIR (swf Image Replacement) is here to solve some of the design limitations of the standard HTML image and its widely-accepted associated CSS values, while still supporting standards-based design concepts. Using the dark arts of JavaScript and Flash, swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website. Could turn out useful. (Where goes the alt=?)
The best user manuals EVER, according to Kathy Sierra. No mention of the TeXbook?
ccHost is an open source (GPL licensed) project that provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata.
Programming Erlang, Joe Armstrong gets published by the Pragmatic Programmers. Very nice. (His thesis is a very good read on Erlang too, by the way.
I said I’d come back for you
Keep my jacket to keep you warm
That’s all that I can do
And if I have to go will you
Remember me or will you find
Someone else while I’m away?
— Tom Waits, If I Have To Go
WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2, worst thing that can happen…
The Wind Bank and the Battery, featuring King Aeolus.
Indexed, the index card cartoon, to be published as a book! Great!
The Guatemala City Abyss, again the cool sinkhole.
SkyMall Liberation, a fun waste of time.
02mar2007
The Buddhabrot is a special rendering of the Mandelbrot set which, when traditionally oriented, resembles to some extent certain depictions of the Buddha.
The State of GEGL, FOSDEM talk by Øyvind Kolås.
Rudy Rucker: Everything Is Computation, an interview.
Outside in the cold distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
And the wind began to howl
— Bob Dylan, All Along The Watchtower
Who Wants to Save the Aye-Aye, I like it. :/
Highest Paying Jobs That Don’t Require a College Degree, become a brick mason!
Scheme Now!, also know as Snow, is a repository of Scheme packages that are portable to several popular implementations of Scheme. Snow is a general framework for developing and distributing portable Scheme packages.
MO bridge landing!, the Pugs Meta Object Protocol. Interesting approach.
The Beauty of Perl 6 Parameter Passing, by Phil Crow. It’s powerful, but is it beautiful?
Continuations in Java, a conversation with Geert Bevin by Bill Venners with Frank Sommers. “RIFE project founder Geert Bevin discusses how continuations can simplify complex workflows, and how they are implemented in RIFE.”
IDEs for Ruby, by Curt Hibbs. For those that think they need one.
What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts
— Brecht/Weil, What Keeps Mankind Alive?
Future Preservation, “Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen.” Too bad I’m not in LA.
Classical vs Quantum Computation (Week 16), by John Baez. “This time in our class on Classical vs. Quantum Computation, we finished up the λ-theory of commutative rings and moved on to a more interesting example: the λ-theory for high school calculus!”
Hundefleisch wird in einigen Ländern als Nahrung genutzt, zum Beispiel in Korea, Vietnam und einigen südlichen Provinzen Chinas wie Kanton. Nicht mit Hundekuchen zu verwechseln.
01mar2007
Who wrote 2.6.20?, an Kernel patch analysis.
rfc-club is a hot new bi-weekly discussion group of an RFC, kind of like a bookclub only for RFC’s.
Metalua is a metaprogramming extension to Lua 5.1, i.e. a compiler which allows to extend the language’s syntax and semantics from within Lua. Sounds like an awesome toy, and the lambda sugar they added could make Lua really sweet.
Do you ever think about the past
Do you ever check in with yourself
Walking around wondering who I am
The answer comes in big blobs of red
Dripping to the floor
Congratulations
— Dan Bern, Drips
Sun joins the Free Software Foundation, good thing.
Ruby Screenshot of the Week #5, still coding white on black only, I wonder if this really raises productivity, or just distracts.
Taking home the jackpot, here’s how one lucky winner spent his new-found fortune. Looks like a great plan.
And soon enough time will tell,
About the circus in the wishing well
And someone who will buy and sell for me
Someone to toll my bell
— Jimi Hendrix, Burning Of The Midnight Lamp
I Bought Votes on Digg, pwned.
GrandPerspective is a small utility application for Mac OS X that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. I used Disk Inventory X for this so far, but GrandPerspective looks cool, too. I think it shows the file sizes better.
Where is XML Going?, by Kurt Cagle. He could be right about RDFa.
Zuverlässigkeit von Wahlcomputer-Hersteller nach versuchter Erpressung höchst zweifelhaft, drei Leute über die Macht des Volkes…
Powered by Nukumi2 0.5.
