Anarchaia

Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)

31jul2007

Better Writing Through Design, by Bronwyn Jones at A List Apart. “It’s one thing to write copy that fits on a website. It’s quite another to write copy that fits in with a website.”

Reviving Anorexic Web Writing, by Amber Simmons at A List Apart. “We’ve starved all the life out of web writing. The kind of writing we encourage is lifeless, insipid, and calorie-free. If we want to get back on track—to allow writers to write wonderful user experiences—we have to change our expectations and our rules.”

Now it can be told, now it can be spoken
Buildings will fall, records will be broken
You can’t hide the alien sitting in your head
No more secrets, it s all bein’ said
— Dan Bern, Now It Can Be Told

The Karmasphere DP language is a high-performance non-blocking parallel language for performing data processing. It is designed to give the user a high degree of control over the usage of system resources, for example, how many CPU cores or how much disk I/O time to use, without requiring the software developer to explicitly consider these issues in code.

fluxus is a graphical livecoding environment for Scheme. Builds for Linux (and sometimes OSX), and released under the GPL licence.

Carnivore sex off the menu, “Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals.” Well, they can use a cucumber instead.

Fire escapes on the sides of buildings
If everything suddenly went up in flames
We’d be all right darling.
— Dan Bern, Fire Escape

Expand then contract, Aristotle Pagaltzis on the usefullness of having intermediate formats.

Dependency Injection in One Sentence, Jim Weirich reminds me of the saying: “Needle is a library that makes things complicated.”

Okay, Well… Shoes, _why has some screenshots of his small toolkit.

30jul2007

Type the sky, Semesterarbeit von Lisa Rienermann. Very neat.

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. By Why The Lucky Stiff.

Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq], von Thomas Mayer. “20 Jahre NetHack, 20 Jahre Spaß mit Buchstabensalat – die Geschichte des Spiels, aufgezeichnet von einem Süchtigen.”

I see a lot of people as I make the rounds
And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town
And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off
Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m gettin’ soft.
— Bob Dylan, If You See Her, Say Hello

Intel, Racism Inside, heh.

More, Bigger, Faster, Shinier, by brain in a jar. “There are however a few reasons why consumerism in its current form isn’t a particularly good way to go about the pursuit of happiness, either at the level of individuals or societies.”

Biologists Helping Bookstores, “Reshelving pseudo-scientific nonsense since 2007.” Awesome!

Finally Working On Django-AtomPub, when will Rails support APP?

37 Reasons to Love Haskell (playing off the Ruby article), nice one.

Can a file be ODF and Open XML at the same time? (and HTML? and a Java servlet? and a PDF archive?), Rick Jelliffe wonders. Better ask how to keep them in sync.

The possibility of secret passageways: An Interview with Patrick McGrath, “McGrath’s characters are frequently deformed, crippled, insane, or somehow undefined, both psychologically and sexually; they are sinister, if naive, and quietly aggressive, weaving conspiratorial plots around one another with a tightness and an intricacy, and a psychological intensity, till something dreadful occurs – and the book then lurches on to its brutal and unhappy ending.”

And then I turn my head, for you’re approachin’ me.
Moonlight on the water, fisherman’s daughter, floatin’ in to my room
With a golden loom.
— Bob Dylan, Golden Loom

RubyConf 2007, call for proposals until August 20.

29jul2007

Some thoughts on desert gardens, “By establishing micro-climates, with often extreme variation from building to building, in both temperature and humidity, architecture participates directly in botanical speciation.”

UIKit Hello World, first third-party app for the iPhone.

assert_latest and greatest, “When a test case calls methods that write new records to a database, sometimes the test needs to fetch those records back and inspect them. This post develops assert_latest, an assertion that detects newly created records.”

Algebra 1 versus Algebra 2, “This is not Mathematics, it is Theology!”

Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
— Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Lightweight Database Strategies for Perl , Mark Dominus: “I think it’s a good class, but since it never sold well, I’ve decided it would do more good (for me and for everyone else) if I just gave away the materials for free.”

Uniplate provides a Haskell framework for generic traversals, and is intended to be used in a similar manner to the original Scrap Your Boilerplate paper.

Compiling queries without EVAL or COMPILE, closure combination is the key for implementing efficient small languages.

ML Modules and Haskell Type Classes: a Constructive Comparsion , thesis by Stefan Wehr.

Getting Things Done, in Emacs, a pretty complex setup.

She’s got her iron chain
I’d do it, but I, I just can’t remember how
You talk to her
She’s your lover now.
— Bob Dylan, She’s Your Lover Now

Livemore’s Centennial Bulb, burning straight for 106 years.

Die “Online-Durchsuchung”. Technischer Hintergrund des verdeckten hoheitlichen Zugriffs auf Computersysteme, von Ulf Buermeyer, einem Richter, der mal Netzwerkadmin war. Unbedingt lesen!

28jul2007

iPhone+AT&T Bill=Uh-Oh, “I get SIX PAGES of listings of data tidbits that the iPhone has downloaded in the form of email and Web pages–KILOBYTE BY KILOBYTE!” If the bill is empty at the back, it’s a nice source of scrap paper, I guess…

TTYShare, share and view your tty data online.

Boostraping a Forth in 40 lines of Lua code, by Eduardo Ochs. Neat.

I came to the place where the lone pilgrim lay,
And patiently stood by his tomb,
When in a low whisper I heard something say:
How sweetly I sleep here alone.
— Bob Dylan, Lone Pilgrim

A Taste Of Haskell, cool OSCON 2007 slides by Simon Peyton Jones. IMO really good, with a practical yet profund approach (demonstrating xmonad, QuickCheck, Typeclasses, and avoiding the word “monad”).

OSCON 2007 Presentations, lots of other slides.

Blue sky upon the horizon,
Private eye on my trail,
And if I don’t be there by morning
She’ll know that I must’ve spent the night in jail.
— Bob Dylan, If I Don’t Be There By Morning

LtU turns 7: The year of spam, happy birthday nevertheless!

28.7.2002, KD erinnert an Klaus Leupolz und Karl Poppers Geburtstag.

27jul2007

AntiRight wants to be lightweight in resource use and requirements, create a prominent desktop scripting environment, meet the GNU coding standards, and ease the use of unix-like operating systems. Kinda interesting.

XQuery, libferris, and Virtual Filesystems, by Ben Martin. “By bringing together an XQuery engine and a virtual filesystem you can use a familiar query language to access relational databases, Berkeley db4 databases, kernel filesystems, and network files as well as XML. libferris, at its, core is a virtual filesystem allowing many different data sources to be exposed through a filesystem interface. These include the expected things like file://, http://, ftp:// as well as not so expected things like databases, XML files, and even applications like emacs, Evolution, XWindow, and Firefox.”

Well, you know, we was cruisin’ down the highway in a Greyhound bus.
All kinds-a children in the side road, they was hollerin’ at us, sayin’:
“Get your rocks off! (Get ‘em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get ‘em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get ‘em off!)
Get your rocks off-a me!”
— Bob Dylan, Get Your Rocks Off!

Conference talk brochure descriptions, by Mark Dominus. “One of the things that Nat (the program committee chair) and I have commiserated about in the past is that no matter how hard you try to make a clear, concise, accurate description of the class, you are doomed, because people do not use the descriptions in a rational way.”

One Book to Specify Them All, by Khoi Vinh interviews the guy behind the FontBook, “It’s billed as “the largest typeface reference in the world,” and just a single flip through its 1,500 pages leaves one with no reason to doubt that claim.”

Time May Not Exist, I still don’t have any.

Linux: The 0.01 Release, a close look at KernelTrap.

Trails of troubles,
Roads of battles,
Paths of victory,
We shall walk.
— Bob Dylan, Paths Of Victory

What Would Euler Do?, nice cheque.

Liberation Hydrology: Miami, 2107 A.D., the future is wet.

The Perl Survey is attempting to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands. Whether you’re a web developer, sysadmin, or using Perl for scientific research or finance or just tracking your DVD collection, we’d love to hear about it.

26jul2007

Pedigree of man, Haeckel 1874.

What really kills Americans, news at 11.

You changed my life
Came along in a time of strife
In hunger and need
You made my heart bleed
You changed my life
You changed my life
— Bob Dylan, You Changed My Life

Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”, by danah boyd. “This is a response to the various critiques of my June 24 essay.”

British Hydrology, “I’m totally fascinated by the idea that adventure tourism firms might someday lead wreck-diving tours through the flooded ruins of London: in your expensive re-breathing gear, you’ll roll backward off a boat, flashlight in hand… and the coral-specked vaults of St. Paul’s are now yours to explore.”

‘The Atom Publishing Protocol’ to Proposed Standard, yay.

I don’t need much and that ain’t no lie
Ain’t runnin’ any race
Give to me my country pie
I won’t throw it up in anybody’s face
— Bob Dylan, Country Pie

The Atom Publishing Protocol, slides for OSCON 2007 by Joe Gregorio.

25jul2007

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, by Bruce Mau.

Mentat Wiki is a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker.

On requirements specification as a Wittgensteinian language game , by Stephen Taylor. Read this.

They say “Drink and be merry,
Take the bull by the horns.”
I keep seeing visions of you, a lily among thorns
Everything looks a little far away to me
— Bob Dylan, Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart

ICFP 2007, Juho Snellman’s report is especially interesting.

Additional Firefox 0 Day Exploits, by Nitesh Dhanjani. Lame, lame, lame.

2007 White Camel Awards, “At OSCON, David Adler of The Perl Foundation presented the 2007 White Camel Awards to recognize significant non-technical acheivement in the Perl community.”

Best Hack of OSCON Day 1, by chromatic. ssh -R saves the day.

My American dream
Fell apart at the seams.
You tell me what it means,
You tell me what it means.
— Bob Dylan, Heartland

Things I wish I’d known when I was younger, I liked that one.

Powers and Products of Graphs, by Mark C. Chu-Carroll.

24jul2007

ssh on iPhone, yay!

Bloboats is an arcade-like boat racing game contributing to the Assembly ‘06 game development competition in the hybrid spirit of SMB-like platform jumpers and elasto mania / xmoto like motocross-I’m-faster-than-you games.

Goatse on CNN, WJW. PNSFW.

Hitchbase.com is your information source for finding best local hitching spots.

Generating PDF files from OpenOffice via Ant, or: why I prefer documentation with LaTeX.

I been good, I been good while I been waitin’
Maybe guilty of hesitatin’, I just been holdin’ on
Seven more days, all that’ll be gone.
— Bob Dylan, Seven Days

Apache Wicket has graduated!, “The Wicket project has officially joined the Apache Software Foundation.”

Power serious: power series in ten one-liners, “These Haskell functions implement operations on power series. Power series are represented as lists of numeric coefficients.”

Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia, neat.

The GHC Commentary, It contains all the explanatory material that doesn’t belong in comments in the source code itself, because the material is wide-ranging, usually covers multiple source files, and is more architectural in nature. The commentary can also be considered a design document for GHC.

You Park Like An Asshole, “Sick of a car taking up two spaces on the street? How about a car too close to yours? What about the car at the mall parked diagonally? Now you can do something about it. Simply download a notice and place it on the car’s windshield.”

If I had rubies and riches and crowns
I’d buy the whole world and change things around
I’d throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea
For they are mistakes of a past history.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.
— Bob Dylan, Let Me Die In My Footsteps

Towards a Practical, Verified Kernel, by Kevin Elphinstone, Gerwin Klein, Philip Derrin, Timothy Roscoe, and Gernot Heiser. “In the paper we examine one of the issues in designing, specifying, implementing and formally verifying a small operating system kernel – how to provide a productive and iterative development methodology for both operating system developers and formal methods practitioners.”

Six Apart Merges With Facebook, well: “We meant that we merge code.”

Data.Sequence, one of the best and most efficient data structures Haskell has.

Telemarketing: Get Rich or Burn Out trying, by xC0000005. “And no telemarketer is ever a total failure. After all, just to put on the headset you’ve already sold something: Your dignity.”

Thue is a language based on the concept of the semi-Thue grammar/process. It is, in essence, an arbitrary grammar, which can (by its arbitrary nature) be used to define/recognize “Type 0” languages from Chomsky’s hierarchy. Because the grammar can be used to define a language of such complexity, the process, itself, is essentially Turing Complete.

lebst Du noch?, Lydia: “Manche Paare bei vor und nach IKEA…” Sehr gut.

23jul2007

NEPOMUK intends to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution – methods, data structures, and a set of tools – for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state of art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts.

The Tree of Life design celebrates the theory of evolution and was created to give a voice to those who favor traditional biology and oppose the growing American support of various forms of creationism. (Why only a single common ancestor?)

He wouldn’t take shit from no one
He wouldn’t bow down or kneel.
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.
— Bob Dylan, George Jackson

iPhone Haiku, e.g. “Was it religion? / opiate of the masses? / now its the iphone”.

deriving is an extension to OCaml for deriving functions from type declarations. Includes derivers for pretty-printing, type-safe marshalling with structure-sharing, dynamic typing, equality, and more.

Functional JavaScript, by Oliver Steele. A pretty nice library, but not close to the real thing.

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.
— Bob Dylan, The Death Of Emmett Till

The Death Camp of Communist China, “[F]ew Westerners are even aware, or, if they are aware, they are not conscious, of the bloody reality that prevailed in China between the years 1949 and 1976, the years of communist rule by Mao Zedong.”

Processing Harry Potter, danah boyd added mail filters not to get any spoilers. Crazy.

22jul2007

Powerlist: A Structure for Parallel Recursion, by Jayadev Misra. Pretty useful, and very easy to implement.

12 Hilarious Tombstones, funny.

But the bottles are done,
We’ve killed each one
And the table’s full and overflowed.
And the corner sign
Says it’s closing time,
So I’ll bid farewell and be down the road.
— Bob Dylan, Restless Farewell

EXI is a very compact representation for the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. Read: Binary XML.

I’ll have a Buchburger with fries, solving the XKCD menu puzzle by rewriting terms.

Revision tracking of functions is more important than file names , a call for more semantic tools.

Internet Explorer for UNIX, WJW.

You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it
— Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone

YouTube Scalability Talk, summary by Kyle Cordes.

21jul2007

rFeedParser is a translation of Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser from Python into Ruby. It has nearly the exact same behavior. Very useful.

Connector and Slingshot Open-sourced and Free, “Joyent is releasing the source code for our Connector and Slingshot products under the GPL v2.” Nice step.

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
— Bob Dylan, Chimes Of Freedom

iPhone Fonts, commentary by John Gruber. It’s a weird selection, yes.

Comprehensive comprehensions: comprehensions with “Order by” and “Group by”, by Phil Wadler and Simon Peyton Jones. Nice stuff.

And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.
— Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In

Arc Lessons, by Paul Graham.

Homosexuality is not hereditary, Mark Dominus claims the opposite: “Here is one way in which homosexuality could be entirely hereditary and still be favored by natural selection.” Not that it would matter, no?

20jul2007

Death by Suburb, “The Washington Post profiles Virginia suburbanites who, fed up with the upkeep needed to maintain their lifestyles–and by extension, suburbia itself–are clamoring for simpler lives.”

The Broken Metric of “Intuitive to the Uneducated” Language Syntax, by chromatic. So true.

Checkers now is a boring game.

Heiß, heiß, kochend heiß
Heiß, heiß, hundert Grad
Heiß, heiß, glühend heiß
heiß, heiß, blühend weiß
— Ton Steine Scherben, Jenseits Von Eden

Email tricks, that might solve a few webapp problems, mailing a form is clever indeed.

The Lives and Death of Moore’s Law, by Ilkka Tuomi. “As semiconductors are becoming important in economy and society, Moore’s Law is now becoming an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments.”

Introduction to Haskell, Part 2: Pure Functions, by Adam Turoff.

Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops, made my day.

Introduction to Flex Using PHP, by Jack Herrington. I like how this is independent from the server side.

Tough questions, by Mark Dominus.

Little Earth was a “four channel synchronised video installation with surround sound,” featuring scenes “shot on Haldde Mountain in the Norwegian Arctic, Ben Nevis in Scotland, and on the island of Svalbard, with computer animations of the Earth’s magnetosphere modeled by the Leicester Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group.”

Billige Räusche, hartes Verlangen,
soviele Jahre sind vergangen
Und das ist gut so, mach kein Geschrei,
denn nur so geht alles vorbei.
— Funny Van Dannen, Billige Räusche

Scalable fault-tolerant upgradable systems, Part 1, by Joe Armstrong.

The 10th ICFP Programming Contest has begun. “Endo is an alien, crashed on Earth, and is in desperate need of DNA repair.” Pretty awesome exercise.

iPhone ringtone installation, “How to add a custom ringtone (for intel Mac users only…for now)”

19jul2007

Georg Kreisler wurde gestern 85 und ich habs verplant. Alles Gute nachträglich!

A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, “missing letter”) is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is missing, usually a common vowel, the most common in English being e.

The art of living in small spaces, by Claire Wolfe.

Oh, ich liebe das Mädchen mit den drei blauen Augen,
nicht einem, nicht zwei, nein: drei blaue Augen.
Ja, wenn ich in ihre drei Augen schau:
wie blau, wie blau, wie blau.
— Georg Kreisler, Das Mädchen mit den drei blauen Augen

SystemX Interlocking Fluorescent Lights by Yamagiwa, SystemX lighting units can interconnect to create stunning, yet practical lighting sculptures.

Periodic Table of the Internet, nice.

The Million Marker Map, “Current JavaScript maps from Google or Yahoo become noticeably pokey with just a few hundred markers on them, and effectively unusable once the number exceeds a thousand.”

Der Tod, das muß ein Wiener sein,
genau wie die Lieb a Französin.
Denn wer bringt dich pünktlich zur Himmelstür?
Ja da hat nur ein Wiener das G’spür dafür.
Der Tod, das muß ein Wiener sein,
nur er trifft den richtigen Ton:
Geh Schatzerl, geh Katzerl, was sperrst dich denn ein?
Der Tod muß ein Wiener sein.
— Georg Kreisler, Der Tod, das muß ein Wiener sein

God Plays Dice, “A look at daily life through the eyes of a mathematician.” Cool new blog, via Mark Dominus.

Vec is an implementation of extensible, functional arrays for Ocaml. The module provides log-time insertion, deletion, modification, concatenation, and much more.

LOLcat Bible, “Invisible Man tell man, “ur in mai Earth, pwnz0rz mai aminulz.”” WJWZ.

18jul2007

Epic is a simple functional language which compiles to reasonably efficient C code. The primary aim is to develop a back end for Epigram, but it will (I hope, eventually) be useful to anyone looking for a back end for a functional language.

The Open Library, “Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.” Awesome project.

xmonad contributed code, neat stuff.

Someday when your sky is blue
You’ll know what I’ve left to you
Then you’ll know what you must do
And you’ll know that my heart has been true, Suzanne
— Dan Bern, Suzanne

three.sentenc.es is a personal policy that all email responses regardless of recipient or subject will be three sentences or less. It’s that simple.

Learn Haskell in 10 minutes, very well done.

The full, final “Harry Potter” – leaked online!, get a PDF of phone-cam’ed pages. Eww. Ultimate Spoiler.

Harry Potter is thinly-veiled homosexual propaganda, by gndn. An interpretation.

The day the Tivo died, a filk by Damien Katz.

Implementing a Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus, slides by Wouter Swierstra.

No more pencils, no more books
No more teachers’ dirty looks
Nothing I don t wanna do
Just days and nights of loving you
This could be the finest thing
I ve ever done, or ever will
This could be the summer of my life
— Dan Bern, School’s Out

Pseudopod brings you the best short horror in audio form, to take with you anywhere. “This is a podcast of horror fiction. The stories presented here are intended to disturb you. They are likely to contain death, graphic violence, explicit sex (including sexual violence), hate crimes, blasphemy, or other themes and images that hook deep into your psyche.”

People, Joi Ito blogs about them. Nice idea, really.

15 Unfortunately Placed Ads, pretty funny.

Epigram Reloaded: A Standalone Typechecker for ETT, by James Chapman, Thorsten Altenkirch, and Conor McBride. An eye-opening paper.

17jul2007

82megaohm.de ist mit dem Ziel geboren worden, dieser zunehmenden Beschränkung der Bürgerrechte und der drohenden Überwachung durch den Staat einen geordneten Widerstand entgegenzusetzen. Wir sind der Auffassung, dass die freie Meinungsäußerung zu diesem Thema mithilfe einer legalen Plattform für eine demokratische Grundordnung lebensnotwendig ist. Wir wollen etwas verändern, und wir wollen die Politik-Verdrossenen wachrütteln. In Deutschland wird zu vieles einfach hingenommen, eine Beschneidung unserer Freiheit und unserer Bürgerrechte nehmen wir nicht hin!

Retire motherfucker
Retire motherfucker
Retire motherfucker
Get out of the way-for some new blood
I m sure your lawyer, will negotiate
A good pension plan
— Dan Bern, Retire Motherfucker

To delete this building, press 3, BLDGBLOG goes radio.

The Complexities of Assessing XSRF Automatically Yet Accurately , by Nitesh Dhanjani. Serious problems.

Thank You, GDB!, by chromatic. It’s a pretty good debugger indeed.

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo, by Aza Raszin at A List Apart. “Does the way we design our web apps cause people to lose their work? Raszin’s simple, foolproof rule solves the problem.”

And they shall be for rocket launchers on my doorposts and upon my gates:
That ye may remember and not go meekly to the slaughter
I am wearing the yellow star
— Dan Bern, Yellow Star

Conflicting Absolute Positions by Rob Swan at A List Apart. A common problem in my designs too…

Programming Erlang is Shipping, a pretty good book though I wish it was more in-depth into OTP.

Israeli teen culture, by danah boyd.

16jul2007

Dependent Type System with Subtyping Type level Transitivity Elimination, by Gang Chen.

Do Lisp Programmers Really Exist?, open questions…

Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
— Die Internationale

Pro-finite Lie rings and p-adic Lie algebras (PDF), by Leland McInnes.

Seaside got a new site. Nice.

Cinematically mobile in the curved underworld of greater London , the Tube live.

Ja und dann fragst du mich: “Was schaust Du am liebsten an?”
Und ich sage: “Naturfilme, weil man da sehen kann
Wie schön die Welt ist und was die Tiere tun,
Wohin die Vögel ziehen wenn es kalt wird in Berlin.”
— Funny Van Dannen, Naturfilme

How Long Do You Need To Boil Water?, “The correct amount of time to boil water is 0 minutes. Thats right, zero minutes.”

Military Hides Cause of Women Soldiers’ Deaths, they died of dehydration in fear of being raped at nite. Words fail me.

15jul2007

PerceptualDiff is an image comparison utility that makes use of a computational model of the human visual system to compare two images.

SIGSALY was a secure speech system used in World War II for the highest-level Allied communications. It pioneered a number of digital communications concepts, including the first transmission of speech using pulse-code modulation.

Data and Codata, “By ensuring that a function expecting codata never receives data, and vice versa, we can ensure that even programs with open-ended loops always produce a well defined output.”

And the water knew
And the fire, too
And the winds, they blew
Be true, be true
— Funny Van Dannen, Holyman

A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities, towns and villages which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. It is thus a polycentric form of agglomeration.

The Wealthiest Americans Ever, Rockefeller wins.

Notes on the Plan 9 3rd Edition Kernel Source (PDF), by Francisco J Ballesteros.

Und hört man: es gibt Leben auf einem fremden Planeten
Dann ist man aufgeregt und gleich ganz Ohr
Denn man stellt sich unter Leben ja
man stellt sich unter Leben so gerne etwas Großartiges vor
— Funny Van Dannen, Leben auf fremden Planeten

A JRuby Rubinius machine, nice idea.

Not for the Faint of Heart: Multiple 0-Day Exploits Affecting Firefox, IE, Netscape, and Trillian, by Nitesh Dhanjani. It’s a shame for every developer that such bugs still exist.

the Cheapest Days to Buy Certain Items, maybe a bit US-specific.

14jul2007

We’d all be living in dams, also, nice for showering.

Collaborative Systems, Patrick Logan complains about the Web 2.0: “Other than a few notable examples there is still surprisingly little really good collaboration on the web.” Ack.

The λ-cube is a way of presenting the fine structure of Coquand’s Calculus of Constructions relating that system to a variety of other typed lambda calculi.

There’s some tomatoes chemically engineered
They come out square to fit in boxes
There’s some people chemically engineered
They come out square to fit in boxes
— Dan Bern, Go To Sleep

Hume (Higher-order Unified Meta-Environment) is a strongly typed, mostly-functional language with an integrated tool set for developing, proving and assessing concurrent, safety-critical systems. Hume aims to extend the frontiers of language design for resource-limited systems, including real-time embedded and safety-critical systems, by introducing new levels of abstraction and provability.

AngloHaskell 2007 is 10th and 11th August at MSR in Cambridge. Now, how do I get to Cambridge…

CPAN Module Review: App::SVNBinarySearch, by chromatic. This is like git-bisect for SVN.

Dangerous Java flaw threatens virtually everything, pwned. Write once, exploit everwhere.

Dependent Finger Trees in Coq, “We prove the correctness of an implementation of Finger Trees in Coq, using Russell to develop the dependently typed programs associated with this datastructure.” Pretty nifty and still grokkable for people new to Coq.

Best Curve-Fitting Ever, oh noes!

XQuery and Data Abstraction, by Kurt Cagle.

Ten answers to the un-answerable question: “what is Web 2.0?”, geez.

Every day I spend my dough to keep the gas tank full
Every day I buy flowers for my funeral
Every day I miss the apple and kill William Tell
Every day I ride through the gates of hell
— Dan Bern, Gates Of Hell

Evaporation, and Mark Dominus thought he pipetted badly. (Oh I know that…)

Ruby One-Click Installer for OSX, useful: It replaces the broken Readline library, updates to a current version of SQLite3 and prepares your OSX for Rails, which needs at least Ruby 1.8.4 to run.

13jul2007

Smarter Ways to Work with PDFs on OS X. By Giles Turnbull.

Microsoft Admits ALL Xbox360’s Are Defective, pwned. “[T]he general consensus is that it’s one of botched thermal design management and inadequate dissipation of heat leading to component failure. All of the nearly 12 million units currently in the hands of consumers are effected.”

You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant
You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant
Walk right in it’s around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant
— Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant

The beauty of LaTeX, I don’t need to be convinced anymore, but you?

Last exit to Taftan, by bumpydog. “Well, it comes as a bit of a shock crossing the border from Mirjavah (Iran) to Taftan (Pakistan). On the Iran side there is a nice air-con savari on a perfect road to the pleasant and efficient border camp; on the Pakistani side there’s errr… a muddy field!”

And you start walkin’ backwards though you know its wrong
And lonesome comes up as down goes the day
And tomorrow’s mornin’ seems so far away
And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin’
And yer rope is a-slidin’ ‘cause yer hands are a-drippin’
— Bob Dylan, Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie

CoqPrime is a library built on top of the Coq proof system to certify primality using Pocklington certificate and Elliptic Curve Certificate.

12jul2007

Another useful utility, small Perl scripts by Mark Dominus.

(un)filtered, Michael Sippey’s new blog is actually a tumblelog. Great thing.

On Top, John Gruber on top posting. Help stop it!

I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
— Bob Dylan, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

Floating cities are settlements that use buoyancy to remain in the atmosphere of a planet. Buckminster Fuller first proposed the concept for Earth, by building a geodesic sphere that would be heated by sun.

interesting stuff, a compilation of slides from Interesting 2007.

Quicksilver for Emacs: anything.el, discovered by Bill Clementson.

You can join Guantanamo if someone in there invites you whether or not you’re interested in joining. — mosox

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back For Your Water, once having had an acidic superheating shot into my nose, I only can laugh about that.

What are the Top Ten Python Related Blogs?, by Noah Gift. And why do they all use alliterations?

atomojo is an Atom Publishing Protocol Client & Server. Firefox on the client side, Java/RESTlet for the server.

Exploratory Coding, Patrick Logan wants a suspendable type checker. Me too. Badly.

The Island of Forgotten Diseases, “near the south rim of the shrinking Aral Sea, you’ll find “the remains of the world’s largest biological-warfare testing ground.””

Gastro-Astronomical Tableware, want have, awesome!

Sturmflut an der Nordsee und Erdbeben in Los Angeles
Und schwarzer Kaffee der sich nicht bewegt
Es kommen schöne Bilder und sie passen in das Zimmer
wo sich still und leise Staub auf alles legt
Ich lieb dich mehr als Geld, ich lieb dich mehr als mein Auto
Ich lieb dich mehr als alles auf der Welt
— Funny Van Dannen, Mehr Als Geld

A Natural Axiomatization of Church’s Thesis, by Nachum Dershowitz and Yuri Gurevich. “The Abstract State Machine Thesis asserts that every classical algorithm is behaviorally equivalent to an abstract state machine. This thesis has been shown to follow from three natural postulates about algorithmic computation. Here, we prove that augmenting those postulates with an additional requirement regarding basic operations implies Church’s Thesis, namely, that the only numeric functions that can be calculated by effective means are the recursive ones (which are the same, extensionally, as the Turing-computable numeric functions).

Cooperative Visitor: A Template Technique for Visitor Creation , by Anand Shankar Krishnamoorthi.

Rigg is a Ruby on Rails open-source collaborative content management system—in other words, an engine to create likes like Digg, Reddit or DZone.

Recipe of the week: Pyline, by Jeremy Jones. Pyline is a kind-of awk for Python.

11jul2007

Attacking recommender systems, “A good (but very long) paper by Mobasher et al., “Towards trustworthy recommender systems: An analysis of attack models and algorithm robustness” (PDF), explores a variety of ways of spamming or otherwise manipulating recommendation systems.”

Will the iPhone blend?, yup. Poor thing.

I only heard him slightly
‘Til I heard you whisper
Took you up all in my arms
— Love, Old Man

GSoC: Apotomo: a Widget library for Rails?, by Nick Sutterer. Looks good, but I wonder how RESTful it is.

iPhone Review for Programmers, by Noah Gift.

What is an ISO 8601 Date?, by Rick Jelliffe. “IS 8601 is in an international standard which gives several standard syntaxes for representing Gregorian dates and times.”

Lambda Animator from Mike Thyer is a tool for displaying and experimenting with alternate reduction strategies in the LC.

And as the paint is peeling down off the walls
Put on your cowboy hat girl, I think I hear the call
Of the desert wailing, mad blowing like a street corner saxophone
Calling us home
Calling us home
— Dan Bern, Forever And Ever

Ruby Project Spotlight, June ‘07: Sequel, by Gregory Brown. Sequel is the best SQL interface I know for Ruby, a pleasure to use.

Polar Opposites, by Sgt York. “It makes sense that animals living in polar water would have to come up with a strategy for coping with this cold, salty water. Unlike marine invertebrates, saltwater fish osmoregulate.”

10jul2007

Higher Order Zippers, cool stuff.

Executable Semantic Definition of Programming Languages Using Two-level Grammars, also known as Van Wijngaarden Grammars. An introduction by Steven Pemberton.

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, says Jakob Nielsen, and is right (this time).

Summertime’s here and look over there, flowers every-
where in the morning, in the morning
La da da, da da da da
— Love, The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This

YARD is a PEG parser implemented in C++ metaprogramming.

telekinesis, helps to remotely access your Mac through a collection of mini web apps on your phone.

The Weather Emperors, “One of the most interesting – if unexpected – side-effects of global climate change is that the Alps are growing taller.”

Hey Satan! Paid my dues.
Playin’ in a rockin’ band
Hey Mama! Look at me
I’m on my way to the promise land
— AC/DC, Highway To Hell

A marine chronometer is a timekeeper precise enough to be used as a portable time standard, used to determine longitude by means of celestial navigation.

An interview with Robin Milner, the guy that came up with the most successful type inference system so far.

09jul2007

Watch your neighbour, Paul Battley finds a “creepy and totalitarian” poster.

Land of Saints and Morons, “Ireland has not produced a single important philosopher for the last 300 years – and the Irish have no great regard for thinking. Are we just a bit thick?”, an essay by Max McGuinness.

One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.
Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. — Martin Luther King

Why Daring Fireball is comment free, transcript of John Gruber talking. (You could claim Anarchaia has no comments for the same reason, but I never really thought of it that way. My next site is going to have comments.)

Simply Easy!, an Implementation of a Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus by Andres Löh, Conor McBride, and Wouter Swierstra. “We present an implementation in Haskell of a dependently-typed lambda calculus that can be used as the core of a programming language.” Really good paper.

All alone–in a tree
You won’t even–kiss me
And I m so–in love–with you
Sky is gray–inside too
Days are filled–dreams of you
Cause I m so–in love–with you
— Dan Bern, Ecstatic Addiction

Four Reasons DNA is Not Computer Code, I read that as: why Computer Code is a bad idea to build organisms from…

Starbucks Economics: Solving the mystery of the elusive “short” cappuccino, by Tim Harford.

project.ion.ist is now two years old and got a huge and cool archive. Congratulations to the editors!

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson

The Astronomer’s Telegram (ATEL) is for the reporting and commenting upon new astronomical observations of transient sources. “Editors exercise no control over content. The authors are responsible for the content of their Telegrams.”

08jul2007

Transference is a MacOSX utility for working with large numbers of files to be moved or copied.

Blümchenwiese beim CCC. Super!

A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts, WJW. This is truly awesome.

Maze Generator, the maze is rendered at the client using only HTML and CSS. Neato.

ObjectSpace: to have or not to have, I wouldn’t really miss it.

From face to face and down to down
From gray on green and gold to brown
From where I’ve never been and been the most
— Dan Bern, Running

UNESCO confirms that it is not involved in the “New 7 wonders of the world” campaign, “In order to avoid any damaging confusion, UNESCO wishes to reaffirm that there is no link whatsoever between UNESCO’s World Heritage programme, which aims to protect world heritage, and the current campaign concerning “The New 7 Wonders of the World”.”

Creole 1.0 is a common Wiki markup which I hope gets popular because it looks pretty sane.

State of the art in NLP.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche at Project Gutenberg.

They’re locking them up today
They’re throwing away the key
I wonder who it’ll be tomorrow, you or me?
We’re all normal and we want our freedom
— Love, The Red Telephone

dtach is a tiny program that emulates the detach feature of screen, allowing you to run a program in an environment that is protected from the controlling terminal and attach to it later.

07jul2007

Rubinius 0.7 has been released. “It’s very much still a developer preview, but hopefully there are people out there who will enjoy it.”

iPhone Native Looking Skin, a bit of Javascript and CSS to make nicer apps.

iPhone serial hacked, full interactive shell, all hail RS-232.

Biblic suicide bombers are cited in Wikipedia: “Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines!’ Down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more as he died than while he lived.” (Judges 16:30).

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” said he,
“I never died” said he.
— Alfred Hayes, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night

HOPL-III: Modula-2 and Oberon, “Niklaus Wirth discusses two of his Pascal successor languages in the HOPL-III paper on Modula-2 and Oberon.”

Mathematical Paris, John Baez started taking pictures of streets named after mathematicians.

The Joy of Titling, PragDave looks for better titles for his books.

Stars up in the sky and,
I do wonder yeah,
Wonder who am I and,
Oh I do, ooh,
But I know it’s true,
Just like I know you,
And if you realise,
The things you,
I am hearing,
La la la la la.
— Love, Wonder People

Treetop is a Ruby-based DSL for text parsing and interpretation. It facilitates an extension of the object-oriented paradigm called syntax-oriented programming. Includes a C compiling PEG parser.

Safari Real Does Leak the World, “640 Petabytes should be enough for anyone.” *g*

06jul2007

Apple Form Factor Evolution, would make a great poster as well.

Gems for iPhone, finally a game.

Write the rules
In the sky
But ask your leaders
Why why
— Love, Live & Let Live

The English Editor Screenshot Tour, very nice interface. (Maybe not for emacs users.)

Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide, by Dick Grune and Ceriel J.H. Jacobs. Out of print, full text online.

LLVM 2.0 & gcc 4.2, I think I underestimated LLVM…

Great Way to Stay Warm: Vodka and Sunshine, “Larry Weingarten used inexpensive low-maintenance materials in his home, like vodka in the heating system.”

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact. — Robert Graves, In Broken Images

Zombie Food Pyramid (JPG), yummy.

Twitter v. Pownce: It’s The API, Stupid, it doesn’t have an API and no mobile support. How lame is that?

A First, Fat Book For Processing, sounds pretty cool.

A Fin Too Far: A Guide to Freshwater Fishing, by GhostOfTiber. “One day when helping my father clean things up, I stumbled across the old rod which no-one had used in a decade and got a crazy idea: I was going to take up fishing.”

OpenGuides: City Wikis in Perl, by Kake Pugh.

04jul2007

The Stupidity Tax, David A. Black lost his cell phone.

How Seagate learned to package like Apple, they really spent a lot of thought there.

At my request I ask for nothing
You get nothing in return
If you’re nice shell bring me water
If you’re not then I will burn
— Love, You Set The Scene

R. Feynman on Papp perpetual motion engine, featuring dead people.

iPhone root password cracked in three days, good job.

The “Project Zero FAQ” FAQ, by Mark Pilgrim. Have a look at the URL, too.

By the time that I’m through singing
The bells from the schools of walls will be ringing
More confusions, blood transfusions
The news today will be the movies for tomorrow
— Love, A House Is Not A Motel

Lightweight concurrency primitives for GHC, by Peng Li, Andrew Tolmach, Simon Marlow, and Simon Peyton Jones. “Rather than hard-wiring all kinds of concurrency features, the runtime system is a thin substrate providing only a small set of concurrency primitives, and the rest of concurrency features are implemented in software libraries written in Haskell.”

03jul2007

RNum, the Ruby Numerical Library is a linear algebra package using Blas and Lapack.

TwoStick is a novel text entry method for game controllers. Seems pretty intuitive.

Engauge Digitizer is a tool to scan diagrams. (I bet that’s nice for PAGE too.)

You’ll be free child once you have died
from the shackles of language and measurable time
And then we can trade places, play musical graves
till then walk away walk away walk away walk away
— Bright Eyes, Land Locked Blues

(Co)monads for DummiesGrad Students, by Paul Hachmann.

PostgreSQL warm standby on ZFS crack, a sad but awesome hack.

Blubber Bots at Machine Project, wanthave.

A Transfinite Landscape, “Problems that involve infinity have a tendency to read a little like Zen koans.”

Don’t adore what is impossible
We have built this ship in a wine bottle
But if you knew how it worked,
We’d have to grow old
— Bright Eyes, Ship In A Bottle

The Sun, the Grid, and the City, “Manhattan is a solar instrument that only works twice.”

Movement, the future of BLDG BLOG is bright. Yay.

Ta-da List for iPhone, that was quick. And it looks nice.

02jul2007

Compressed javascript considered harmful, full ack: it majorly slows down loading the code on slow computers.

WebShell is a web-based ssh shell for the Apple iPhone. It is written in Python and is very easy to set up on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and any Unix that runs python 2.3.

Project Zero is an incubator project started within IBM that is focused on the agile development of the next generation of dynamic Web applications. The Project Zero environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP with application programming interfaces optimized for producing REST-style services, integration mash-ups and rich Web interfaces.

What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows
— Edgar Alan Poe, The Bells

A brief Haskell book status update, Bryan O’Sullivan seems to be Yak Shaving but is nevertheless making good progess.

Flip, ǝpoɔıun oʇ sʞuɐɥʇ—pɐǝɥ ǝɥʇ uo ǝʇıɹʍ oʇ ʇdıɹɔs ɐ ʎ11ɐuıɟ.

Gold Star Hurricane, BLDG BLOG has some great astronomic shots.

Blue is the color of night
When the red sun
Disappears from the sky
Raven feathers shiny and black
A touch of blue glistening down her back
Blue
— Lucinda Williams, Blue

Generic Zipper and its applications, I pretty much underestimated that.

Erdbebenmeßstation Stuttgart während der Bundesliga, der große Lauschangriff kommt von unten, ich sags euch.

The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, 455 BC–395 BC.

01jul2007

The 10th ICFP Programming Contest, registration is open now.

Monads from Algebra and the the Gray Code from Groups, “There is a close association between algebraic structures and monads.” Really good post.

micro is a minimal, one column theme for websites (supports Mephisto and Blogger). Seems like a great choice to use when you need something quick or as a ground to hack your own.

CLL: A Concurrent Language Built from Logical Principles, by Deepak Garg. “In this report, we use both the Curry-Howard isomorphism and proof-search to design a concurrent programming language from logical principles. … Our underlying logic is a first-order intuitionistic linear logic where all right synchronous connectives are restricted to a monad.”

So I have become the Middleman
The gray areas are mine
The in-between, the absentee
Is a beautiful disguise
— Bright Eyes, Middleman

What’s new in the Ruby World: rocaml, Pat Eyler interviewed Mauricio Fernandez.

More space in the space hotel, can I have a neutral milk with that?

von Neumann’s Long Farewell, “For many of us the shift away from the von Neumann architecture is painfully slow.” So true.

Everything gets smaller now the further that I go
Towards the mouth and the reunion of the Known and the Unknown
Consider yourself lucky if you think of it as home
You can move mountains with your misery if you don’t
If you don’t
— Bright Eyes, Lime Tree

The Panel, “We asked three writers, three scientists and two broadcasters to answer six basic scientific questions, and their answers appear to confirm the arts/science divide.” One really ought to know these answers.

The Missing Piece, nice effect.

10 Things that “Absolutely suck” about the iPhone, by someone that has one.

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