Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31oct2007
Shipping Means Prioritizing, Jon Gruber excuses Apple for not having a JRE 6 ready. I would have loved if they killed Java…
Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop are online.
Addressing the ORM problem, typed relational algebra, Mauricio Fernandez writes: “I have been working on a typed relational algebra that allows to abstract and compose queries that can be verified statically. This means that the type system ensures all queries are well-formed and you never try to use a non-existent column or table or an existent one with the wrong types.” WJW. (A nice exercise for category theorists as well…
Santa-Fe,
Dear, dear, dear, dear Santa-Fe.
Since I’m never gonna cease to roam,
I’m never, ever far from home,
But I’ll build a geodesic dome
And sail away.
— Bob Dylan, Santa Fe
Hot Pepper Record Broken, jd says. Yay! The Bhut Jolokia pepper scores over 1000000(!) on the Scoville scale.
A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac, _why needs a bit help with Leopard.
A Roundup Of Leopard Security Features, by Thomas Ptacek, with this very interesting fact: “sandbox-compilerd embeds TinyScheme”.
Why I Love ECMAScript 4: Real Decimals, wow, a curly-braces language with a proper numeric tower? (It also has optional typing, which is even cooler… now add a reasonable syntax, please!)
Ikarus is a free optimizing incremental native-code compiler for R6RS Scheme. Must be the only R6RS implementation out there.
Smalltalk YX is an open source programming language. It’s an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 standard. Syx is written in C and embeddable.
Ten Commandments of How to Write an IMAP client, by Mark Crispin.
Sometimes I wonder about change
But change doesn’t wonder about me
So I figure it’s enough to live, do anything at all
We all got stuff to give
— Dan Bern, Drips
MHI is a commandline style mailreader in the tradition of mh and nmh, but mutated to support IMAP. Written in Python.
The Pirate Bay Sees a Future Without BitTorrent, let’s hope it doesn’t fall to the second system effect.
Police: Boy playing with matches started 38,000-acre fire, “well done”.
30oct2007
Chaosradio Blog, Aktuelles vom Chaosradio Podcast Network.
Elements of Basic Category Theory, by Alfio Martini.
Blindtext-Archiv, denn immer Lipsum ist auch langweilig.
Don’t make a grown man cry
My eyes dilate, my lips go green
My hands are greasy
She’s a mean, mean machine
Start it up
— Rolling Stones, Start Me Up
Finding Objects: What to do when the Cards don’t work, by Ward Cunningham.
Spies, Light-Writing, and the Surface of the City, impressive, WJW.
Client Side Hyphenation Library, for JavaScript. WJW.
Everything I know about writing, excellent list by Paul Boutin.
iNdependence is a Cocoa-based application for Mac OS X which provides an easy-to-use interface for jailbreak, activation, SSH installation, and ringtone/wallpaper/application installation on your iPhone. Very nice.
CSS Eleven is an international group of visual web designers and developers who are committed to helping the W3C’s CSS Working Group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow’s web.
Fundamental physics: where we stand today, introductionary talk by John Baez. “Since the discovery of the W and Z particles over twenty years ago, few truly novel predictions of fundamental theoretical physics have been confirmed by experiment. On the other hand, observations in astronomy have revealed shocking facts that our theories do not really explain: most of our universe consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Where does fundamental physics stand today, and why has theory become divorced from experiment?”
Nobody Knows Shoes, a book(let) by why the lucky stiff!
Undefined behavior in Perl and other languages, by Mark Dominus. (There is defined Perl behavior? :-P)
isitchristmas.com, omg I totally love that site. Totally.
You’re graceful as a bird
My heart is on the wing
You’re gentle as a dove
If a humming bird could sing
— Rolling Stones, Terrifying
Illnesses Whose Victims May Not Be Safely Eaten, by Maryam Akbari and Sean Michaels. May be useful someday…
YASS, or how to get 2^31-1 points in a week, awesome Nethack suicide.
Simple Turing machines, Universality, Encodings, etc., Vaughan Pratt(!) considers the 2,3-proof flawed.
29oct2007
Stupid Shit People ACTUALLY Put On Their Resumes, made my day.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review, by John Siracusa. Great review.
html5lib is a ruby/python based HTML parser/tokenizer based on the WHATWG HTML5 specification for maximum compatibility with major desktop web browsers.
You always aroused me
I got you all primed
Maybe I’ll understand you
One of these times
— Dan Bern, Hooker
Call for Comments, “The WHATWG has how published a snapshot version of the HTML5 spec for review.” Whee.
Mail 3 and To Do Lists, “Mail.app version 3 brings some pretty nice To Do related features. A few pieces of the functionality make the use of “contexts” fairly easy.” A trick by lypanov.
Rsync Version 3 Alpha Out, with OS X xattr support.
Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future, nice list.
Why every programmer should play NetHack, yay.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
— Bob Dylan, Forever Young
GI Metro, a shirt showing your intestines like a tube map.
Displaperture, a small OS X app to round the corners of your screen with a variable radius.
DecentURL maks ugly URLs decent, by allowing you to enter the title in the redirection URL.
28oct2007
Molecular Gastronomy, Dehydrated Apple Powder anyone?
MIXA: a USB cassette for your digital stuff!, cute.
Sail on silvergirl,
Sail on by.
Your time has come to shine.
All your dreams are on their way.
— Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water
jwz mixtapes, “I’ve decided to start putting together a weekly mixtape: a cassette-tape-sized chunk of music that I enjoy, and that you should enjoy too. Some will be new, some old.”
String#to_proc is “an addition to Ruby’s core String class to enable point-free hylomorphisms…” Kind of neat, but not really hylo.
Repoze integrates Zope technologies with WSGI and reusable Python middleware. Interesting.
Implementation of Programming Languages, Lecture Notes featuring Utrecht parser combinators, attribute grammars, type inference and other impressive stuff.
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’.
— Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man
The Genesis of Attribute Grammars, by Donald E. Knuth(!).
Why Attribute Grammars Matter, by Wouter Swierstra for The Monad.Reader Issue Four.
27oct2007
Twitter Cookbook, every recipe in 140 chars or less.
Don’t fall in love with everybody’s baby
You think she’s all for you and she’s your pal
But watch yourself with everybody’s baby
‘Cause everybody’s baby
Ain’t nobody’s gal
— Dan Bern, Everybody’s Baby
OfflineIMAP is a tool to simplify your e-mail reading. With OfflineIMAP, you can read the same mailbox from multiple computers. You get a current copy of your messages on each computer, and changes you make one place will be visible on all other systems. For instance, you can delete a message on your home computer, and it will appear deleted on your work computer as well. OfflineIMAP is also useful if you want to use a mail reader that does not have IMAP support, has poor IMAP support, or does not provide disconnected operation.
Factor’s object system, one can learn lots from it.
Leopard Easter Egg, I love it.
HALO: High ALtitude Object, “My project launched a payload with GPS, camera, sensors and communications to an altitude of 30km.” Very cool.
Going Agro, “Via Dwell’s recently redesigned blog, we discover so-called agro-housing: buildings made for, with, and alongside residential experiments in agriculture.”
Tonight I wish I was born in New Orleans
So I could play the blues
So I could really play the blues
Tonight, tonight, I m wishing I could play the blues
Play the blues
— Dan Bern, Play The Blues
Geometric Representation Theory (Lecture 6), by John Baez. “In mathematics, a ‘magic wand’ is any systematic process that you can apply to big chunks of interesting mathematics and get new, more interesting mathematics.”
26oct2007
Kusasa, a Zulu word for tomorrow, is the name of a new, dynamic learning system for the 21st century. Kusasa will provide learners with free software to model the objects, organisms or processes they are studying in any learning area.
Sometimes I wonder what’s going on in the mind of Miss X
Sometimes I wonder what’s going on in the mind of Miss X
You know she got such a sweet disposition
I never know what the poor girl’s gonna do to me next
— Bob Dylan, New Pony
Co-Logic Programming: Extending Logic Programming with Coinduction, by Luke Simon, Ajay Bansal, Ajay Mallya, and Gopal Gupta. “Co-LP is a natural generalization of logic programming and coinductive logic programming, which in turn generalizes other extensions of logic programming, such as infinite trees, lazy predicates, and concurrent communicating predicates.”
Simpler, Easier!, “In a recent paper, Simply Easy! (An Implementation of a Dependently Typed Lambda Calculus), the authors argue that type checking a dependently typed language is easy. I agree whole-heartedly, it doesn’t have to be difficult at all. But I don’t think the paper presents the easiest way to do it.” Lennart Augustsson presents his solution.
Mutt On Mac OS X with Emacs. Well explained.
HPDF package is a Haskell PDF library with support for several pages, page transitions, outlines, annotations, compression, colors, shapes, patterns, jpegs, fonts, typesetting…
So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
On this new morning with you.
New morning…
— Bob Dylan, New Morning
Gödel, Nagel, minds and machines, Ernest Nagel Lecture by Solomon Feferman. “Just fifty years ago, Ernest Nagel and Kurt Goedel became involved in a serious imbroglio about the possible inclusion of Goedel’s original work on incompleteness in the book, Goedel’s Proof, then being written by Nagel with James R. Newman. ”
Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life, paper by danah boyd.
Eight of the World’s Most Unusual Plants, really cool.
25oct2007
Kēlen, a conlang without verbs. Very detailed exposition.
GIMP 2.4 Release Notes, since it was released, obviously.
All the leaves are brown
And the sky is grey
I went for a walk
On a winters day
— John and Michelle Phillips, California Dreamin’
DeltaStreams, OOPSLA 2007 talk by Göran Krampe.
this made me smile #26, me too.
A graphical tracer for Perl 6 regexes based on PCR, “Tracing parse failures by hand while developing a compiler can be really a daunting task, because the real problem can appear everywhere – the grammar definition, the input string being matched, or even the regex engine itself.” Nice.
CouchDB “Joins”, bolting-on relationality.
Libecc is an elliptic curve crypto library for C++ developers. Well documented.
The VIC cipher is an intricate cipher issued by the Soviet Union to at least one of its spies. It is of interest because it seems highly secure, despite being a pencil-and-paper cipher.
Ruleby is a Rete based Rule engine in Ruby.
I’d be safe and warm
If I was in LA
California dreamin’
On such a winters day
— John and Michelle Phillips, California Dreamin’
Fast image enlargement through seam insertion in OCaml, by Mauricio of course.
The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved, Stephen Wolfram proclaims. Very nifty.
24oct2007
Getting Started with IMAP for Gmail, yay! (But my account doesn’t have it yet…)
Y10k Compliance for OS X. Faking, but nice though.
Need it now!, the perils of the Blueberry keyboard.
And every day there’s a dark stranger
Who tries to lead us into danger
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
They don’t know what I’m going through
— Dead Moon, Over The Edge
Seeing with sound: The boy who echolocates, WJW.
WHATWG to start work on “Bible5”, made my day.
Come
Doused in mud
Cept in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend
A a friend
— Nirvana, Come As You Are
Remote Control Anarchy, it was three years ago but still holds: “The six remote controls required for a simple home theater illustrate the problems caused by complexity and inconsistency in user interfaces.”
Sinatra is a RESTful DSL for writing webapps with Rack.
23oct2007
On One-Pass CPS Transformations, by Olivier Danvy, Kevin Millikin, and Lasse R. Nielsen. Just when I need it, great.
I wanna see a line-up, just as long as this old town
I wanna see a line-up, just as long as this old town
Get a warrant right out, for whomever ain’t around
— Lousiana Red, First Degree
Libtextcat is a library with functions that implement the classification technique described in Cavnar & Trenkle, “N-Gram-Based Text Categorization”. It was primarily developed for language guessing, a task on which it is known to perform with near-perfect accuracy.
The Internet? Bah!, “Hype Alert: Why Cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana”. By Clifford Stoll, written in 1995.
Well you know I loved you Ealase, that’s why I went down and dug your grave
You know I loved you Ealase, that’s why I went down and dug your grave
If I do right and live right honey, I’ll join you up there someday
— Lousiana Red, Death of Ealase
Aha-one-liners in Haskell.
22oct2007
Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place, I love it. WJW.
The mr(1) command can checkout, update, or perform other actions on a set of repositories as if they were one combined respository. It supports any combination of subversion, git, cvs, bzr, and mercurial repositories, and support for other revision control systems can easily be added. Very nice.
Fifty years after the fair
I drink from a different cup
But it does no good to compare
cause nothing ever measures up
— Aimee Mann, Fifty Years After The Fair
Graph Theory with Applications , by J.A. Bondy and U.S.R. Murty. Full scanned text online.
Bundesweiter Demonstrationsaufruf zum Stopp der Vorratsdatenspeicherung, “Der Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung und der Chaos Computer Club rufen unter dem Motto “Freiheit statt Angst – Für die Grundrechte!” zu bundesweiten Demonstrationen am 6. November 2007 auf, um die von der Koalition geplante Vorratsdatenspeicherung noch in letzter Minute zu stoppen.”
Call me call me in a sweet design
Call me call me for your lover’s lover’s alibi
Call me on the line
Call me call me any anytime
— Blondie, Call Me
The only castle in Malibu burnt down.
21oct2007
The Calculus of Saying “I Love You”, by Anna Gosline. “Why you should never date man who knows more math than you.” (Gorz would disagree.)
Tuppence Tour of Haskell Concurrency Constructs, channels and STM.
Oh, child, why you wanna hurt me?
I’m exiled, you can’t convert me.
I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes glazed.
— Bob Dylan, We Better Talk This Over
Inductive Logic Programming: Techniques and Applications, by Nada Lavrac and Saso Dzeroski. Full text online.
My love, I cannot live without you, “French philosopher Andre Gorz wrote his terminally ill wife a moving letter before their joint suicide last month.”
Using Thermonuclear Pennies to Embed Complex Numbers as Types, seems unrelated to Clifford algebras, though.
Wir werden immer laut durch’s Leben gehen,
alles andere ist uns egal.
Vom Anfang blieb sehr wenig bestehn
und nichts davon ist wahr.
Doch darum geht es längst nicht mehr,
vergiss den Frust und komm her.
— Die Toten Hosen, Geh Aus Dem Weg
The Hillary Nutcracker, totally nuts.
20oct2007
The Dodo Query Flattening System, by van Ruth, Fokkinga, and van Keulen. “This report proposes Dodo, an approach to automatic translation of queries from the complex objects domain into set-at-a-time operations against data stored in a flattened form.” Layers on MonetDB.
Mercurial 0.9.5 released! Quite some nice stuff.
If he’s in some battle slain
I will die, when the moon doth wane
And if he’s drowned in the deep salt sea
I’ll be true to his memory
— John Riley
Jesus Potter, ROTFLMAO.
blurring.org, “each day (or so) i use my imagination and imprint recordings of these categories below! i began this web almanac in late september, 2004!”
1x umrühren bitte, super deutsch/englisches Kochblog.
Lingon is a graphical interface for creating launchd configuration files and controlling them through launchctl for Mac OS X Tiger.
CronniX is an Aqua frontend to the powerful Unix tool “cron”.
The Google Vanity Ring, by Markus Kison shows the amount of hits you have on google, updated daily. Brilliant.
Fontblog.de, ein deutsches Weblog über Typographie und Grafik, voll von eigenem Inhalt und vielen Illustrationen. Hervorragend.
The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er.
And neither have I, The wings to fly.
Give me a boat, that can carry two.
And both shall row, My true love and I.
— The Water Is Wide
Moleskine Project, lots of art drawn into Moleskines. PNSFW.
Pogue’s Imponderables, good questions by David Pouge, e.g. “Who are the morons who respond to junk-mail offers, thereby keeping spammers in business?”
SVN Time-Lapse View is a cross-platform viewer that downloads all revisions of a file and lets you scroll through them by dragging a slider. As you scroll, you are shown a visual diff of the current revision and the previous revision. Thus you can see how a file evolved, and you can easily find the revision at which lines appeared, disappeared, or changed. Not sure if it does, but it should support multiple columns.
COMFY: A Comfortable Set of Control Primitives for Machine Language Programming, by Henry G. Baker. “We present a new set of machine language control primitives based on Pratt’s suggestion which are simpler to implement tan if-then-else and do-while and are more flexible at te same time.” [sic]
Using Z: Specification, Refinement, and Proof, by Jim Woodcock and Jim Davies. I thought Z was much worse, but this is actually pretty nice (which doesn’t mean immediately useful).
19oct2007
The Dymaxion map of the Earth is a projection of a global map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map. It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him in 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. Very cool.
Sassy is a portable assembler for 32-bit or “protected-mode” programming on the x86 architecture. Sassy is based on Henry Baker’s COMFY-65 compiler, which he wrote in PDP-10 Maclisp, subsequently ported to GNU Emacs Elisp, and which targeted the MOS 6502 processor.
Lazy SmallCheck: A library for demand-driven testing of Haskell programs, by Fredrik Lindblad, Matthew Naylor, and Colin Runciman.
Go ‘way little boy
It’s much too late
Walk back out the door
Don’t wanna see you here no more
You’re making it hard for me to concentrate
Go ‘way little boy
It’s much too late
— Bob Dylan, Go ‘way Little Boy
Let the Tea Leaf Reading Begin, John Gruber on the iPhone SDK.
xmonad 0.4 has been announced.
How to make your student credit card 40,000 times cooler, pimp your card.
A Taste Of The Future, in which machines kill soldiers and pacify the planet…
KindaPerl6 now runs on sbcl, clisp and ecl, hooray for CL portability.
18oct2007
The Gel Dilemma, on picking pens. I really like the G2 too.
Kunst ohne “ästhetische Masturbation”: Oliviero Toscani im Interview, vom Traum des täglichen Druckwerks, warum sich Technologie und Kreativität widersprechen und worum es in seiner neuesten Kampagne wirklich geht. Lesenswert.
Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices, “For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.”
Well I just wanna ask you,
If you seen that gal of mine,
Don’t the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don’t the clouds look lonesome shining across the sea,
Don’t my gal look good,
When she’s comin’ after me?
— Bob Dylan, Rocks & Gravel
Combinator Parsers: From Toys to Tools, by Doaitse Swierstra. “We develop, in a stepwise fashion, a set of parser combinators for constructing deterministic, error-correcting parsers. The only restriction on the grammar is that it is not left recursive. Extensive use is made of lazy evaluation, and the parsers constructed “analyze themselves”. Our new combinators may be used for the construction of large parsers to be used in compilers in practical use.” Must read before implementing any parsing combinators.
rocaml-0.6.1: fast, easy Ruby extensions in Objective Caml, no C required!
Art in Programming, PragDave on putting Twittervision and Flickvision into the MoMA.
I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted one time to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain
purple rain, purple rain
I only want to see you bathing in the purple rain
— Prince, Purple Rain
Multiple apps, one domain, I hope that some day Rack will make this very easy.
Executable Grammars in Newspeak, by Gilad Bracha. Parsing EDSLs are getting popular.
Viruses, Trojans and Remote Snooping: Hackers Release Their Own iPhone SDK, Metasploit for the iPhone. Wheee.
GNEVE: GNU Emacs Video Editing, WJW.
17oct2007
What if Google had to design their user interface for Google?, funny.
Delimited Continuations in Haskell, very nice. IMO these are much underrated.
We’re all gonna meet
At that million dollar bash
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
Ooh, baby, ooh-ee
It’s that million dollar bash
— Bob Dylan, Million Dollar Bash
Ramaze Wiki, for the users of the simple, light, modular open-source web-framework written in Ruby with Rack.
What is your current mailing address?, help Don Knuth find the addresses of seven cheque recipients. (I got mine without issues, 6 years ago.)
t2 Allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation. Currently the Linux kernel is normally used – but the T2 SDE is beeing expanded to Minix, Hurd, OpenDarwin, Haiku and OpenBSD – more to come. (In case you need to heat.)
‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary.
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.
— Bob Dylan, Hard Times
Findings From the Web Design Survey, by the A List Apart Staff. “The findings we present here have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession.”
16oct2007
jQuery and XML, by Uche Ogbuji. “jQuery offers a lot of facilities, but it’s best known for offering a cross-browser model for accessing and manipulating web page elements that means you don’t have to deal with the endless pain of DOM.”
Quick List X at BLDG BLOG.
There’s a home place under fire tonight in the Heartland
There’s a well with water so bitter nobody can drink
Ain’t no way to get high and my mouth is so dry that I can’t speak
Don’t they know that I’m dyin’, Why nobody cryin’ for me?
— Bob Dylan, Heartland
Lothar Sieber war ein deutscher Flugkapitän und Testpilot. Er absolvierte den ersten senkrechten Raketenstart in der Geschichte.
On the Tension Between Object-Oriented and Generic Programming in C++, and What Type Erasure Can Do About It. By Thomas Becker. “The author discusses how the use of generic programming in C++ can lead to conflicts with object-oriented design principles. He demonstrates how a technique known as type erasure can often be used to resolve these conflicts. An in-depth example is presented: any_iterator, a type-safe, heterogeneous C++ iterator.”
The Web might be better than sex. — Bob Metcalfe
File::Remove reported to “rm -rf /” during tests, best argument for stubbing I’ve seen so far.
Through a bullet of light
Her face was reflectin’
The fast fading words
That rolled from my tongue
With a long-distance look
Her eyes was on fire
But the song it was long
And there was more to be sung.
— Bob Dylan, Eternal Circle
Atheists and Anger, “this piece is about anger, and for once I’m going to fucking well let myself be angry.” Partially good points.
15oct2007
Why everyone should know number theory (PDF), by Minhyong Kim. “Pythagoras’ dictum that ‘all is number’ is well-known. But my impression is that even practicing mathematicians are often not entirely aware of the thoroughness with which we have developed this very idea over the centuries in the formation of our world-view, from the evolution of the cosmos to the structure of elementary particles, and even in attempts to describe the ultimate nature of human consciousness.”
Top Down Operator Precedence, by Douglas Crockford. That’s the way to implement custom operators!
![Oroba Tunnel in Salah Salem Road [Cairo]](http://static.flickr.com/2254/1543283671_1160b91c78_m.jpg)
I can feel it in the air
Feel it up above
Feel the tension everywhere
There is too much blood
Too much blood, well alright
— Rolling Stones, Too Much Blood
Kiva: The Power of Small, by xC0000005. “With $25, a paypal account, and a desire to do some good Kiva connected me to this man in Senegal and in doing so revealed the power of small. Kiva itself is a front, a sort of backing bank for agencies that offer microloans. A microloan is a loan in an amount that normal banks don’t traffic in. A loan with a term so short normal banks don’t deem it worth their time. A micro-loan can also be the key to change.”
A generic library for SAT problems (PDF) with Higher-Order Unit Testing, by Oliver Kullmann. The source is not yet available (but apparently will be), and I’m sure we can learn lots from it.
MLgraph: A library to produce images in Caml, “This library has been designed and implemented by Emmanuel Chailloux and Guy Cousineau to produce images of PostScript quality. It is available for Caml Light and Objective Caml.” Sounds good: “Starting from elementary graphisms corresponding to elementary objects, one builds more complex graphisms using graphical combinations of these objects. To program these constructions, it is very natural to consider images as values and graphical combinations as functions.”
Got to be an important person to be in here, honey,
Got to have done some evil deed,
Got to have your own harem when you come in the door,
Got to play your harp until your lips bleed.
— Bob Dylan, Sweetheart Like You
Van der Waerden’s problem: programs 3 and 4, by Mark Dominus. Also featuring embarrassing C macros.
Voting up or down is dead, full ack.
14oct2007
How to Get a Job Like Mine, by Aaron Swartz.
Conchoid of Nicomedes, and trisect any angle.
In addition, online news sites started noticing that Reddit could send them vast amounts of traffic. They somehow thought they could encourage this by adding “reddit this” links to all of their articles. As far as I know, adding such links doesn’t actually improve your chances of being popular on Reddit (although it does make your site look more ugly), but it did give us lots of free advertising. — Aaron Swartz
Cissoid of Diocles, and duplicate the cube.
Inside Out Martini, this rocks.
Object-oriented Brainfuck, the shapes example. WJW.
Asemic writing looks like writing, but we can’t quite read it. “Asemic writing has been made by poets, writers, painters, calligraphers, children, and scribblers, all around the world. Most people make asemic writing at some time, possibly when testing a new pen.”
I don’t care
How many letters they sent
Morning came and morning went
Pick up your money
And pack up your tent
You ain’t goin’ nowhere
— Bob Dylan, You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
Building Communities with Software, by Joel Spolsky. A recap of his forum software design. Worth a read.
13oct2007
In which direction does she spin? (GIF). Amazing illusion.
Greater Los Angeles, “I love Boston; I even love Denver; I like Miami; I think Washington DC is habitable; but Los Angeles is Los Angeles. You can’t compare it to Paris, or to London, or to Rome, or to Shanghai.”
Pagination 101, my main issue always is only one or two entries on the last page. A bit of fuzzy logic would just stick them to the last full page.
How do you sleep at night?
How do you walk with your head held high?
Dear Mr. President,
You’d never take a walk with me.
Would you?
— Pink, Dear Mr. President
Oh Christ! … I couldn’t care less. — Doris Lessing
The square of the Catalan sequence, by Mark Dominus.
University of the Arts students hack Eames classics, I want one!
And you can’t find your waitress with a Geiger counter
And she hates you and your friends and you just can’t get served without her
And the box-office is drooling, and the bar stools are on fire
And the newspapers were fooling, and the ash-trays have retired
‘Cause the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking
The piano has been drinking, not me, not me, not me, not me, not me
— Tom Waits, The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)
young italian girl likes to imitate olive trees, WJW.
12oct2007
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – with semantic technology, thus turning it into a semantic wiki. While articles in MediaWiki are just plain texts, SMW allows users to add structured data, comparable to the data one would usually store in a database. Lightweight enough it could work.
Favourite Unicode Codepoints, these really rock.
MCL 5.2 goes open-source. A bit late, now everyone is using Intel.
OAuth is an open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.
The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
— Tom Petty, The Waiting
Death special: How does it feel to die?, learn all the different ways.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 goes to Al Gore. And not for the invention of the internet! (Which honestly would be more worth the prize than making another movie about climate change.)
ocamljs, an OCaml to Javascript compiler. ML to JS seems to get popular, this is a good thing.
You’re Doing It Wrong, I love it! Let’s make another t-shirt.
Changes in Ruby 1.9, Oct. 07 update, by Mauricio Fernandez. “This is a summary of the changes in Ruby 1.9 between Feb. and Oct. 07.”
And its wake up time
Time to open up your eyes
And rise and shine
— Tom Petty, Wake Up Time
HTTP response signing abstract model, by James Clark. Maybe this will get somewhere.
FreeCell: General Information and Index of Solutions, compiled by Michael Keller, based on earlier lists by Dave Ring and Wilson Callan. Features the impossible deal and Laura Ross, who played all games and won them except for five. WJW.
11oct2007
The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World, yikes. PNSFW.
Hacker dichten GDL Schlichtung im Tarifstreit mit der Bahn an, made my day.
I long to see you in the morning light
I long to reach for you in the night
Stay, lady, stay, stay while the night is still ahead
— Bob Dylan, Lay, Lady, Lay
What the F***?, by Steven Pinker. On the linguistics of swearing, highly interesting.
Project proposal: Multi-Language VM, this could be great: “Here are some examples of features that could be prototyped in this project, if developers were found who are willing and able: tail calls and tail recursion, continuations and coroutines, tuples and value-oriented types, lightweight method objects, runtime support for closures, invokedynamic.”
Swiss Ice Storm, brrrrrr.
Chernobyl to be covered in steel, “Ukraine has hired a French firm to build the structure to replace the crumbling concrete casing put over the reactor after the 1986 accident.”
Explicit-Formulas Database for Hyperelliptic curves, compiled by Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange.
Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end.
Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again.
They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car.
They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar.
Yes, but I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.
— Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
HDB is a small, flexible and efficient hybrid database, a mix between a filesystem and a database. It comes with a wide support of command line utilities for manipulating and extracting data. Uses BerkleyDB internally.
6 Things STAR WARS Teaches Us About Our Money, eww.
10oct2007
The Powerbook! The Powerbook! The Powerbook’s on Fire!, yikes.
Infoporn is information that serves no purpose and consumes valuable space in your head.
BarCamp Munich was last week and noone told me. :/
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
Morph Endo!, Official Report on the Tenth Interstellar Contest on Fuun Programming, by Eelco Dolstra, Jur Hage, Bastiaan Heeren, Stefan Holdermans, Johan Jeuring, Andres Löh, Arie Middelkoop, Alexey Rodriguez, John van Schie, and Clara Löh.
StupidFilter, an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines.
Starving in the Belly
Starving in the Belly
Starving in the Belly of a whale
Starving in the Belly
Starving in the Belly
Starving in the Belly of a whale
— Tom Waits, Starving In The Belly Of A Whale
wettriffs.com goes online. Oh joy, oh glory. NSFW.
Physics and Computation: Essay on the unity of science through computation, by José Félix Costa. Weird stuff, but interesting.
09oct2007
The Deseret alphabet is a phonetic alphabet developed in the mid-19th century by the board of regents of the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah) under the direction of Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The alphabet was intended to replace the traditional Latin alphabet with an alternate, more phonetically accurate alphabet for the English language. This would offer immigrants an opportunity to learn to read and write English, which is often less phonetically consistent than many other languages.
The Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time, at the New York Magazine.
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell.
— Bob Dylan, Hurricane
Text::Hatena is a Perl extension for formatting text with Hatena Style. Interesting markup.
Pultius TV remote control, “Design a remote control with as many buttons as there are channels on TV.” Yay! (Actually, I had one like that, but the TV only had 12 channels…)
Slides by Dan Saffer on Interaction Design at SlideShare. All three talks are highly recommended.
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
— Billy Joel, We Didn’t Start The Fire
“We Didn’t Start the Fire”, The History Behind Billy Joel’s Song. With links for each keyword.
Scalad: a salad of Scala abstractions, neat site, could be useful for other languages as well.
The Open Problem Garden, a collection of unsolved problems in mathematics.
Basic Pattern Matching Calculi: A Fresh View on Matching Failure, by Wolfram Kahl. Filed as: Stuff I’ve come up by myself.
RFC 5023: The Atom Publishing Protocol, “The Atom Publishing Protocol has finally been published as RFC 5023.” Fanastic job, kudos to everyone involved. Now write clients.
Programmierkurs startet am 20. Oktober in Köln, “Der C4 (Chaos Computer Club Cologne) und die Codebabes veranstalten einen Programmierkurs für Mädchen ab 16 Jahre.” Super Idee!
Relatively prime polynomials over Z2, by Mark Dominus.
LOLCatBible Translation Project, thez r goink fur teh ful zing, lol!
08oct2007
The Garden of Forking Path, a hypertext.
TYPOlight webCMS is a powerful web content management system that specializes in accessibility (back end and front end) and uses XHTML and CSS to generate W3C/WAI compliant pages. It was developed by Leo Feyer in 2004 and has been released under the General Public License (GPL). Front page validates.
Socratic Electronics, by Tony R. Kuphaldt. Learn electronics the Socratic way.
The harder they come
The harder they fall
One and all
— Rolling Stones, The Harder They Come
Wrangler is an Erlang refactoring tool that supports interactive refactoring of Erlang programs with Emacs.
When my dome opens, I see stars, “Being an enthusiast for all things astronomically observatory, I swooned last week when I read that “a growing number of Americans [have been] incorporating observatories into new or existing homes.” Leading to the question: are suburban homes the new future of astronomy?” There is at least one house with observatory in my hometown.
Sitting amidst war ruins in the hills outside San Francisco, “My wife and I went out to the Marin Headlands yesterday, on a beautiful if windy October afternoon, to hike through the earthquake-prone hills of an upraised seabed, past the eroding concrete bunkers of the U.S. military – abstract monoliths left stranded in the landscape.”
07oct2007
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science, by Dijkstra.
Y&Y TeX was donated to the TeX Users Group (http://tug.org) by Blenda Horn, one of Y&Y’s founders. Per Blenda’s wishes, TUG has now released the sources under the GNU GPL. Short documentation and other ancillary files are under an all-permissive license, since they could be useful to excerpt in other projects. Cool!
Computer Power, by Karl Hartig. “The charts on the right track the power of Intel Corp.’s microprocessor chips from 1971 to 1997. The chart along the bottom and up the right side shows a 27-year perspective.”
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whisperd in the sounds of silence.
— Simon and Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence
A Prayer for Archimedes, “A long-lost text by the ancient Greek mathematician shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus.” Eat that, Newton!
Blind signatures, abstract algebra and cryptography playing together is fantastic.
ASUS Motherboard Ships With Embedded Linux, Web Browser, not a bad idea, but a system that wakes up in 5s is just better.
For the Freelance Assassination of the Burmese Generals, by circletimessquare. Revolutionary: “We have universal consensus that violent action on the Burmese Generals is valid and just and required, earnestly. Well, why can’t the Internet serve as the clearinghouse for organizers, bypassing governments and the UN?”
It’s Time to Stop Calling Circuits “Hardware”, by F. Vahid. FPGA ahoy!
I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells,
I’d taken the cure and had just gotten through,
Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel,
Writin’ “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” for you.
— Bob Dylan, Sara
Geometric Representation Theory (Lecture 1), by John Baez. “This fall, the so-called Quantum Gravity Seminar at U. C. Riverside will actually tackle geometric representation theory – the marvelous borderland where geometry, groupoid theory and logic merge into a single subject.”
Censored 2008, The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006–2007.
06oct2007
fdm is a program to fetch mail and deliver it in various ways depending on a user-supplied ruleset. Mail may be fetched from stdin, IMAP or POP3 servers, or from local maildirs, and filtered based on whether it matches a regexp, its size or age, or the output of a shell command. It can be rewritten by an external process, dropped, left on the server or delivered into maildirs, mboxes, to a file or pipe, or any combination. Seems nice for small setups.
wagn, a data-centric wikish system. Worth a look.
The Future of Web Startups, essay by Paul Graham.
A Solomonic Solution to Leopard’s Dock Problem, geez, I want my dock at the left and serious too.
GemStone 101: Transactions, “With this post I am starting a series of articles on some of the fundamental concepts that you should have at least a passing familiarity with if you are planning on working with GemStone/S.”
I can hear that whistle blowin’,
I see that stationmaster, too,
If there’s a poor boy on the street,
Then let him have my seat
‘Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you.
— Bob Dylan, Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
How can it possibly be that we can exhaustively search an infinite space in a finite time?, “Unfortunately the explanations seem to be couched in topological language making them a little inaccessible. So I thought it’d be good to attempt a rigorous, but elementary, proof so that is possible to see exactly where the ‘magic’ happens.” Seriously cool.
Butt-biting Bug / Vaginads, BoingBoing goes vlog. PNSFW.
Coffee, Tea, Or Vitamin C: Kitchen Chemistry In The Darkroom, by Roger K. Bunting. “It may surprise you to learn that there are a number of common household materials that can serve as developing agents, and they can produce surprisingly good photographs.”
05oct2007
Kohonen’s Self Organizing Feature Maps, “A SOM learns to classify the training data without any external supervision whatsoever. Neat huh?”.
Erlang-like Method Definition in FlexMock, a bit clunky.
Object removal using seam carving, still fast, Mauricio hacks on.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
— Leonard Cohen, Anthem
Dan’s the Man! Check out Dan Ingalls work, Squeak in JavaScript. It doesn’t work here, but it sounds promising.
Van der Waerden’s problem: Program 2, by Mark Dominus.
Oersted Medal Lecture 2002: Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics (PDF), by David Hestenes. “Research on the design and use of mathematical systems provides a guide for designing a unified mathematical language for the whole of physics that facilitates learning and enhances physical insight. This has produced a comprehensive language called Geometric Algebra, which I introduce with emphasis on how it simplifies and integrates classical and quantum physics.”
I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners? — Mark Pilgrim
Clifford algebras are a type of associative algebra. They can be thought of as one of the possible generalizations of the complex numbers and quaternions. The theory of Clifford algebras is intimately connected with the theory of quadratic forms and orthogonal transformations. Clifford algebras have important applications in a variety of fields including geometry and theoretical physics.
Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools,
You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules.
When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?
— Bob Dylan, When You Gonna Wake Up
Perpetual Now, “Wiki is the essence of now. It is the short-term memory, the local heap, of the contributors.” Must read.
Your Personal Moon, WJW, must have.
Vile: vi like emacs, nice and compact vi-ish editor that also has a win32 version and nonsucky buffer management. (No UTF-8, like nvi, my favourite vi. (but that one doesn’t have a win32 port.))
04oct2007
The Munsell color system is a color space that specifies colors based on three color dimensions, hue, value (lightness), and chroma (color purity or colorfulness).
Why Programmers suck at Picking Colors, “For the longest time, I had that problem myself, so much that I decided to go grayscale (like this blog) and focus only and exclusively on brightness and contrast.”
He was a clean-cut kid
But they made a killer out of him,
That’s what they did
— Bob Dylan, Clean-Cut Kid
The Storm Worm, Bruce Schneier says: “Worms like Storm are written by hackers looking for profit, and they’re different. These worms spread more subtly, without making noise. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.”
UCB on YouTube, very nice.
Sputnik.ogg, beep beep beep.
A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformations of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs. — Vannevar Bush, As We May Think
Fun With Fruit, By Sgt York. “Wanna see some DNA? This is a fun little demo that works well at parties. The supplies are found in most people’s kitchens.” We did that in school once, worked well.
Bytes not infosets, James Clark says for REST security. Full ACK.
03oct2007
ICFP Results, I guess a formal announcement will come up soon.
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit
Für das deutsche Vaterland!
Danach laßt uns alle streben
Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!
Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit
Sind des Glückes Unterpfand.
Blüh’ im Glanze dieses Glückes,
Blühe, deutsches Vaterland.
— Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Das Lied der Deutschen
Van der Waerden’s problem , Mark Dominus writes: “In this series of articles I’m going to analyze four versions of a program that I wrote around 1988, and then another program that does the same thing that I wrote last month without referring to the 1988 code.”
Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods, at BLDG BLOG.
Amazon’s Dynamo, an internal DHT they use.
Das Panoptische Prinzip: Filme für die Zeit nach der Privatsphäre, Der Chaos Computer Club Cologne veranstaltet zusammen mit dem Kölner Filmhaus einen Minutenfilmwettbewerb zum Thema “Das Panoptische Prinzip – Filme für die Zeit nach der Privatsphäre”.
Ai Weiwei: Study of Perspective: Tiananmen (1995-2003), Black-and-white photograph. Great!
02oct2007
A History of the Social Web, comprehensive draft by Trebor Scholz.
Higher-dimensional enumeration, cool Haskell.
Mulholland Dr. on Wikipedia. External link recommended.
Winterlude, Winterlude, oh darlin’,
Winterlude by the road tonight.
Tonight there will be no quarrelin’,
Ev’rything is gonna be all right.
— Bob Dylan, Winterlude
Fonts & Encodings by Yannis Haralambous. “This reference is a fascinating and complete guide to using fonts and typography on the Web and across a variety of operating systems and application software. Fonts & Encodings shows you how to take full advantage of the incredible number of typographic options available, with advanced material that covers everything from designing glyphs to developing software that creates and processes fonts.” I must get that.
Air Unit, “Lateral’s “exciting new freehold residential unit” not only attaches to the sides of existing buildings – indeed, it is “a portable unit that can fit into any community and be attached to any building” – but it also floats on water.”
The Failure of the United Nations, by GrandWazoo. “It is not unreasonable to look to the United Nations for understanding and problem resolution. Presumably, we expect it to be an unbiased and peace loving organization. Yet at closer examination one begins to realize the fact that the United Nations has been a total failure in terms of world peace. Rarely has the UN brought enough countries together to form an alliance to intervene meaningfully in the affairs of an oppressive and brutal country.”
My new folding fixie from Bike Friday, nice one, Joi.
I am, I am, I am
I am a patriot
And I love my country
Because my country is all I know
— Steven Van Zandt, I Am A Patriot
Let us attach files please, and DabbleDB giveth.
Das Spiel und der Tote, was passiert wenn ein Ultima Online Spieler stirbt?
01oct2007
Slashdot Turns 10, happy birthday. May you get wiser with your age.
Programming Nu, a site about the new Lisp for OS X stuff.
And you’re clutching your phone
As you walk in the dark
And your smile’s got a twist
You’re looking so hardcore
— Rolling Stones, Let Me Down Slow
Hotwire is an intelligent hybrid text/graphical shell for developers and system administrators. Written in Python.
Rails 2.0: Preview Release, not really worth a 2.0, but a good step forward.
POW: Plain Old Webserver, by David Kellogg. “Turn the web on its head with the Plain Old Webserver (POW), which adds a server to your browser. The Plain Old Webserver uses Server-side Javascript (SJS) to run a server inside your browser. Use it to distribute files from your browser. It supports Server-side JS, GET, POST, uploads, Cookies, SQLite and AJAX.
Happy birthday, OpenSSH, Chad Perrin says. I don’t want to miss it.
You let somebody do the dirty work
Find some loser, find some jerk
Find some dumb ass do it all for free
Let somebody do the dirty work
Find some loser, find some jerk
Find some greaseball, yeah
— Rolling Stones, Dirty Work
Arboreal Isomorphisms from Nuclear Pennies, “The game of Nuclear Pennies is a game for one player played on a semi-infinite strip of sites, each of which may contain any non-negative number of pennies. The aim is to achieve a target configuration of pennies from a starting configuration by means of penny fusion and penny fission.”
Fast content-aware image resizing, Mauricio does it faster and nicer in OCaml.
Marching cubes is a computer graphics algorithm for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a 3D scalar field.
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