Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31mar2008
Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN) is a standard notation for describing a particular board position of a Chess game. The purpose of FEN is to provide all the necessary information to restart a game from a particular position.
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!, jwz: “In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online.”
js2-mode: a new JavaScript mode for Emacs, by Steve Yegge. Seems to be worth a try.
Take a vacation, fall out for a while,
Summer’s comin’ in, and it’s goin’ outa style
Well, lie down smokin’, honey; have yourself a ball,
Cause your mother’s down in Memphis, won’t be back ‘till the fall.
— Grateful Dead, The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)
Password Masking in the Java Programming Language, by Qusay H. Mahmoud. Really really nasty icky trick, almost deserving a WTF. But it works.
Debugging of Maude Modules, by R. Caballero, N. Martí-Oliet, A. Riesco, and A. Verdejo. This is how debugging ought to work: the program says what it does and you judge if the result correct.
Matita (that means pencil in italian) is an experimental, interactive theorem prover under development at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bologna.
It is a solemn thought: Dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork. — Mark Twain
Aktion Pfalzstorch, mit Webcam!
Google Maps of Sci-Fi, I still consider myself to be the inventor of the geocomic.
Pebble: A kernel language for modules and abstract data types, by Rod Burstall and Butler Lampson.
Three blue stars / Rise on the hill
Say no more, now / Just be still
All these trials / Soon be past
Look for something / Built to last
— Grateful Dead, Built To Last
How To Dry A Wet Book, could be very useful.
gibak 0.3.0, Mauricio Fernandez’s backup tool using Git. News: OSX support, extended attributes, bugfixes.
Earth Evolves, “I’ve been looking at Ron Blakey’s maps of the tectonic evolution of the earth’s surface again, and I just absolutely love these things.”
30mar2008
Draco 0.3 has been marked release quality. Changes since beta2 includes the removal of SlackBuilds as build system, it took two month more than expected, but I believe it was worth it. Draco is now self contained and can easily be (re)built from the commandline.
Angerwhale is blogging software that reads posts from the filesystem, and determines authorship based on the post’s PGP digital signature.
16.399: Abstract Interpretation, a bunch of material for a course by Patrick Cousot and Jerome Clarke Hunsaker.
Twimbler, a Twitter-backed tumblelog system.
Even though I been a stranger, full of irony and spite
Holding little but contempt for all things beautiful and bright,
Something shines around you and it seems, to my delight
To give me just a little sweetness…
Just a little sweetness…
Just a little sweetness…
Just a little light.
— Grateful Dead, Just a Little Light
A Guided Tour of emacs-git, by TSKim, a new Emacs interface for Git.
punch is a k.i.s.s. tool for tracking the hours spent on various projects. It supports logging hours under a project name, adding notes about work done during that period, and several very simple reporting tools that operate over a window of time.
Yhc/Javascript backend: personal/historical notes, by Dimitry Golubovsky.
Improving the neighbourhood, a great short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
Power Plant, “The roots of garden pea plants were exposed to low-level electric current and subsequently produced 13 times more pisatin, an antifungal chemical, than plants that were not exposed to electricity,” we read.
RetroForth 10 now uses a virtual machine. Great!
Cellular Automata Sand Pile Model, a neat Java applet.
Everything I tell you, I heard it first from you.
Heard your news report, you know you’re falling short.
Pretty soon, we’ll trust you for the weather.
When that ship comes in, you won’t know where it’s been.
You got to try to see a little farther.
— Grateful Dead, They Love Each Other
The linguistic turn refers to a major development in Western philosophy during the 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy, and consequently also the other humanities, towards a primary focus on the relationship between philosophy and language.
Things I have learned in my life so far, fantastic site.
A Victim Treats His Mugger Right, idealism at work. Heartbreaking.
Earthquake Intensity, “Tom Weller suggests the humorous Rictus scale (a take off on the conventional Richter scale) for earthquake intensity.”
29mar2008
Celebrating Three Years of Anarchaia!, “Thanks for all your kind mails, contributed links and other pleasantness. I still enjoy it as much as I hope you do as well.”
The TeX Tuneup of 2008, unbelievable: “New versions of TeX (3.1415926) and METAFONT (2.718281) have just been released, after five years of accumulated experience with the previous versions.” The diff.
Now you see me now you don’t watch me dive below
Deep down in your love lake where the sweet fish come and go
And I might sink and I might drown but death don’t mean a thing
‘Cause life continues right or wrong when I play this birthday song
I learned from you, and you can’t even sing
— Don McLean, Birthday Song
Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example, by Peter Flach. Full PDF available.
Unification Theory, by Franz Baader and Wayne Snyder. “Unification is a fundamental process upon which many methods for automated de duction are based. Unification theory abstracts from the specific applications of this process: it provides formal definitions for important notions like instantiation, most general unifier, etc., investigates properties of these notions, and provides and analyzes unification algorithms that can be used in different contexts.”
CCC publiziert die Fingerabdrücke von Wolfgang Schäuble, pwned. “Die Hacker haben es nicht beim Abdruck von Schäubles Fingerabdruck belassen – dem Heft liegt auch eine fertige Fingerabdruck-Attrappe bei.”
Deep Mix, minimal Moscow Radio.
How to Disagree, by Paul Graham.
Asaph, a small blogging system, that allows you to instantly post links and images directly from any page on the web. Really neat tumblelog software.
T-Shirts and Memberships, 2008, for Daring Fireball. I got one, should have done it earlier. Keep up the excellent work, John.
Unread Books, I counted: of 198 books in the shelf, I didn’t read 43 (as in “didn’t start”, not “didn’t finish”). But I fully agree with “Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be.”
Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem, by Brian Warner, Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, and Rob Kinninmont. “The “Tahoe” project is a distributed filesystem, which safely stores files on multiple machines to protect against hardware failures. Cryptographic tools are used to ensure integrity and confidentiality, and a decentralized architecture minimizes single points of failure.” Sounds promising.
Signing bug in Wii, or when strncmp sucks.
MOST-POSITIVE-BIGNUM, Jamie Zawinski found it on the TI Explorer.
StrokeDB is an embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby. It is schema-free, it scales infinitely, it even tracks revisions and perfectly integrates with Ruby applications. Hot hot hot!
WashUP: A washing machine on your toilet, umm, yeah.
montañas, plain beautiful.
Working on inheritance in Factor.
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear
Make my old memories come alive
Take me away and turn back the years
Sing Me Back Home before I die
— Haggard Merle, Sing Me Back Home
The Grothendieck Circle, to make publicly available (and in some cases translate) the material written by and about Alexandre Grothendieck as well as to provide biographical material on Grothendieck’s life and his origins. For the present, we have posted several of his writings appearing on the web in complete form for the first time, together with many links to other online sources of his work. Since many of these texts are unpublished or are out-of-print we hope this site will serve as a valuable resource, expanding over time.
Types for Prolog, pretty nice.
Optimal Union-Find in Constraint Handling Rules, by Tom Schrijvers and Thom Fruehwirth. “Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice rule-based language that was originally intended for writing constraint solvers. In this paper we show that it is also possible to write the classic union-find algorithm and variants in CHR. The programs neither compromise in declarativeness nor efficiency. We study the time complexity of our programs: they match the almost-linear complexity of the best known imperative implementations. This fact is illustrated with experimental results.”
Kein Transrapid für München, *kicher*.
Wrong Number, Chris Okasaki asks: “Is it time to overhaul the user interface of the phone system?” Yes! Why is there no phone-DNS?
How to guarantee a girl never leaves you, WJW.
What has happened so far, by Urs Schreiber. “The n-Category Café has recently passed beyond 6⋅10 2 entries, 1.3⋅10 3 trackbacks and 1⋅10 4 comments.” Gratulations!
Sign Up Forms Must Die, by Luke Wroblewski at A List Apart. Couldn’t agree more.
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, by Aarron Walter at A List Apart. “Once upon a time in a web design agency, there lived a sad little boy named Findability.”
Git mirror of the MacPorts svn repo, nice.
24mar2008
Comparing lightweight threads, by Mauricio Fernandez.
Taffy DB is a free and opensource JavaScript library that acts as thin data layer inside Web 2.0 and Ajax applications. Think of it as a SQL database in your web browser.
Ouvroir Du Design Graphique Potentiel, Archive for design constraints, rules and methodologies. Viele deutsche Einträge, some are translated.
My love is bigger than a Cadillac
I try to show it but you drive me back
Your love for me has gotta be real
For you to know just how I feel
A love that’s real not fade away
— Buddy Holly, Not Fade Away
Experimental demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the Soprano, by Georges Perec. Must read.
No Resistance Is Futile, by Paul Ford. Excel as writing tool, it burns. But: Six words are enough for everything. (Paul Ford is doing great stuff lately. Ten Word Line is partially related.)
Circuitry Snacks, yummy.
New ELF linker code added to GNU binutils, Google has to be desperate when they need a faster linker…
Finally nothing moves. High noon.
Black top rolling below the asphalt drive
A concrete fascination scraping the edge of nothing
This is black sunshine.
— White Zombie, Black Sunshine
Classboxes: A Minimal Module Model Supporting Local Rebinding (PDF), by Alexandre Bergel, Stéphane Ducasse, and Roel Wuyts. I had similar ideas, but its nice to see them written up already.
50 Jahre ☮, und die Entstehung dieses Symbols.
What Conditions (Exceptions) are Really About, by Dan Weinreb. Common Lisp still has one of the finest condition systems around.
Transforming a comonad with a monad, heavy lifting.
Monkey Patching, Gilad Bracha compares various ways of extending other classes.
23mar2008
The Good Friday Experiment, “The goal was to see if in religiously predisposed subjects, psilocybin (the active principle in psilocybin mushrooms) would act as reliable entheogen.”
Introduction to Operating Systems Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs (PDF), nice book by Francisco J Ballesteros.
And the whole damn thing s a great big lie
Jesus was a Jew and so am I
But I–I got a guitar
I got a guitar
— Dan Bern, I Got A Guitar
Boxes Go Bananas: Encoding Higher-Order Abstract Syntax with Parametric Polymorphism (PDF), by Geoffrey Washburn and Stephanie Weirich.
hvac 0.1b, a transactional, declarative framework for lightweight web applications in Haskell.
And I met Jesus Christ in the mall
Said, “What are you doing here”
He said, “I ve come to find the King
I said, “I thought that was you”
He said, “No, I m the Lord of Hosts
“Elvis is the King”
I said, “Oh yes, I like his music
“Especially that one–Allison”
— Dan Bern, They Will Pass Over
Why Is the 3X + 1 Problem Hard? (PDF), by Ethan Akin.
8 Powerful Features of Safari That Few People Know About, by Daniel Miessler. Totally useful.
22mar2008
Twiddla is a free no-setup, web-based meeting playground. Very neat.
MacBook Air USB hacks, WJW. Really.
The wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game.
I cut my deck to the queen of spades, but the cards were all the same.
Dont murder me, I beg of you, dont murder me. please, dont murder me.
— Grateful Dead, Dire Wolf
Pi-calculus on Wikipedia. I always thought it was ugly, but actually it’s pretty nice.
Infinitary Logic are logics which can have infinitely long statements or infinitely long proofs.
So blow your whistle freight train
Take me far on down the track
I’m going away, I’m leaving today
I’m going but I ain’t coming back
— Bill Browning, Dark Hollow
Friends of the High Line, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and reuse of the High Line – a 1.5 mile, elevated railway that runs along the West Side of Manhattan. Beautiful.
When Are Two Algorithms the Same?, by Andreas Blass, Nachum Dershowitz, and Yuri Gurevich. Tricky questions.
21mar2008
The road coloring problem, a proof by A. N. Trahtman.
the new shelton wet/dry, awesome PNSFW blog.
Version 2.0 of mod_wsgi is now available, good to know.
They nailed Him there to die on a cross in the sky,
In the lightning, the thunder and the rain.
Judas Iscariot committed suicide
When they laid poor Jesus Christ in his grave.
— Woody Guthrie, Jesus Christ
Harald Welte and Groklaw announced as winners of the FSF’s annual free software awards.
World Time Clock, freaking clever design.
You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss, essay by Paul Graham.
EXPELLED!, WJW.
JSAwesome provides a powerful JSON based DSL for creating interactive forms.
Sophie 1.0 Available Now, Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins.
Everybody’s bragging and drinking that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shine
Come to Daddy on an inside straight
I got no chance of losing this time
No, I got no chance of losing this time
— Grateful Dead, Loser
The Lightning Sessions Session, Patrick Logan says: “Here is how it works: within the hour and a half session, the participants continuously create new 60-second sessions.”
The NetBSD project celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, big gratulations.
20mar2008
This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 261), the journey goes on!
Quantum immortality is a metaphysical speculation derived from the quantum suicide thought experiment. It states that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that conscious beings are immortal. I believe.
Terrapin Station
in the shadow of the moon
Terrapin Station
and I know we’ll be there soon
— Grateful Dead, Terrapin Station
Disciple is an explicitly lazy dialect of Haskell which supports destructive update, computational effects, type directed field projections and some other useful things. Very interesting.
CCHR: The Fastest CHR Implementation, in C, by Pieter Wuille.
Principles of Chemical Programming (PDF), by Jean-Pierre Banâtre , Pascal Fradet, and Yann Radenac. “Since the introduction of Gamma in the mid-eighties, many other chemical formalisms have been proposed such as the CHAM, the P-systems and various higher-order extensions. The main ob jective of this paper is to identify a basic calculus containing the very essence of the chemical paradigm and from which extensions can be derived and compared to existing chemical models.”
Did you say your name was
Ramblin’ Rose?
Ramble on, baby
Settle down easy
Ramble on, Rose
— Grateful Dead, Ramble On Rose
The Sad Truth About Relationships, oh damn how true…
The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations. The Google Visualization API also provides a platform that can be used to create, share and reuse visualizations written by the developer community at large.
The FSB virtual machine by Tom Lord emulates a hypothetical computer designed to host dynamically typed, high-level programming languages. Contains some interesting concepts.
Decorating Eggs with Mathematica, neat idea.
19mar2008
Arthur C. Clarke, 16 December 1917–19 March 2008. RIP.
The truth, as always, will be far stranger. — Arthur C. Clarke
On the Incomparability of Gamma and Linda, by G. Zavattaro. “We compare Gamma and Linda, two of the most prominent coordination languages based on generative communication via a shared data space. In Gamma computation is obtained by applying multiset rewriting rules, reminiscent of the way chemical reactions happen in a solution. On the other hand, Linda permits interprocess communication by means of the creation and consumption of shared data.”
Abracadabra, a tube type bookmark. Fantastic!
Wake up to find out
that you are the eyes of the World
but the heart has its beaches
its homeland and thoughts of its own
— Grateful Dead, Eyes Of The World
Disks have become tapes, how true.
Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, In Words of Four Letters or Less.
Below the Polar Ice Cap, “Another danger was that the sub might simply be frozen in place with no way out and no way to call for help as food and other supplies dwindled.”
Hay-Soos, a truly excellent mail reply by Scott Adams.
And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.
No-one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.
That leaves only me to blame ‘cos Mama tried.
— Merle Haggard, Mama Tried
Georges Simenon, the existential hack, “Paul Theroux on Maigret’s creator, the Balzac of blighted lives, who was confident of winning the Nobel Prize”. An impressive person: “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically. Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work”, and even more so: “generally his writing is so textureless as to be transparent, and never calls attention to itself (‘It’s written as if by a child’).”
Kriegspiel is a chess variant invented by Henry Michael Temple in 1899 and based upon the original Kriegspiel developed by Georg von Rassewitz in 1812. In this game each player can see their own pieces, but not those of their opponent.
18mar2008
HyperText Implementation, sources of Tim Berners-Lee’s first browser!
Drawing Chessboards in various ways.
First Class Rules and Generic Traversals for Program Transformation Languages, by Eelco Dolstra. Search long enough, and you’ll find a paper on every good idea I ever had.
Teh funnay, it BURNS: Why internet catchphrases aren’t funny, by Delirium. “Since it is kuro5hin’s longstanding mission to improve the society in which we live, this article shall attempt to briefly explain why parroting stale internet catchphrases is not particularly clever.”
You cry out in your sleep—all my failings expose
There’s a taste in my mouth, as desperation takes hold
Just that something so good just can’t function no more
When love, love will tear us apart again…
— Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart
TinyML is a polymorphic functional programming language with static type checking, implemented in less than 700 lines of SML code.
Linear Hashing is a dynamic hash table algorithm invented by Witold Litwin (1980), and later popularized by Paul Larson. Linear hashing allows for the expansion of the hash table one slot at a time. The frequent single slot expansion can very effectively control the length of the collision chain.
Python 3000 and You, Guido van Rossum’s PyCon 2008 keynote.
ClassNamer, Can’t think of a good class name? Try this.
And she turned around and took me by the hand and said
I’ve lost control again
An how I’ve never felt just why I don’t understand she said
I’ve lost control again
And she screamed out kicking on her side and said
I’ve lost control again
And she’s upon the floor; I thought she died she said
I’ve lost control again
— Joy Division, She’s Lost Control
The Five Purpose Bath, WJW.
Project Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2008, at squeak.org.
Tokyo Tyrant is a package of network interface to the DBM called Tokyo Cabinet. Though the DBM has high performance, you might bother in case that multiple processes share the same database, or remote processes access the database. Thus, Tokyo Tyrant is provided for concurrent and remote connections to Tokyo Cabinet. It is composed of the server process managing a database and its access library for client applications. Has memcache-like and HTTP interfaces.
17mar2008
An Imperfect Ten, a short movie wherein one man breaks all ten commandments before breakfast. Great.
An Embedded ALGOL-like language in Prolog, I await a Lambda-Prolog revival…
The wheel is turning
and you can’t slow down
You can’t let go
and you can’t hold on
You can’t go back
and you can’t stand still
If the thunder don’t get you
then the lightning will
— Grateful Dead, The Wheel
Secrets of JavaScript Libraries, SXSW 2008 slides by Sam Stephenson, Alex Russell, Thomas Fuchs, and Andrew Dupont.
The Quake III Arena Bot (PDF), thesis(!) by J.M.P. van Waveren.
Sind Soldaten Faxgeräte?, von Wiglaf Droste.
Zendo: Design History, “Zendo is one of those creations that makes people slap their foreheads and say “why didn’t I think of that?” It’s just so darned simple. Surely the idea must have sprung fully-formed into its designer’s brain, just ready to be played? What else could possibly have been required? A weekend of tinkering, perhaps, but certainly no more than that?”
Ur-Scheme by Kragen Sitaker is a compiler from a small subset of R5RS Scheme to Intel x86 assembly language for Linux. It can compile itself. It is free software, licensed under the GNU GPLv3+.
From BFS to ZFS: past, present, and future of file systems, extensive post by Jeremy Reimer.
Mason was a mighty man
A mighty man was he
All he said: when I’m dead and gone
don’t you weep for me
— Grateful Dead, Mason’s Children
RAD (Ruby Arduino Development) is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller. Also offers inline assembler support now.
Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown. “Because the Bloop noise originated near the location of the sunken city of R’lyeh from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu”, the Bloop has been linked to Cthulhu by Lovecraft fans”.
Lolthulhu: Cthulhu fhtagn Cheezburger, I love it.
16mar2008
The Wall of Sound was an enormous public address system designed specifically for the Grateful Dead’s live performances by legendary audio engineer and LSD chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley. WJW.
Haus vom Nikolaus, all 44 ways to draw in parallel. Very neat.
You’re a loop of lazy lightning,
Liquid loop of lazy lightning,
Must admit you’re kinda fright’ning,
But you really get me high.
— Grateful Dead, Lazy Lightnin’
First atomic bomb diagram, it sounds more exciting than it is: “Censored early drawing of an atomic weapon based on the famous U.S Los Alamos “Fat Man” device which was dropped on Nagasaki and detonated in the Trinity test. The diagram is from a report completed by William G. Penney on 1 July 1947.” More such things can be found at The Nuclear Weapon Archive. Enjoy, but be careful!
Type-driven testing in Haskell, video and slides of a talk given by Simon Peyton Jones. “While the focus of this talk is testing, I’ll introduce functional programming as I go along, so that you don’t already have to know Haskell to make sense of the ideas. I’ll also try to give a flavour of why I think you’ll be seeing a lot more crossover of functional programming ideas into the mainstream, over the next few years.”
I don’t know, it must have been the roses
The roses or the ribbons in her long brown hair
I don’t know maybe it was the roses
All I know was I could not leave her there
— Grateful Dead, It Must Have Been the Roses
The Science of Designing Interactions, SXSW 2008 slides by Ming Yeow Ng and Andreas S. Weigend.
The BNF Converter is a compiler construction tool generating a compiler front-end from a Labelled BNF grammar. It is currently able to generate C, C++, C#, F#, Haskell, Java, and OCaml, as well as XML representations.
The Windows Sockets Lame List, yeech.
15mar2008
dvtm brings the concept of tiling window management, popularized by X11-window managers like dwm to the console. Works a lot better than I thought!
Clojure, Clojure, we want Clojure, read the comments for why having dynamically scoped functions in a statically scoped language can be really nice. I really need to have a closer look.
Dan Ingalls demos Lively at Google, saved for future reference.
One blue star / Sets on the hill
Call it back / You never will
One more star / Sinks in the past
Show me something / Built to last.
— Grateful Dead, Built To Last
Idris: A language with dependent types, with promising goals.
Administrative Debris, Ryan Tomayko on his site redesign and the new administration interface, which is brilliant really.
L’Esguard: quite possibly the worst meal of my life.
Come hear Uncle John’s Band by the riverside,
Got some things to talk about here beside the risin’ tide.
Come hear Uncle John’s Band playing to the tide, come on
Along or go alone, he’s come to take his children home.
— Grateful Dead, Uncle John’s Band
kottke.org is ten years old today, gratulations! And enjoy the review of designs, I still do remember the boxy yellow one.
Using Uninitialized Memory for Fun and Profit, pretty nasty but really life-saving trick in certain circumstances.
Frink is a practical calculating tool and programming language designed to help us all to better understand the world around us, to help us get calculations right without getting bogged down in the mechanics, and to make a tool that’s really useful in the real world. It tracks units of measure (feet, meters, kilograms, watts, etc.) through all calculations, allowing you to make physical calculations easily, to mix units of measure transparently, and ensures that the answers come out right.
14mar2008
Grateful Dead discography on Wikipedia.
New Minimalism in Web Interface Design, a compilation by Rainfall Daffinson.
Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s, by Paul Ford. I listened to 2005 and 2006 and while it was nice, there is better stuff.
Just one thing I ask of you, just one thing for me
Please forget you know my name, my darling Sugaree
Shake it, shake it sugaree, just don’t tell them that you know me
Shake it, shake it sugaree, just don’t tell them that you know me
— Grateful Dead, Sugaree
American Pi, Dave Stuewer, sings a song he wrote for Pi Day, 2007.
USENIX Past Conferences, Announcement: All online conference proceedings are now freely available to everyone. Yay!
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, by George Boole. Nicely TeXed at Project Gutenberg.
Mojibake is the phenomenon of incorrect, unreadable characters (garbage characters) shown when computer software fails to render a text correctly according to its associated character encoding. It is a loanword from Japanese.
Oh he love, he love, he love
He does love his numbers
And they run, they run, they run him
In a great big circle
In a circle of infinity
— Kate Bush, Pi
The World’s 50 Best Works of Art, and how to see them.
One App at a Time, John Gruber on the iPhone SDK restrictions.
Drawing lines, Mark Dominus wrote a little drawing tool. Pretty cool for its size. (R can draw dendograms nicely, IIRC.)
MacRuby 0.1, a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector. Interesting!
13mar2008
Get that job at Google, by Steve Yegge.
The pkgsrc portability guide, “pkgsrc is a package management system that has been ported to various POSIX-like operating systems. These systems differ in a lot of small details that are all nice to know when writing code that will later run on as many of these platforms as possible. This article collects some of the limitations, bugs and other characteristics of the pkgsrc platforms.” Very useful.
Allow Me Not to Explain Myself, Khoi Vinh on blogging desperation.
Delia, oh Delia, how can it be?
You loved all them rounders, never did love me.
All the friends I ever had are gone.
— Bob Dylan, Delia
vanilla.rb, bliki-classic Vanilla gets a reimplementation in Ruby by lazyatom! Yay! (I’m really excited about how it will turn out, as I’ve been throwing around these ideas in my head a lot as well.)
What makes Mathematics hard to learn?, an essay from Marvin Minsky. Recommended reading.
Fez, the best game I have never played, I don’t care about video games usually, but look at that movie and be freaking impressed. I love it!
Night after night some new plan to blow up the world.
Night after night another old man kissing some young girl.
You look for salvation, you find none.
Just another broken heart, another barrel of a gun,
Just another stick of dynamite night after night.
— Bob Dylan, Night After Night
Timeline of the Debian project, nice application of SIMILE.
Maris-McGwire-Sosa pairs are two consecutive natural numbers such that adding each number’s digits (in base 10) to the digits of its prime factorization gives the same sum.
Playing with a Testing Library, PragDave proposes a promising new testing library.
cvsclone is a utility to clone CVS repositories over the cvspserver interface. It works for anonymous access.
The Trenches of Approach, “A three-metre deep trench is being dug around Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, to force vehicles through one of a few fortified gateways into the dusty city.”
12mar2008
No Pants, made my day, PNSFW. More.
iPhone SDK Bug Filing, a good idea!
The Vatican announces 7 NEW flavors of sin! at Indexed.
Just For Fun: Autostereograms in Haskell, very neat.
I’ll follow through again this time.
I’ll swallow swords, spit out my pride.
I’ll be just fine.
You fill my head with endless lies.
You’re killing me, I’m killing time.
I’ll be just fine.
— Silverstein, Worlds Apart
DoomRL (Doom, the Roguelike) is a fast and furious coffee-break Roguelike game, that is heavily inspired by the popular FPS game Doom by ID Software. WJW.
Smooth vector graphics, a video demonstrating them in Toolbox, a graphics program for Mac.
Tilton’s Law: Solve the First Problem, an entertaining and useful lesson by Kenny Tilton.
First Class Patterns, by Mark Tullsen. “This paper proposes a simplification of pattern matching that makes patterns first class[…] thus patterns and pattern combinators can be written as functions in the language.” Very simple but powerful idea.
Pleasure from the bass
A place to call your own
The one and only son
Someone to call my own
The people that you find
Wherever you may be
Filling up my soul
My curiosity
— Tiga, Pleasure From The Bass
Objective ML is a small practical extension to ML with objects and top level classes. It is fully compatible with ML; its type system is based on ML polymorphism, record types with polymorphic access, and a better treatment of type abbreviations. Objective ML allows for most features of object-oriented languages including multiple inheritance, methods returning self and binary methods as well as parametric classes.
A proxy marriage is a marriage in which either the bride or the groom is not physically present for the wedding. During the solemnization of the marriage, based upon a power of attorney, a stand-in, or proxy, acts on behalf of one of the parties. If neither party is present, it is called a Double-proxy Marriage.
11mar2008
GitNub, a Git frontend using RubyCocoa. Looks pretty good.
The Lady’s Brunch Burger, by Paula Deen. WJW.
Debian Sid on the OLPC XO, saved for reference.
He did ten years in Attica, reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich
They threw him in the hole one time for tryin’ to stop a strike.
His closest friends were black men ‘cause they seemed to understand
What it’s like to be in society with a shackle on your hand.
— Bob Dylan, Joey
A Brief Introduction to Rvalue References, by Howard E. Hinnant, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Bronek Kozicki. Whyowhy.
Warm fuzzy things for random simulations, by Mauricio Fernandez. I saw the m**** at first glimpse!
Wondermark #389: In which Things get Worse, oh I know.
We’ll sing this song all night long,
Sing it to my baby from midnight on.
She’ll sing it to you when I’m dead and gone,
Ain’t a-gonna grieve no more.
— Bob Dylan, Ain’t A-Gonna Grieve
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: a Rosetta Stone, the paper is “done”, and John Baez concludes: “Actually, I’ve come to feel that in academia no project is ever really done. At least, not until you lose interest or die – which, come to think of it, is just an extreme case of losing interest.”
World’s oldest animation, 5,200 years old, cute.
10mar2008
Switched!, Sam Ruby gets a Mac mini.
You are like a flower
You rise and rise to the sun
You do not look back at where you came from
I wanna be like that
— Martha Wainwright, These Flowers
KELVIN IS LORD!!! ALL PRAISE THE LORD KELVIN!!, Only The One, True Lord KELVIN Can Conserve You From Entropy!
HMF: Simple type inference for first-class polymorphism (PDF), by Daan Leijen. “In this article we introduce HMF, a conservative extension of Hindley-Milner type inference with first-class polymorphism and regular System F types. The system has a simple and effective type inference algorithm that infers principal types. Given the relative simplicity and expressive power, we feel that HMF can be a very attractive type system in practice.”
En este tablero de ajedrez en mi cabeza no
recuerdo quien es un peon ni quien es una reina
— Los Abandoned, Pantalon
What Sucks About Erlang, a list by Damien Katz.
Panzerballett, heavy-metal jazz. It exists!
09mar2008
RubyFringe is an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture. We’re sick of the sold-out and over-sold labradoodle shows that are now staged with alarming frequency. In response, we’re mounting a unique and eccentric gathering of the people and projects that are driving things forward in our community. 700$, but free drinks.
Bloxes are building blocks made of interlocking pieces of corrugated cardboard, folded together. Their unique shape and structure make them exceptionally strong and lightweight – you could build yourself a platform to stand on, and then pick it up and move it wherever you need to. Wanthave.
SING stands for ‘Send ICMP Nasty Garbage.’ It is a tool that sends ICMP packets fully customized from command line. Its main purpose is to replace and complement the ping command, adding certain enhancements as fragmentation; send and receive spoofed packets; send many ICMP information types (echo as the old ping, address mask, timestamp, and router discovery) and errors (redirect, unreach, and time exceeded); and send monster packets. It also supports loose and strict source routing and record routing.
“I hit him, yes, it’s true,
But that’s what I am paid to do.
Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say ‘kill.’
It was destiny, it was God’s will.”
— Bob Dylan, Who Killed Davey Moore
Mercurial Record Extension, finally: “This command lets you choose which parts of the changes in a working directory you’d like to commit, at the granularity of patch hunks. It is similar in spirit to the darcs record command.”
bookporn #28: the seminary co-op bookstore, university of chicago, very nice. “I’m absolutely sure that the place secretly unfolds out when you walk around it; separate alcoves and rooms generate themselves when someone approaches, only to fade the second one’s back is turned.”
‘I fell in love with a female assassin’, “They met on a train and fell in love. Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life – as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia’s brutal civil war.”
San Francisco’s fine,
You sure get lots of sun.
San Francisco is fine.
You sure get lots of sun.
But I’m used to four seasons,
California’s got but one.
— Bob Dylan, California
Feeling Presidential, they “asked readers to sketch their own visions for the George W. Bush Library”. WJW.
World-Wide Web Map, From .ad to .za, cool.
Doodle is a Ruby library and gem for simplifying the definition of Ruby classes by making attributes and their properties more declarative. Best part: “Doodle is eco-friendly: it does not globally modify Object, Class or Module, nor does it pollute instances with its own instance variables (i.e. it plays nice with yaml). Future versions will try to be even more unobtrusive.”
08mar2008
Goodbye, cruel Word: A personal history of electronic writing, by Steven Poole. “For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change.”
We know a place no space ships go
We know a place where no subs go
No cars go
No cars go
— The Arcade Fire, No Cars Go
Aufruf zur Demonstration am 15. März in Köln: “Für ein Morgen in Freiheit”, “Diesem unsinnigen, bürgerrechtsfeindlichen und teuer bezahlten Überwachungsdrang der Bundesregierung wollen Parteien und Organisationen aus Köln und dem ganzen Bundesgebiet nicht länger tatenlos zusehen. Daher haben sie sich in Köln zu einem Bündnis gegen den Überwachungswahn der Bundesregierung und für die Stärkung der Bürgerrechte zusammengeschlossen.”
Can GPL iPhone apps exist?, Mark Pilgrim wonders.
See Mike Draw, a web comic I immediately subscribed to.
witt, reload.
Do not create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will not change. it will follow you the rest of your life. — Bob Dylan, Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday
The last product Polaroid should make, really.
Zobrist keys: A means of enabling position comparison, “When writing a chess program, it is necessary to be able to compare two positions in order to see if they are the same. If you had to compare the position of each piece, it wouldn’t take long to do, but in practice you will have to do this thousands of times per second, so if you did it this way it could become a performance bottleneck.” Pretty neat trick, a bit like Bloom filters..
07mar2008
Voronoi Diagrams and a Day at the Beach, by David Austin. Fortune’s algorithm is cool.
On The Use of Code in Weblog Titles, Miller’s is a classic.
Denise, Denise,
You’re concealed here on the shelf.
Denise, Denise,
You’re concealed here on the shelf.
I’m looking deep in your eyes, babe,
And all I can see is myself.
— Bob Dylan, Denise
3-Way Chess, a great idea.
Seaside development with GNU Smalltalk, Paolo Bonzini says: “The next release of GNU Smalltalk will include support for Seaside.”
Quick, Magdalena, take my gun
Look up in the hills, that flash of light.
Aim well my little one
We may not make it through the night.
— Bob Dylan, Romance In Durango
If Version Control Systems were Airlines, instant classic.
The Lyrical Quality of Links, by Susana Tosca. “This paper argues that hypertext might be a lyric rather that a narrative form. It proposes the close examination of explicit links as the starting point for a study of hyperfiction rhetoric.”
“It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, by Michael Barthel. Interesting comparison.
06mar2008
Iodoform is tasty!!
Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings.
Joseph Weizenbaum, you departed we needed you most. Siehe auch Heise.
Ich bin kein Computerkritiker. Computer können mit Kritik nichts anfangen. Ich bin Gesellschaftskritiker. — Joseph Weizenbaum
Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?, WJW. And I thought I was a nerd for doing Sierpinski triangles in Excel on a slow day.
The controlled river indicates, “The water poured out of the dam as if pumped through a gigantic fire hose, at the rate of 41,500 cubic feet per second – enough to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes.”
Template Haskell: baby steps, powerful thing.
Tunnelblick is a simple graphical user interface for the great VPN software OpenVPN 2.0 and higher. It is written in Cocoa and comes in a ready to use distribution with all necessary binaries and drivers.
Rolling Bridge, “Rather than a conventional opening bridge mechanism, consisting of a single rigid element that lifts to let boats pass, the Rolling Bridge gets out of the way by curling up until its two ends touch. While in its horizontal position, the bridge is a normal, inconspicuous steel and timber footbridge; fully open, it forms a circle on one bank of the water that bears little resemblance to its former self.” WJW.
rechnung.sty ist der Versuch das Erstellen von Bestellungen und Rechnungen mit LaTeX2e zu erleichtern. Praktisch.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. — Joseph Weizenbaum
I Want To Teach Programming In The Developing World, by MichaelCrawford.
codepad.org is a pastebin that runs your code for you. Supports many languages and has a nice minimalistic look.
JavaScript in Internet Explorer 8, by John Reisg. Apparently good.
Polynomial Root-finding with the Jenkins-Traub Algorithm, “The Jenkins-Traub Algorithm is a standard in the field of numerical computation of polynomial roots, fundamentally developed as a numerical algorithm specifically for the task of computing polynomial roots.”
April 18 is Poop For Peace Day, good idea.
05mar2008
The Hand Drawn Map Association has, well, a few hand-drawn maps.
HOWTO build a LiveCD from scratch with Gentoo. Doesn’t seem to be that hard!
Hey hey I saved the world today
Everybody’s happy now
The bad things gone away
And everybody’s happy now
The good things here to stay
Please let it stay
— Eurythmics, I Saved The World Today
Sliced bananas on opaque data (The expression lemma), by Ralf Lämmel and Ondrej Rypacek. “Algebraic data types and catamorphisms (folds) play a central role in functional programming as they allow programmers to define recursive data structures and operations on them uniformly by structural recursion. Likewise, in object-oriented (OO) programming, recursive hierarchies of object types with virtual methods play a central role for the same reason. There is a semantical correspondence between these two situations which we reveal and formalize categorically.”
Workplace Experiments at 37signals. Yay for 4-day weeks!
geordi is an C++ eval bot. S(l)ick.
LEW is a Lua-based system for doing graphics like Processing or Nodebox.
I like Ghosts most because it is just under two hours of excellently eerie Reznorian sound design without the liability of Reznorian lyrics. — Scott David Herman
A better backup system based on Git, by Mauricio Fernandez. Seems to be useful.
Wie erwartet erhebliche Probleme bei bayerischer Computer-Stimmenzählung, vermeldet der CCC. “Das Login-Passwort für den Zugang zur Wahlkonfiguration war in mindestens einer Stadt auf “123456” gesetzt und lag offen sichtbar im Wahllokal.”
04mar2008
A hand-carved knife-block shaped like a man’s head, the knives sticking out of it in gruesome humor. Very nice.
“Boolean” or “boolean”?, Mark Dominus found out.
Do Somethin’
Give Somethin’
Give Somethin’ – Give Me Anything!
Now, Don’t Try To Take Me Away From Here
Give Me My Absolution!
— Tin Star, Viva
Design is in the Details, by Naz Hamid at A List Apart. “Paying attention to small details—and in some cases, obsessively focusing on “what isn’t right”–can take a design from “nearly there” to “there” and beyond.”
On Creativity, by Andy Rutledge at A List Apart. “Except for personal projects, self-expression has no place in design, but constraint is vital to design.”
passiveaggressivenotes.com, love it: “painfully polite and hilariously hostile writings from shared spaces the world over”.
We’ve been together
just as long as I remember
but your mouth is a weapon
that is worse than any knife
— Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, White Trash
Out of the Blue, “Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?” I claim no, but prove me wrong.
CabooseConf gets its own site, hotel discount, I so wonder what the O’Reilly guys think about that.
dsb: A lite version of Common Lisp destructuring-bind for Arc. By Kenny Tilton.
03mar2008
STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming, First Year Progress Report of the Viewpoints Research Institute. Really, really impressive what they do in such small amounts of code.
Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. The core of Galleria lies in it’s smart preloading behaviour, snappiness and the fresh absence of obtrusive design elements. Use it as a foundation for your custom styled image gallery. Yum.
You don’t know me
You don’t own me
You’re just passing through my life
You’re a stranger
With bad behavior
You’re so weird I’m terrified
— Veruca Salt, So Weird
zblog is a zsh weblogging engine. Neat.
On illustrating architecture, “As interesting for its form as for its content, the project pictured here is something called “Willa’s Wonderland,” a one-off urban design comic strip set on the urban fringes of Atlanta by LOOMstudio and Amy Landesberg Architects, in collaboration with artist John Grider and writer Julia Klatt-Singer.”
I’d love to quit my job! (sort of), Gregory Brown ponders hacking open source full-time, with help of donations.
It’s sunny and 75. It feels so good to be alive.
Come on baby don’t stay inside.
Everybody’s coming out tonight.
— Silver Jews, People
What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer?, highly recommended reading by Jeff Moser. Compare mappers and packers.
Catching an Online Poker Cheater with Data Mining, neat.
iPhone SDK Rumors and Speculation, by John Gruber.
02mar2008
Haskell Style Pattern Matching In Arc, need to investigate.
Hex silliness, words as CSS colors.
Build your own book-cave for sleeping in, wanthave.
Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a Russian structuralist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.
I’m like an eagle,
I like to fly high
I’m like a snake,
I like to lay low
I’m like a black man,
I’m like a white man
Maybe a red man, I don’t know.
— Neil Young, Boxcar
generatingfunctionology, a book by Herbert S. Wilf. “This book is about generating functions and some of their uses in discrete mathematics.” Full text online.
Single character commenting, neatish trick.
Patches for journalling support, finally for NetBSD. “Wasabi Systems Inc is pleased to make our journalling code available to the NetBSD community. This code is known as WAPBL – Write Ahead Physical Block Logging, and has been used to provide meta-data journalling in production environments for over 4 years. WAPBL journals meta-data only – not file data, and has been used on filesystems ranging from from 16MB to multiple terabytes in size.”
Metavilla, “Reconversion of the french pavillon into an inhabitated villa.”
List of collective nouns by collective term A–K, L–Z, get them while you can.
Nobody Knows Shoes, now in HTML and PDF.
Let’s go to my apartment
we’ll pull the sheets up over our heads
forget all reasons to go outside
— Pretty Girls Make Graves, Blue Lights
Dreamachine, epileptics beware!
Strengthening in Logical Frameworks, Oleg plays with Twelf: “In this article we demonstrate simpler examples requiring strengthening, and two surprisingly trivial solutions. Quite literally, one solution deals with the problem head-on, whereas the second one avoids the problem in a round-about way.”
Tony Stamolis, awesome but NSFW portfolio.
01mar2008
Bacon-flavored Vodka, WJW.
PiDuce is a distributed implementation of pi-like process calculi with native XML datatypes developed at the Department of Computer Science of Bologna. Neat mix.
Well it kind of struck me funny
Sort of made me smile
After all these years on this old road
— Neil Young, Beautiful Bluebird
word bridie: the word game for twitter, “part buzzword bingo, part drinking game”: Predict which words people you follow will use in an update and earn points when they do!
CD Cover Meme on Flickr.
Secrets, a collection of Mac OS X user defaults. Very useful.
Haskell-style monad do-notation for Ruby, most awesome hack by Aanand Prasad that I actually planned to do myself, but never got around to.
Down at the factory, they’re puttin’ new windows in.
The vandals made a mess of things, and the homeless just walked right in.
Well, they worked here once, and they live here now, but they might work here again,
They’re ordinary people.
And they’re livin’ in a nightmare, hard workin’ people.
— Neil Young, Ordinary People
Satnam Singh: Declarative Programming Techniques for Many-Core Architectures, talk from the Functional Programming seminar at Ericsson, 21 February 2008.
The Seven Virtues of Simple Type Theory, by William M. Farmer. This paper surveys the virtues of simple type theory and attempts to show that simple type theory is an attractive alternative to first-order logic for practical-minded scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. It recommends that simple type theory be incorporated into introductory logic courses offered by mathematics departments and into the undergraduate curricula for computer science and software engineering students.
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