Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
13may2008
The collected jwz bicycle wisdom, must read.
The Thing That Should Not Be, Or: How to import 18500+ patches from Darcs into Git in less than three days, by Thomas Schilling.
Getting started with awk, essential Unix skills.
100 Essential Jazz Albums, compiled by David Remnick.
Confusion’s prince is at my door.
The crown I wear’s the one he wore
He’s here to bring me down some more
And bend my mind.
— Grateful Dead, Mindbender
An IRC client in 40 lines of shell script, Kragen was bored.
Using a Proof Assistant to Teach Programming Language Foundations, or, Lambda, the Ultimate TA, by Benjamin C. Pierce. “In Fall 2007, I taught an introductory course on logic and the theory of programming languages entirely in Coq. The experience was quite demanding — for the students and especially for me!— but the overall payoff in terms of student engagement and performance on exams far exceeded my hopes. I am now convinced that this is the right way to teach programming language foundations and am working on course materials that will allow the approach to be replicated elsewhere.” Wow, the material looks really good.
pymeta, OMeta in Python.
Barcodes as URLs, a QR decoder for the iPhone.
SigScheme is a R5RS Scheme interpreter for embedded use. It features small footprint (64KB in library form on the ‘small’ configuration) like SIOD and TinyScheme, low memory consumption (2-words per cons cell), multibyte characters handling (UTF-8, EUCs and Shift_JIS) and more. Cool.
Mountain Monuments, what a bunchload of steps.
Dynamic Languages Strike Back, autotranscript by Steve Yegge.
Those who misremember history…, critique of Yegge’s talk by Avi Bryant, who says: “Strongtalk was that much faster whether you used the optional static type system or not. Strongtalk’s optimizing compiler completely ignored the types, and it made your program run not one iota faster to add them.” Which is freaking amazing.
Preparing For EC2 Persistent Storage, “Using LVM + DRBD + NFS + Heartbeat + VTun To Gain Data Persistence, Redundancy, Automatic Fail-Over, and Read/Write Disk Access Across Multiple EC2 Nodes”, by M. David Peterson.
“I want you inside me…”, PNSFW but genius lubricant ad.
GChart exposes the Google Chart API (code.google.com/apis/chart) via a friendly Ruby interface. It can generate the URL for a given chart (for webpage use), or download the generated PNG (for offline use). Seems nice for avoiding the marshalling stuff.
I run through the forest, I cut past the vine
Head through the thickets, many a time
Octave of voices, sweet voices belie
I live for the comfort of cold Clementine
— Greateful Dead, Clementine
Is QWERTY harming language design?, Daniel Berger wonders. The time for Unicode has come IMO.
Good Margaritas, Bad Slugs, Mark Bernstein: “I mention the margaritas because, when we have margaritas on the porch, it always brings out the garden slugs.”
Useless use of *, good slides by Jan Schaumann on optimizing shell scripts.
Ajax anno 1858.
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