Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
03oct2008
LHC Grid Fest, “When the Large Hadron Collider comes into operation, it will begin to produce an expected 15 million gigabytes of data every year, enough information to create a 21-kilometre-high stack of CDs annually. On 3rd October, the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid consortium announce the readiness of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), an e-infrastructure conceived and designed to support this data challenge.”
Ruby Manor, a promising conference idea.
Missed Connections, mapped by state.
das ist als wuerde der ORF
aufhoeren zu senden :) — Manuel Simoni
Moving Beyond Modernism in 6 Easy Steps, a simple guide for architects.
Tetris Tiles, want have!
So it’s fare thee well my own true love,
We’ll meet another day, another time.
It ain’t the leavin’
That’s a-grievin’ me
But my true love who’s bound to stay behind.
— Bob Dylan, Farewell
NetFlix Origami, The fun way to recycle your NetFlix flaps.
The XO abides, Danny O’Brien analyzes slow-cooked software.
Empty Boxes: a business idea, WJW.
The Fear, John Gruber has 2781 words on the NDA and remaining problems of the App Store.
On Wedding Design, marrying a designer: not the worst idea.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
— Pete Seeger, Turn! Turn! Turn!
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841 9716939937510.com.
PocketGuitar is an application which turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a virtual guitar.
An update to the email standards, a diff.
Die Stimme Gottes: “Ich habe es nicht gewollt.” — Karl Kraus, Die Letzten Tage Der Menschheit
02oct2008
Let’s build an MP3-decoder! in Haskell. “The end result is a decoder that is inefficient and not standards compliant, but with hopefully readable code.”
Skunk Bomb?, Israel Takes Chemical Warfare to a Stinky New Level, WJW.
He’ll take you up, he’ll bring you down,
He’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground.
He flies so high, he swoops so low,
He knows exactly which way hes gonna go.
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
— Moody Blues, Legend Of A Mind
A Sysadmin’s Unixersal Translator (Rosetta Stone), or: What do they call that in this world? Very useful. Covers AIX, A/UX, DG/UX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, Mac OS X, NCR Unix, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Reliant, SCO OpenServer, Solaris, SunOS 4, Tru64, Ultrix, and UNICOS.
The Credit Crisis and the Bailout in Plain English, by Liar. “It will explain the role of FNMA (Fannie Mae) and FHLMC (Freddie Mac), mortgage-backed securities, Credit Default Swaps (CDS), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), mark to market, prime, subprime, a run, the Community Reinvestment Act, and liquidity in the current situation. These terms will be introduced as gently as possible.”
I see the ships of a friendly fleet
And a song so sweetly sounding
And gentle souls who think not to defeat
As across the waves they are bounding
— Gene Clark, 1975
My concerns about the Senate financial services bill, without commentary, by Gregory Brown.
The iPhone Book is in Beta!, now that the NDA fell.
RFC 5321 and RFC 5322 now obsolete RFC 2821 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and RFC 2822 (Internet Message Format). I wouldn’t have expected that.
01oct2008
Google 2001, “In honor of our 10th birthday, we’ve brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001.” Amazing, but only up for a month.
Visibility is a pager-like thing for your X11 desktop, showing the icons of open windows.
CodeCity is an integrated environment for software analysis, in which software systems are visualized as interactive, navigable 3D cities.
Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
— Joan Baez, Diamonds And Rust
Photoshop photo frame, the first ever analog “digital” photo frame. WJW.
Origami, the first folding editor, which is even programmable in a Lisp like language. Compiles with minor adjustments.
MilaX is a small size Live CD distribution which runs completely off a CD or a USB pendrive. It is based on Solaris Nevada and includes its basic features. Installation needs ~300 megabytes of disk, GUI is optional, and I couldn’t find any Java stuff there—way to go for a Solaris server.
Well, I want you to know, I just had to go.
I want you to know, we just had to grow.
So it’s goodbye first love, and I hope you’re fine.
— The Incredible String Band, First Girl I Loved
Emiller’s Guide To Nginx Module Development, recommended.
Webmachine, a layer that adds HTTP semantic awareness on top of the excellent bit-pushing and HTTP syntax-management provided by mochiweb.
Gerrit macht sich frei – Teil 5: Das erste Jahr, Gerrit van Aaken berichtet über sein erstes Jahr als selbstständiger Designer. Sehr lesenswert.
Nothing is too trivial to test, that wouldn’t have happened in Haskell. ;-)
30sep2008
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman, and he’s right.
Light Switch Complicator, I like.
Who holds the blank thoughts of people when nothing is said?
And who turns the lights out after you’ve gotten in bed?
I guess I’ll never know why
I’ll just lay here and decay here
— Moby Grape, Lazy Me
Ask a Google engineer, whatever you want to know on Google Moderator.
Nostalgia, Kellan Elliott-McCrea: “You remember those dark days after the first bust?”
Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.
But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.
— Barry McGuire, Eve Of Destruction
Blog History Project, die Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Blogosphäre.
Lie Theory Through Examples 1, a seminar by John Baez.
29sep2008
Critbit trees in C, “This code is taken from Dan Bernstein’s qhasm and implements a binary crit-bit (alsa known as PATRICA) tree for NUL terminated strings. Crit-bit trees are underused and it’s this author’s hope that a good example will aid their adoption.” Yay!
The Meat Hooker: Steak, by mybostinks. “The technique of preparing the perfect steak is quite simple and uncomplicated. It’s an art that has almost been forgotten.”
I’ll go through life searchin’
Tryin’ to find the one
I’d go slip, slip, you’d
go slip, slip away
— Love, A Message to Pretty
How to implement a typechecker? (PDF), by Freek Wiedijk. Also, how to self-verify proof assistants.
A Taxonomy for “Bad Code Smells”, useful reference.
CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS, by Natalie Downe. “A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site’s individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness.”
Falcon 1 Made it to Space, “SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.” Awesome.
Court martial, court martial, then quickly was got
And the sentence passed upon me, that I was to be shot
May the Lord have mercy on them for their sad cruelty
For now the Queen’s duty lies heavy on me
— Fairport Convention, The Deserter
A vindication of Ada’s rights, Danny O’Brien goes to the Computer History Museum.
Height, today’s xkcd is so mappy, I can’t refrain posting.
28sep2008
GNU turns 25, “Happy birthday, software libre”. And really thank you for Emacs, GCC and all the utilities we love to use every day!
Judge a book by its cover, and see if you can guess the Amazon rating.
Taxman, rentman, they all chase me,
I ain’t home when they come round.
Got no money, live my life free,
That’s the best way, I have found.
— The Yardbirds, I Can’t Make Your Way
I wish I were the Moon, so much emotion in so few pixels. A Flash game. (Don’t miss his other games.)
Higher-order shell, by Chung-chieh Shan. “Many Unix utilities execute their arguments as a command line in turn. Some well-known examples are nice, sudo, xargs, and find. These programs are sometimes called meta-commands, but I think of them as higher-order programs by analogy to higher-order functions.”
Please discipline codegirl and make her code very difficult AJAX, “I will code the HTML you don’t want to. It’s ok. I don’t mind. I like it. I will code it handcuffed if you want.” I always knew web development was for masochists only.
Query Replace, Patrick Logan points out C-r in Emacs’ query-replace and some other nifty features of it.
On writing Python one-liners, hash lookup instead of if is really neat.
Look Ma! No OS!, by Cees de Groot. “SqueakNOS was an attempt to remove the OS underneath Squeak.”
And you singing the song thinking this is the life
And you wake up in the morning and your head feels twice the sizxe
Where you gonna go, where you gonna go, where you gonna sleep tonight?
— Amy MacDonald, This Is The Life
Falschbericht in der Kronen Zeitung, das schockierende hierbei ist nicht, dass Zeitungen auf einen Hoax reinfallen, sondern dass die Fehlinformation durch so offensichtliches XSS eingeschleust wurde.
SciRate.com, an Arxiv review site.
WikiSym: Collaboration and its Discontents, Mark Bernstein: “Is collaboration inherently good? Is openness always a virtue? These were the questions at WikiWalk.”
New Regexp based URL dispatching, Helma NG goes web.py?
26sep2008
Full Pass of Acid3, congratulations to WebKit!
JDB is a database where columns are mapped J nouns.
Crowds of people standing everywhere
‘Cross the street I’m at this laugh affair
And here they always play my songs
And me, I wonder if it’s…
— Love, Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale
papert, a logo in your browser. Uses canvas.
Muxtape, “relaunching soon, in the service of bands”.
Wireframe Graph Paper Notepad, wanthave but out of stock.
Less than vs Greater than, Chris Okasaki raises the point that “[a]lthough the two expressions are mathematically equivalent, they’re not linguistically equivalent. One focuses attention on something being smaller, and the other focuses attention on something being bigger.”
Every morning I would see her waiting at the stop
Sometimes she’d shop and she would show me what she bought
All the people stared as if we were both quite insane
Someday my name and hers are going to be the same
— The Hollies, Bus Stop
Giving Dabble DB a time machine, a useful feature.
Sprague-Grundy theory, by Mark Dominus: “N dots are placed in a circle. Players alternate moves, where a move consists of crossing out any one of the remaining dots, and the dots on each side of it (if they remain). The winner is the player who crosses out the last dot. What is the optimal strategy with 19 dots? with 20? Can you generalize?”
25sep2008
Disparition de Guy Decoux, “I’m sad to announce you Guy Decoux’s death in the beginning of the month of July 2008. He was 53 years old.” This makes me so incredibly sad. Hommage at UMR. Hommage at hackety.org.
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more.
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough,
‘Cause there’s not many men that done the things that you’ve done.
— Bob Dylan, Song To Woody
RailsWTF, an amusing tumblelog.
IntellaSys 40-core Processor Announced, time to learn VentureForth?
ICFP 2008 Programming Contest Results, the TeX solution deservedly wins the Judge’s prize.
Yeah, said its all right
I wont forget
All the times Ive waited patiently for you
And youll do just what you choose to do
And I will be alone again tonight my dear
— Love, Alone Again Or
Web Standards 2008: Three Circles of Hell, by Molly E. Holzschlag at A List Apart. “We do not have an interoperable web. What we have is a glut of proprietary, closed, and protected stuff.”
Test-Driven Progressive Enhancement, by Scott Jehl at A List Apart. “Users of these devices initially receive a perfectly functional page, but it’s progressively “enhanced” into a mess of scripts and styles gone awry, entirely defeating the purpose of the approach.”
The Holy Church of Bacon, “We must spread this delicious religion. Let Bacon guide your taste buds to bliss! Bacon be with you, brothers and sisters.”
24sep2008
The Loughran-Guijarro Scale, a logarithmic scale for assessing the consequences of a system failure. Awesome: “Loss of small city few people care about. this is why CERN is in Geneva.”
Clozure CL is an open source Common Lisp implementation that runs on PowerPC hardware under Mac OS X and Linux, and on x86-64 hardware under Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Clozure CL used to be called OpenMCL.
Dirac 1.0.0 released. Please adopt free codecs.
She may beg she may plead
She may argue with her logic
And then mention all the things I’ll lose
That really have no value
In the end she will surely know
I wasn’t born to follow
— Carol King and Gerry Goffin, Wasn’t Born To Follow
Adaptive interfaces, Matt Webb: “Steven Chapman has created a way to control his DSLR camera with a custom interface on his Nintendo DS.”
Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math, “Whenever we choose a shorter grocery line over a longer one, or a bustling restaurant over an unpopular one, we rally our approximate number system, an ancient and intuitive sense that we are born with and that we share with many other animals.”
too, Sergey Brin’s personal blog. “While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number – two. It also means “in addition”, as this blog reflects my life outside of work.”
Noncommutative geometry, a heavy math blog.
data Mu f = In (f (Mu f)), Mark Dominus has fun with type fixpoints.
Gonzo Reader is a feed reader that shows the actual page designs.
Skinning Newspeak?, Gilad Bracha considers alternative syntaxes instead of Smalltalk.
Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 4, “With these defintions we can take any knot diagram and compute a value for it.”
The river flows
It flows to the sea
Wherever that river goes
That’s where I want to be
— Roger McGuinn, Ballad Of Easy Rider
V8 on YouTube, there are two tech talks.
I will be joining Microsoft Research in January, danah boyd says. Gratulations! MSR probably is the only good part of Microsoft.
The RubyFringe Videos: Vids From The Summer’s Hottest Conference, finally some are available.
LaTeX Tips n Tricks for Conference Papers, by Gurmeet Singh Manku.
MixTube, a Muxtape clone that actually plays the YouTube video
in background. Very nice, and much harder to shut
downThey are removing stuff like crazy :(.
17sep2008
The Pervert’s Guide to Etsy, hot stuff. PNSFW.
55+ Paper Background Textures, for future reference.
I need my privacy, I lead a secret life
Sleep with the enemy, and betray both sides
I travelled all my life, but never got away
From the killing jar, and it got me sick
— Black Box Recorder, England Made Me
Theorem Proving for Verification, Galois Tech Talk held by John Harrison. “In this tutorial I will explain some of the advantages of theorem proving, showing situations where the generality of theorem proving is beneficial, allowing us to tackle domains that are beyond the scope of automated methods or providing other important advantages.”
Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator, my name would be Flack Gobbler Palin.
TwitterKeys: Enhance your Twitter conversations, another character table.
5 Reasons why you don’t need to write a book, by Penelope Trunk. “People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book… If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.” Bitter truth.
Do you believe in love at first sight?
Do you believe in fate?
I believe the good things
Only come to those who wait
We’ve got to plan the journey
Eliminate all mistakes
Take the safe route
It’s called the art of driving
— Black Box Recorder, The Art Of Driving
Two Papers and a Presentation, by Dan Piponi. Features a self-shading shader quine. WJW.
45th and 46th Known Mersenne Primes, they are 243,112,609-1 and 237,156,667-1 (the smaller one was found later. And by the way, some German newspaper report it took a bit longer to publish them because they had to find out which one was bigger, which of course is bullshit.)
The Differences Between Star Wars & Harry Potter, yay for narrative constructivism.
16sep2008
magent is a simple but useful proxy program for memcached servers that provides backup farms and a Ketama implementation.
Zoomer automatically generate a video from a picture, zooming each selected detail.
Left-fold enumerators: a safe, expressive and efficient I/O interface for Haskell, by Johan Tibell. “This style of programming is more expressive than imperative style I/O represented by the Unix functions read and write, and safer than lazy I/O using streams.”
Welcome to the House of Lies
For you and I it’s like paradise
You can do what you wanna
When you do, I’ll act like I’m surprised
— The Shortwave Set, House Of Lies
Use GitHub as your Blog!, ouch.
Anti-Theft Lunch Bags are regular sandwich bags that have green splotches printed on both sides. After your sandwich is placed inside, no one will want to touch it. WJW, also check out the other awesome stuff there.
I typed OMG, should be you and me
You wrote LOL, wrote LOL
My browser froze right down to my toes,
I said go to hell.
— The Hot Toddies, HTML
ATS is a programming language with a highly expressive type system rooted in the framework Applied Type System. In particular, both dependent types and linear types are available in ATS. The current implementation of ATS (ATS/Anairiats) is written in ATS itself. It can be as efficient as C/C++ and supports a variety of programming paradigms. Also, the syntax looks nice to me.
Help Build Steampunk’s Funeral Pyre, “Let’s celebrate the life of steampunk while confirming its death with a Photoshop Contest, shall we?”
15sep2008
How to solve a maze puzzle using Photoshop, nice trick.
CopyPasteCharacter.com, easier than the Character Palette.
When you lie in the desert sun
believe me, you make it so much fun
I know you’re coming back
and I’ll wait, I’ll wait forever
— Tiger Trap, Chester
SNOBOL4 (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a language for text processing, pattern matching, and much more, first designed and implemented at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. (BTL) in the 1970’s. It’s amazingly powerful for it’s simplicity.
Illuminati Card Game was invented in 1990 by Steven Jackson. The ‘game’ he had created ruffled quite a few feathers as he was promptly visited by the Secret Service who tried to shut him down and prevent the cards from being released.
Typography for Lawyers, please forward to yours (especially because of the capitalization stuff).
I don’t wanna know
This Love
I don’t wanna know
It’s all I’ll ever have
This love
I don’t wanna know
— The Magic Numbers, This Love
floater magazine suggests an inventory of floatation mechanisms within architecture. All texts online.
Documents Reveal Django Pony, Caught In Tail Of Lies, rotfl.
14sep2008
45th and 46th Known Mersenne Primes Found!, success for GIMPS: “Three independent verification runs with different hardware and software confirm the new prime!”
Dead Man’s Switch, a watchdog for your life.
And these clocks keep unwinding
and completely ignore everything
that we hate or adore.
Once the page of a calendar is
turned it’s no more.
So tell me then, what was it for?
Oh tell me, what was it for?
— Bright Eyes, A Scale, A Mirror And Those Indifferent Clocks
What’s The Deal With Hausdorff Spaces?, Part I.
Shoot the Moon, “the bullet would travel farther in the reduced gravity, but would it travel faster than it does on the earth?”
The Manipulator, by Jill Greenberg. Reload a few times.
I used to be the bright one
Smart as a whip
Funny how you slip so far when
Teachers dont keep track of it
— The Dresden Dolls, The Perfect Fit
Making paperwork filing as interesting as “Nude on the Moon” (or Tron, at least), Danny O’Brien tries.
How to throw a ballot party (for American voters), by danah boyd: “Invite your friends to your house for a ballot party… promise alcohol.”
13sep2008
ACOVEA (Analysis of Compiler Options via Evolutionary Algorithm) implements a genetic algorithm to find the “best” options for compiling programs with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) C and C++ compilers. “Best”, in this context, is defined as those options that produce the fastest executable program from a given source code.
Functional programming languages: Operational semantics, abstract machines and program transformations, course material by Xavier Leroy. Comprehensive and well put together.
There’s the hatred that strangles
The throat of a man
But the worst of all hatred
Is that which is planned
Against what we have
In this goddess of land
— Levellers, Maid Of The River
Support Our Poops, Take part in one of the biggest issues of our time and make a bold statement, letting all your friends and enemies know that feces should no longer be ignored or considered “taboo”.
The App Store’s Exclusionary Policies, John Gruber, insightful as usual: “If there were other means of distributing iPhone apps – to put it in Paul Kafasis’s terms, if Apple’s were an App Store rather than the App Store – then it would be acceptable for Apple’s store to be exclusionary.”
Modern Forth, by Stephen Pelc. “Modern Forth systems are not like their ancestors.”
Nondeterministic Regular Expression Parsing Library For arc, by Conrad Barski. Features a nice introductory comic.
Muttator is a free browser add-on for Thunderbird, which makes it look and behave like the Vim text editor. It has similar key bindings, and you could call it a modal mail client, as key bindings differ according to which mode you are in. “This one just sucks less than Mutt.”
Ignore everybody. The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. — Hugh MacLeod
OSCON? Gone, am I the only one noticing a general dissatisfaction regarding O’Reilly conferences lately, especially related to their location?
Hey, you got your loop in my recursion!, Chris Okasaki on the impair of stateful programming when teaching recursion.
5, John Baez last favorite number talk.
12sep2008
No more media relations, The Pirate Bay proclaims: “We have no longer any interest in participating in traditional media since it’s apparant that they are not trustworthy or willing to adopt.” Yes!
A Scheme Syntax-Rules Primer, Scheme has a wonderfully powerful hygienic macro system.
You’re the girl that I adore,
But still I live in hope to see
The holy Ground once more
— The Holy Ground
JavaScript Unlimited, is a tumblog(sic!) about using JavaScript outside the browser.
Panda, open source video encoding powered by Merb, EC2, S3 and SimpleDB.
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Lua, “Professor Roberto Ierusalimschy offers an in-depth examination of what he believes to be the most successful programming language not born in a developed country.”
Godspeed, the prize for the best titling of a LHC pictures goes to the New Shelton wet/dry.
Nuclear Nation, “Perhaps in the spirit of the Wonders of the World, the nuclear reactor in Hanford, Washington, has been declared a national historic site.” “The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II.”
We’re tired of lies we want the truth!
Most people they will never know!
We’re tired of lies we want the truth!
With your or against you?
— Anti-Flag, Turncoat
Return return, Mark Dominus read “Functional Programming with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism” by Mark P. Jones.
24, by John Baez: “This has long been my favorite number, since it shows up throughout math and physics in mysterious, shocking and even monstrous ways… which seem to fit together in a gargantuan conspiracy, as if pure mathematics itself were the work of an insane god – or at least one with a devilish sense of humor.” Be amazed.
Color Codes, a color palette site that supports channel globs.
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