The Third Time is the Charm, “Name as many instances as you can of mathematicians or physicists who introduced a logical sequence of three concepts, each depending on the previous one, where the third was crucial for the applications they had in mind.”

Joose is a self-hosting meta object system for JavaScript with support for classes, inheritance, mixins, traits, method modifiers and more.

pwnyoutube.com, “Just type pwn to download YouTube videos.” Genius! There also is kickyoutube.com

26 Years, 85 Notebooks, by Michael Bierut. I should stop writing on scrap paper.

zdit, a simple non-screen-clearing editor.

A simple trigonometric identity, by Mark Dominus.

Faster deserialization in Ruby, beating Marshal

The Lazy Manifesto: Do Less. Then, Do Even Less.

A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses

I Love You More Than _____.

Ruby on OS X, an event about building Mac apps with Ruby and Cocoa. May 15 & 16, 2009 in Amsterdam.

Writers We’ve Lost, a collection of obituaries for writers, editors and authors. Such a great idea! We need this for different fields.

It’s Always a Bad Time For Poetry, by Kenneth Goldsmith. “In the United States, it was lousy during the boom and promises to be lousy during the bust. It was crappy to be a poet during the Bush years and will most certainly remain crappy under Obama.”

Silliman’s Blog, a weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics.

The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura.

Fast incremental regular expression matching with monoids and fingertrees.

Cardiopulmonary Spatialization, “spaces themselves should act as experiential platforms that provide a broader spectrum of environmental qualities, so that we may better understand their effects on our psychology – and ultimately, on our physiology.”

Cancer deaths in Mexico, is there a “Silliest Categories in Wikipedia”-category? (Or “Categories which don’t include themselves?”.)

clicktoflash, a WebKit plug-in to prevent automatic loading of Adobe Flash content.

The New Muxtape, a minimalist platform for bands to promote their music and listeners to create mixes.

Inconspicuous vertical metrics, “if you delve into the minutiae of font design, you soon discover that there are a slew of important vertical metrics that aren’t much talked about.”

Micro Lightweight Unit Testing, pattern-matching does the job in Erlang. (And tests for equality are 80% of assertions anyway.)

The 25-Line ActionScript Contest, What can you do in 25 lines of code? Reminds me of the old 4k HTML/JavaScript contests.

Conway’s Game Of Life in APL, live coded.

Tracking an entire Windows sytem inside Git, awesome hack.

Elements of an EmotionML 1.0, WJW.

rohan drape, I always liked his very minimalist website, but only today I found out how it is implemented. Whew.

A Proposal for a Christian Pornography

Practical Zen

A quick survey in HTML error correction: this page mistakenly tries to close a <h1> with <h2>, and this is what happens:

• h1 not closed (everything turns bold): Safari, Chrome, Opera, (E)Links, Hpricot.
• h1 is closed (normal rendering): Firefox, IE, Lynx, w3m, Dillo, Tidy (warning, no error), Nokogiri.

The interesting thing to notice here is that the difference between the first and the second line essentially is the age of the software. Did HTML parsers become stricter “recently”?

FSP (File Service Protocol) is a very lightweight UDP based protocol for transferring files. FSP is what anonymous FTP should be. From 1988.

AD Covers, More AD Covers, Even More AD Covers

Seed is a library and interpreter, dynamically bridging (through GObjectIntrospection) the WebKit JavaScriptCore engine, with the GObject type system. In a more concrete sense, Seed enables you to immediately write applications around a significant portion of the GNOME platform, and easily embed JavaScript as a scripting-language in your GObject library.

Die Achse des Guten, Online-Tagebuch der Mitglieder des publizistischen Netzwerks “Die Achse des Guten”.

Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light, a survey of London’s remaining professional darkrooms

Do Tags Work?, by Cathy Marshall.

Leibniz, Complexity and Incompleteness, video by Gregory Chaitin.

Haskell Monoids and their Uses

Improved documentation for Bool, I love Haskell.

00:03 <chris2> fix (<3)   -- eternal haskell love

Kabbalist ROT-11

The Setup, What do people use to get the job done?.

White House Web Sites by Clinton, and Bush.

Recovery of US Airways 1549 from Hudson River

Social Network Anti-patterns

Things my father taught me

So we learned how to fold a tetrahedron from A4 paper, and instead of studying for exams, we decided to make an stellated icosahedron by gluing 20 of them:

It also makes for a nice hat, if you remove some vertexes:

Cubes are possible as well, in fact all Platonic Solids with glue, and even without.

You can even “fold” in four dimensions.

Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics, danah boyd publishes her PhD dissertation.

FUCK THE CLOUD, you must take responsibility for your own data.

Backward and forward compatible protocol evolution with extprot: the case of Grafffer, Mauricio Fernandez should write a book.

Gee, One Bold Storm coming up…, Steven Fry lives with a bunchload of gadgets.

The loophole in the U.S. Constitution: recent developments, by Mark Dominus.

Masterbacon, featuring Old Fashioned Bacon. Yaouch.

Hydro-Manhattan

A retrospective of the Bush era

Pure Mathematics

Curves <3

There is an oldest file meme going on. Simply run

find ~ -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c '%y %n' | sort | less

And wait a bit. (Or longer. I have 583489 files.) And then tell something about your oldest files. Unfortunately some .tar are awefully broken and have mtime 0. Next up,

1985-08-15 ~/projects/docs/sicp/contrib/examples/chapter1.code

Wow, I didn’t know I had that. :) Other interesting stuff, not written by me:

1986-01-08 ~/projects/docs/rfcs/rfc971.txt.gz
1988-01-27 ~/src/its/klh10-2.0a/contrib/supdup/supdup.h
1988-02-05 ~/src/t3-repo/sources/comp/back_end/closure.t
1990-10-02 ~/Downloads/teco.doc
1991-01-10 ~/projects/docs/gz/mhbook/download/split/mh/old-edition2/babyl2mh
1992-04-06 ~/mess/2008/47/rc-1.7.1/match.c
1993-12-02 ~/projects/docs/tex/texbuch.tex
1994-06-03 ~/src/ruby-0.49/sample/math.rb
1995-05-26 ~/projects/docs/hakmem/pdp10/hbaker/pdp-10/Program.html

Now let’s find something I actually edited.

2000-10-07 ~/projects/addsp/makefile

I guess that’s one of the earliest programs I ever wrote in C: “Add spaces at beginning of line.” I wonder why I wrote that.

2000-10-29 ~/chris/projects/bl/bl.c

A very naive implementation of a curses-like library.

2000-11-05 ~/projects/lisp/verw1.el

Toying with elisp.

2000-12-30 ~/projects/htmldir/htmldir

“gawk script for generating html files on file lists”

2001-01-09 ~/projects/fortran/loan.f

No kidding.

2001-06-07 ~/projects/perl/IO_sockets/chat/client.pl

2001-07-25 ~/projects/tex/zeugnis/z2001.tex

Nontrivial .

2001-10-21 ~/projects/html/pp/files/fvwm2rc.tar.gz

From my first homepage.

2001-10-29 ~/projects/ruby/rfmt.rb
2001-10-29 ~/projects/ruby/pig.rb
2001-12-30 ~/projects/ruby/symnum.rb

Early Ruby scripts.

2002-01-04 ~/projects/ruby/rlisp/StringLexer.rb

I don’t think I for beyond parsing… ;)

2003-02-13 ~/projects/xmlblog/shorten.pl~

Parts of my first blog.

2004-05-28 ~/projects/nukumi/+releases/nukumi-0.2.tar.gz
2004-06-11 ~/projects/Arch/2004-projects/nukumi/nukumi--devo/nukumi--devo--0/patch-22/log

First serious blog, you can see I used GNU Arch back then.

The rest is history! ;)

(I’m sure I’d have even older files on some backup images somewhere… Especially I’d like to find my first ever homepage.)

Okay, you degenerates! Let’s see how much you really know about the history of Unix.

— try to do the quiz yourself first, spoilers follow —

I’m doing the quiz for 2 days now, and a few hundred Google queries and digging in old archives and tapes later, I found out about 66% (I already knew 15%). It is tough. Here are my answers. Questions marked with “?” are not yet answered, questions marked with ”*” I knew without looking.

Thanks to Lincoln Quirk, questions 4, 8, 9 and 10 could be answered.

Thanks to Eric Cooper, question 37 could be answered.

Huge thanks to George Rosamond, who sent in the official solution from ;login: Volume 9, Number 4 (September 1984), which was provided to him by Brian Redman!

If someone has additional sources, please mail me.

1. The source code motel: your source code checks in, but it never checks out. What is it?
   SCCS*
   http://www.faisal.com/quotes/t

2. Who wrote the first Unix screen editor?
   Official answer: Irons. (probably this).
   I assume this is the em editor, a predecessor to vi.*
   http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/

3. Using TSO is like kicking a [what?] down the beach?
   dead whale.
   http://www.csd.uwo.ca/staff/magi/personal/humour/Computer_Folklore/The%20History%20of%20IBM%20Operating%20Systems.html

4. What is the filename created by the original dsw(1)?
   dsw asks whether to delete each file in a directory.
   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~slavinp/
   Lincoln Quirk says it is “core”.
   http://dvlabs.tippingpoint.com/blog/2008/03/18/a-bit-of-history (awesome)

5. Which edition of Unix first had pipes?
   V3 had the <, > syntax, V4 supported ^ and |.*
   http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html#pipes
   http://v6shell.org/uhq/

6. What is -=O=-?
   The seperator of empire(6) login and actual game action.
   http://wolfpackempire.com/infopages/Guide.html
   http://www.classicempire.com/

7. Which Stephen R. Bourne wrote the shell?
   Official answer: software|1138|regis
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Bourne

8. Adam Buchsbaum’s original login was sjb. Who is sjb?
   Lincoln Quirk: *Sol Buchsbaum, his father, VP of Network Planning @ AT&T
   http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0048.html

9. What was the original processor in the Teletype DMD-5620?
   Lincoln Quirk: *Bellmac 32000 (aka WE 32000)
   http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/att/5620/

10. What was the telephone extension of the author of mpx(2)?
    Official answer: 7775
    Linkcoln Quirk: *The author seems to have been Rob Pike, can’t figure out the actual extension
    http://berdom.net/history/exit_mpx/

11. Which machine resulted in the naming of the “NUXI problem”?
    the IBM Series 1 minicomputer
    http://www.nuxi.it/nuxijargon.php

12. What customs threat is dangerous only when dropped from an airplane?
    Official answer: the Chess machine Belle
    source?

13. Who wrote the Bourne shell?
    Stephen R. Bourne.

14. What operator in the Mashey shell was replaced by “here documents”?
    pump … !
    http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/PWB/

15. What names appear on the title page of the 3.0 manual?
    Official answer: Dolotta, Petrucelli, Olsson
    source?
    1st ed: K. Thompson, D. M. Ritchie
    http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/manintro.html

16. Sort the following into chronological order:a) PWB 1.2, b) V7, c) Whirlwind, e) System V, f) 4.2BSD, g) MERT.
    Official answer: c a g b e f
    http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/unix.svg

17. The CRAY-2 will be so fast it [what?] in 6 seconds?
    Official answer: Infinite loops or P=NP
    I think “runs infinite loops”. But I saw “cooks a chicken” as well.

18. How many lights are on the front panel of the original 11/70?
    Official answer: 52
    64
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pdp-11-70-panel.jpg

19. What does FUBAR mean?
    The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX.
    (Also fucked up beyond all recognition.)
    http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/FUBAR.html

20. What does “joff” stand for?
    Official answer: jerq obscure feature finder
    joff was a debugger running on blits.
    http://www.noncombatant.org/trove/pike-blit.pdf
    http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=5081962
    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1006142.1006187

21. What is “Blit” an acronym of?
    Official answer: nothing
    http://www.noncombatant.org/trove/pike-blit.pdf

22. Who was rabbit!bimmler?
    Rob Pike
    Feb 1983 Rob Pike’s first prank as Bimmler
    http://www.good-stuff.co.uk/useful/google_usenet_timeline.php

23. Into how many pieces did Ken Thompson’s deer disintegrate?
    Official answer: 3
    Source?

24. What name is most common at USENIX conferences?
    Official answer: Joy or Pike

25. What is the US patent number for the setuid bit?
    4,135,240: Protection of data file contents, inventor Dennis Ritchie
    http://www.textfiles.com/law/softpat.txt

26. What is the patent number that appears in Unix documentation?
    M-209 cipher machine, U. S. Patent Number 2,089,603
    /usr/doc/password: Password Security: A Case History

27. Who satisified the patent office of the viability of the setuid bit patent?
    Official answer: faulkner
    Lincoln Quirk: This is a strong hint: http://www.sane.nl/events/sane98/aftermath/salus.html (section 3)

28. How many Unix systems existed when the Second Edition manual was printed?
    “The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.”* (I assume decimal numbers.)
    –The UNIX Programmer’s Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972.
    http://herpolhode.com/rob/ugly.pdf

29. Which Bell Labs location is HL?
    Official answer: Short Hills

30. Who mailed out the Sixth Edition tapes?
    Ken Thompson and Irma Biren
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20060616172103795

31. Which university stole Unix by phone?
    Official answer: Waterloo
    Source?

32. Who received the first rubber chicken award?
    Official answer: Dennis Mumaugh
    Source?

33. Name a feature of C not in Kernighan and Ritchie.
    Official answer: enum, structure assignment, void
    (of course, void… sigh.)

34. What company did cbosg!ccf work for?
    Official answer: Western Electric
    BTL Columbus
    http://groups.google.com/group/net.suicide/browse_thread/thread/6cfcefa07f32168b/adce1df428cd42e7?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=ccf&utoken=Ryf04y4AAAAHGPmJL8x4IrlfVR9mUjqneN-j77d_tCCBxb4ztp1rq7WuByHLK8qiJMSYmBNoi5U

35. What does Bnews do?
    Official answer: suck, gulp buckets
    B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News.*
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_News

36. Who said “SEX, DRUGS and UNIX”?
    Official answer: Michael Tilson
    Alex Morton
    http://www.litvision.org/morton.html

37. What law firm distributed Empire?
    Eric Cooper: I’m pretty sure Peter Langston, author of Empire, went to work at the NYC law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell.
    http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/empire.htm

38. What computer was requested by Ken Thompson, but refused by management?
    Official answer: PDP-10

39. Who is the most obsessed private pilot in USENIX?
    Official answer: George Goble

40. What operating system runs on the 3B-20D?
    DMERT = UNIX-RTR
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B2

41. Who wrote find(1)?
    Official answer: Dick Haight
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

42. In what year did Bell Labs organization charts become proprietary?
    Official answer: 1983

43. What is the Unix epoch in Cleveland?
    Official answer: 1969 Dec 31 19:00 (time zone)

44. What language preceded C?
    Official answer: nb
    B*

45. What language preceded B?
    Official answer: bon or fortran
    BCPL*

46. What letter is mispunched by bcd(6)?
    R
    http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/games/bcd/bcd.c?rev=1.1;content-type=text%2Fplain
    http://unix-tree.huihoo.org/V6/usr/source/s1/bcd.c.html

47. What terminal does the Blit emulate?
    Official answer: jerq
    dumb terminals
    http://www.noncombatant.org/trove/pike-blit.pdf

48. What does “trb” stand for (it’s Andy Tannenbaum’s login)?
    “tribble” was his nickname.
    http://alum.wpi.edu/~trb/hacker70s.html
    http://www.shamash.org/trb/xhome.trb.html

49. What do honey and allegra!honey have in common?allegra!honey is no what?
    Official answer: lady
    The login belongs to Peter Honeyman.

50. What is the one-line description in vs.c?
    ”* Screw Works interface via DC-11”
    http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/32VKern/usr/src/sys/dev/vs.c.html

51. What is the TU10 tape boot for the PDP-11/70 starting at location 100000 (in octal)?
    Official answer: 012700 172526 010040 012740 060003 105710 012376 005007

52. What company owns the trademark on Writer’s Workbench (TM) Software?
    Official answer: at&t communications (at least back then?)
    http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20040212154324447

53. Who designed Belle?
    Official answer: Joseph Condon
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson*
    http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~kopec/Publications/Publications/O_31_C.pdf

54. Who coined the name “Unix”?
    In the 1970s the project was named Unics, and eventually could
    support two simultaneous users. Brian Kernighan invented this name
    as a contrast to Multics; the spelling was later changed to Unix.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

55. What manual page mentioned Urdu?
    typo(1)
    “The “-”option suppresses the help from English and should be used
    if the document is written in, for example, Urdu.”
    http://www.bsdlover.cn/study/UnixTree/V3/usr/man/man1/typo.1.html

56. What politician is mentioned in the Unix documentation?
    Official answer: Nixon
    Source?

57. What program was compat(1) written to support?
    Official answer: Zork/Adventure
    Source?

58. Who is mctesq?
    Official answer: Michael Toy Esquire
    “Dungeon consultant Mr. Mctesq” in aard.
    Something related to rogue.

59. What was ubl?
    Official answer: Rogue or “Under Bell Labs”
    Source?

60. Who bought the first commercial Unix license?
    Official answer: RAND
    Source?

61. Who bought the first Unix license?
    Official answer: Columbia
    Source?

62. Who signed the Sixth Edition licenses?
    Official answer: Dick Shahpazian
    http://www.krsaborio.net/research/1980s/85/8504.htm

63. What color is the front console on the PDP-11/45 (exactly)?
    Official answer: puce
    http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/11_45.html
    http://hampage.hu/pdp-11/1145.html

64. How many different meanings does Unix assign to ‘.’?
    Official answer: lots|many|countless|myriad|thousands

    • current directory
    • end of input in ed, mail…
    • marker for hidden files
    • single character not newline in regexs
    • …

65. Who said, “Smooth rotation butters no parsnips”?
    John W. Tukey
    http://books.google.com/books?id=z_F5Tyt66c0C&pg=PA396&lpg=PA396&dq=Smooth+rotation+butters+no+parsnips&source=bl&ots=k1hShPujH8&sig=kYly-tJEAbj7piib1d5Ivx3fTQI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result

66. What was the original name for cd(1)?
    chdir*
    http://unix-tree.huihoo.org/V3/usr/man/man1/chdir.1.html

67. Which was the first edition of the manual to be typeset?
    Official answer: 4
    Source?

68. Which was the first edition of Unix to have standard error/diagnostic output?
    Official answer: 5
    Source?

69. Who ran the first Unix Support Group?
    Official answer: Joseph F. Maranzano
    Berk Tague
    http://archive.rapidpacket.com/unix-jun72-read-only/notes/people.txt http://www.dorje.com/netstuff/folklore/hist.bell-labs
    http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2005-March/001309.html

70. Whose Ph.D. thesis concerned Unix paging?
    Özalp Babaoğlu
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Özalp_Babaoğlu

71. Who (other than the obvious) designed the original Unix file system?
    Official answer: Rudd Canaday
    http://snap.nlc.dcccd.edu/learn/drkelly/hst-hand.htm
    http://8help.osu.edu/wks/unix_course/intro-2.html

72. Who wrote the PWB shell?
    John Mashey
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB_shell

73. Who invented uucp?
    UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories, by Mike Lesk,
    and early versions of UUCP are sometimes referred to as System V
    UUCP.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

74. Who thought of PWB?
    The Programmer’s Workbench was started in 1974 by Evan Ivie and Rudd
    Canaday to provide tools for teams of programmers to manage their
    source code and collaborate on projects with other team members.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

75. What does grep stand for?
    g/re/p from (s)ed*

76. What hardware device does “dsw” refer to?
    Official answer: console 7
    Possibly the PDP front panel, this would reflect that dsw(1) initially required entering the inode number of a file there to delete it. (“delete from switches”)

77. What was the old name of the “sys” directory?
    Official answer: ken

78. What was the old name of the “dev” directory?
    Official answer: dmr

79. Who has written many random number generators, but never one that worked?
    Official answer: Ken Thompson
    WARNING The author of this routine has been writing random-number generators for many years and has never been known to write one that worked.
    http://unix-tree.huihoo.org/V3/usr/man/man3/rand.3.html

80. Where was the first Unix system outside 127?
    Official answer: patent
    ?

81. What was the first Unix network?
    Official answer: spider
    ?

82. What was the original syntax for ls -l|pr -h ?
    ls -l >"pr -h">*
    http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html#pipes

83. Why is there a comment in the shell source “/* Must not be a register variable */”?
    Official answer: registers/longjump
    http://www.google.com/codesearch/p?hl=en#uqpchFcLwmE/main.c&q=%22Must%20not%20be%20a%20register%20variable%22

84. What is it you’re not expected to understand?
    Official answer: 6|5&process
    broken stack frame switching
    http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/odd.html*

The Emperor’s New Mind, Guido van Rossum re-read it. Definitely one of my favourite books, and I highly recommend it. It certainly influenced me.

The Ten Commandments of Leo Szilard, “Szilard was one of the most accomplished, least known modern scientists.” Must read.

Scrum-ban, “For those that are curious about kanban in an office context, it’s not unusual to find people who are either currently using Scrum, or have some understanding of Scrum as representative of Agile thinking. One way or another, Scrum users are an important constituent of the Kanban audience.”

A Stream Input-Output System, by Dennis M. Ritchie. “In a new version of the Unix operating system, a flexible coroutine-based design replaces the traditional rigid connection between processes and terminals or networks.”

Research Unix, good overview at Wikipedia.

Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System, full text available.

AR10, a new architectural blog.

Astrotags explained

Video Footage from War on Gaza, from the Al Jazeera Creative Commons(!) Repository.

NotIronic.com, things that are not ironic.

SysV init must die, full ack.

Acceleration Due to Gravity: Super Mario Brothers

Cheap Camera, Interesting Shot

Ich hätte gern ein neues Internet.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered yesterday 90 years ago. There are also German original texts.

Guantanamo is Simple, Mark Bernstein: “Lots of people seem to believe that closing Guantanamo is a complicated proposition. It’s not.”

Revisiting Python, by Bruce Williams. Almost speaks out of my mouth: “Stating what I think about explicit returns would be too explicit for this blog.”

Facebook’s valuation (in Whoppers), “Burger King recently introduced a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice that allows users to delete ten of their friends in exchange for a Whopper sandwich. Watch the app in action.” WJW.

Jester is a JavaScript implementation of REST, with syntax modeled after ActiveResource.

Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith, “And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”

Chef, a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. Pure Ruby, but nontrivial dependencies.

Apologia, Gilad Bracha says Newspeak is a bit delayed, but will come soon.

Introducing extprot, extensible binary protocols for cross-language communication and long-term serialization. By Mauricio Fernandez. Well designed.

The History of Python, a series of articles on the history of the Python programming language and its community. By Guido van Rossum.

V7/x86, a port of UNIX Version 7 to the x86 (IA-32) based PC. Whoohoo. And great to see how simple everything used to be.

Nokia to Add LGPL to Qt Licensing Model, yay.

2008 music wrap-up, by jwz. Must read, and listen to. ;)

Implementing VisiCalc, awesome story.

You say ‘ad hoc’ as if it were a bad thing.

Hetul Shah, nine-year-old Chess grandmaster slayer

Coffee as Inspiration

Superuseless Superpowers

Standalone web applications using OCaml + Ocsigen, benchmarked against Rails, eigenclass.org is back!

Text Editor Saving Routines, Eclipse just writes ahead? How silly is that?

History of the internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet.

Birds and Frogs (PDF), Einstein lecture by Freeman Dyson.

Dr. OMeta, Alessandro Warth filed his Ph.D. dissertation, “Experimenting with Programming Languages”!

Potion is an object- and mixin-oriented (traits) language by Why The Lucky Stiff.

SAILDART, “Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Dump And Restore Technique”. This is an index of over one million SAIL file names and DART attributes. The content of some of the files is available here. Contains lots of LISP tapes.

Writing in the Age of Distraction, by Cory Doctorow. “The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word.”

Ask mb: What the TK?, “Confused by wacky mag-world jargon? From the lede to the kicker, with a nut graf in between, here’s mb’s handy glossary.”

1859 Western Union “92 Code”

Better CSS Font Stacks, great reference.

Will barcodes cease to exist?

Solving Procrastination, an application of Flow (PDF), good analysis by Kevin Chiu.

2008 Review of Books, by Aaron Swartz. Another list by Matt Webb.

CloudVPN, a small and secure OpenSSL-based VPN for Linux, with mesh networking.

n2n is a layer-two peer-to-peer virtual private network (VPN) which allows users to exploit features typical of P2P applications at network instead of application level. (Very easy to set up, but has no support for multiple supernodes yet.)

tinc is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) daemon that uses tunnelling and encryption to create a secure private network between hosts on the Internet.

Rhizomes promotes experimental work located outside current disciplines, work that has no proper location.

The execution of Mata Hari, 1917

Haskell Koans

Favorite posts of 2008 at kottke.org.

A conical hat is a hat shaped like a cone.

Air Born, “a Ugandan baby girl was born aboard an airplane en route from Amsterdam to the United States – and so was given Canadian citizenship, because the plane was flying over eastern Canada at the time.” Birth-airlines will be the next big thing.

Geeks Bearing Gifts, a new book by Ted Nelson.

Eviction, or The Coming Datapocalypse, archive everything!

Specials, “The following is a special collection of freeware tools for system administration written in Perl.” By Brendan Gregg. Featuring baud rate simulator, triple ROT13, “ls with StarSign” and a PAM happy hour module, among others.

Adagio in Gray is legendary animator Garri Bardin’s 10-minute stop motion masterpiece in origami, set to Remo Giazotto’s Adagio in G minor.

Better, by Merlin Mann. Reposted and worth reading again.

FIRST & THIRD, almost FORTH.

5 Second Films, wasting your time, but not very much.

Yoshimoto Cube

Mathematics Pronunciation Guide A Megametamathematical Guide of the Proper American English Pronunciation of Terms and Names for the for the Diacritically Challenged. ‘muhl tuh pli ‘kay shuhn.

HiStar is a new operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code in a system. HiStar’s security features make it possible to implement a Unix-like environment with acceptable performance almost entirely in an untrusted user-level library.

The Aho-Corasick algorithm is a kind of dictionary-matching algorithm that locates elements of a finite set of strings (the “dictionary”) within an input text. It matches all patterns “at once”.

A “Permissive Action Link” is the box that is supposed to prevent unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon. You should be scared after reading this.

Wikipedia over DNS, information at your fingertips.

Twitter is my Village, good metaphor.

Eliot Shephard, former photologger at slower.net now tumbles.

Sweet meats, cuuuute!

Infinite Armadillo Lizard, awesome.

ihardlyknowher.com, easily browse Flickr accounts.

Origami Hamburger Kit