GraphicDesignerToolbox, a highly flexible drag&drop graphics generation and manipulation tool for OS X.
Musca, a fresh manual tiling window manager. I use it on my EEEPC now.
The elements of networked urbanism, by Adam Greenfield.
LUCID TV, a black-as-death comic strip on doctors.
Urbanized Typeface, just lovely.
Omegle, anonymous(!) 1:1 chat. (I had that idea before, too.)
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow. Deserves to be read at least once a year.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Amy Hungerford’s lecture at Yale, Spring 2008.
Kademlia: A Design Specification, clearest explanation I’ve seen so far.
libdht2, a distributed hash table library built on top of libevent.
cdcover analyses MP3s and other audio files, generating a picture of the waveform for each track, suitable as “album art” for an ID3 tag, or for combining as a single “CD cover”. (And now I want a FFT for coloring.)
SxSW ‘09 – Gruber & Mann – HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!
Schott’s Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles – some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy. By Ben Schott of course.
Programming Language for Old Timers, designed by David A. Moon. “[I]t does not have S-Expressions, does not have NIL, does not have conses, does not have atoms, and does not have a simple parenthesized Polish prefix syntax.”
International Lisp Conference 2009 – Day One, Day Two, Andy Wingo reports.
6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want. But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.
— ILC, Day Two
The Art of the Propagator, by Alexey Radul and Gerald Jay Sussman. “We develop a programming model built on the idea that the basic computational elements are autonomous machines interconnected by shared cells through which they communicate.”
The Unknowable, by G. J. Chaitin.
I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say “Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?”
— Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
WikiBirthday.org! The Wiki turns 14. And it’s still going well.
Nano Forth, a tiny dialect of the Forth programming language with only 11 instructions.
Motoi Yamamoto uses salt to create large, insanely detailed, floor patterns. Must see.
Authors@Google: Donald Knuth, on “the interactions between faith and science”.
Shuhari is a Japanese martial arts concept, and describes the stages of learning to mastery. Also applies to programming.
Edbrowse is a combination editor, browser, and mail client that is 100% text based. The interface is similar to /bin/ed, though there are many more features, such as editing multiple files simultaneously, and rendering html. This program was originally written for blind users, but many sighted users have taken advantage of the unique scripting capabilities of this program, which can be found nowhere else.
Buddhist Phenomenology, by Henk Barendregt.
The Elegance of Imperfection, by David Sherwin at A List Apart. “When I try to think of a paradigm for pursuing elegance through imperfection, the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi comes to mind.”
i3, an improved dynamic tiling window manager.
sr-speedbar.el, same frame speedbar. Must have.
After years of searching and trying to write one myself, I finally found a good outliner for Emacs! (And I could not have discovered it earlier, because it’s only a few weeks old.)
I am talking of orgstruct++-mode, a minor-mode implemented by
org-mode. You probably know org-mode, a
whopping monster of over 40kLOC of Elisp. In spite of trying to be an
outliner itself, it has, however, a nice feature to edit indented
lists of “bullet points”, for example:
- foo
- bar
- baz
You can just write the first line “manually” and then use M-RET to add new bullet points. Then, you can indent them with M-left and M-right. These keys are only bound on bullet points and have their usual behavior else (e.g. I use them for the excellent elscreen to change tabs). E.g. I can indent the “baz”-line with M-right:
- foo
- bar
- baz
And then I can indent the “bar”-line and it will shift recursively:
- foo
- bar
- baz
This sounds pretty trivial, but if you think it is, you haven’t tried
to implement it yourself. Your bullet points also can span multiple
lines and have several paragraphs. For this you need
orgstruct++-mode, the ++ add the indentation features. C-j and
M-q work as expected:
- foo foofoo foofoofoo foo foofoo foofoofoo
foo foofoo foofoofoo
foo foofoo foofoofoo
meh mehmeh mehmehmeh
then turns to:
- foo foofoo foofoofoo foo foofoo foofoofoo foo foofoo foofoofoo
foo foofoo foofoofoo
meh mehmeh mehmehmeh
Also, TAB will smart-indent accordingly. Thus, we have almost everything we need for outlining. It simply feels right. A few more features:
- shuffling items
- M-up: Move item up
- M-down: Move item down
- C-c ^: Sort items
- miscellaneous
- C-c -: Change item marker (-, +, *, 1., 1))
- C-c C-c: Toggle checkbox ([ ] -> [X])
Unfortunately, there are no options yet for folding in
orgstruct++-mode. However, since the thing is indentation-based you
can use, for example, selective display with C-x $ to get an overview
of your outline. It would be nice to have better navigation in
orgstruct as well. In the meantime, you can bind org-next-item like
this:
(org-defkey orgstruct-mode-map [(C-up)]
(orgstruct-make-binding 'org-previous-item 66601 [(C-up)]))
(org-defkey orgstruct-mode-map [(C-down)]
(orgstruct-make-binding 'org-next-item 66602 [(C-down)]))
Also, for convenience, to create a subitem (please mail if you know how to do this easier):
(define-key orgstruct-mode-map [C-return]
'(lambda () "Insert a new heading or item demoted once."
(interactive)
(execute-kbd-macro [M-return M-right])))
Finally, I have written some tools to load dashed-lists in Ruby and convert them to org-lists, HTML (XOXO) and linear text. It also can insert correct header numbering, either plain depth or Wittgenstein style.
Conferences, Friends, and Stuff That Really Matters, thank you, Merlin Mann.
staple is a program that inseparably binds together the data in a file using a cryptographic mechanism known as an All-or-nothing transform.
Topological methods, wonderful notes by Robert Ghrist.
Please don’t bury me
Down in that cold cold ground
No, I’d rather have ‘em cut me up
And pass me all around
— John Prine, Please Don’t Bury Me*
It’s easy to make something incredible. “All you do is, don’t let what you’re doing be shit.”
The UroClub is the discrete, sanitary way for your urgent relief. Created by a Board Certified Urologist, it looks like an ordinary golf club, but contains a reservoir built into the grip to relieve yourself. The UroClub is leak proof, easy to clean and no more embarrassing moments. WJW.
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C minor, “Resurrection”
Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde
Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would
get similar results.”
— Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research”
Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero, CC0 1.0 has been released. It is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain. This is a great step for the Creative Commons!
Public Domain Donor, why let all of your ideas die with you?
Six-Word Reviews of 1,302 SXSW Mp3s, Paul Ford did it again!
A Nominal Theory of Objects with Dependent Types (PDF), by Martin Odersky, Vincent Cremet, Christine Röckl, and Matthias Zenger. A.k.a the vObj paper.
When Reality Meets Product Concepts, more USB Finger.
Bidding chess, and other bidding games. By Jay Bhat and Sam Payne. Recommended.
The Monad.Reader Issue 13 (PDF), featuring Rapid Prototyping in TeX, The Typeclassopedia, a review of “Real World Haskell” and Calculating Monads with Category Theory. Recommended.
What the Hashtag?!, the user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.
Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a math blog by Dick Lipton.
You’ve got all the armies, you’ve got all the arms
you’ve got all the armories
The harbor’s blockaded, the streets barricaded
every thought is under lock and key
There’s an idea rising that you can’t detect
from the same poor souls you claim to protect
There’s a violent burning hatred in every mothers son
you better watch out, ‘cause johnny’s got a gun
— Dead Moon, Johnny’s Got A Gun*
Practical Church Numerals in Scala, one of them was even a practical application: type-safe units calculations.
picoup, exp urself sccntly. 18 chr and 1 @usr reference gotta be enough.
The Vintage Web, get nostalgic everybody.
Celephaïs, by H.P. Lovecraft.
iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation First Look
Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace
Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon, and Bill Venners, in times where good programming books are rare, this excellent introduction for intermediate programmers really stands out. You’ll find everything here you need to learn this promising language.
In Praise of Evolvable Systems, by Clay Shirky. “HTTP and HTML are the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of Internet protocols, only comprehensible as elaborate practical jokes”.
HTML Evolution, summarized by Sam Ruby.
Great Moments in Logic, a good read.
Tell the EU: Keep Copyright Sound!, A handful of major record labels are trying to break a fifty year-old promise.
Attacked from Within, a plea to fundamentally rethink what constitutes community and society on the web, and what possibilities exist for their maintenance and reconstruction in the face of scale and malicious users. Read this! So much truth in it.
M4DBI is a Ruby library that provides ORM modelling and more to the Ruby DBI library.
Golfing decimal to Roman number conversion, in Perl of course.
Thesaurus of Mathematical Languages, or MATLAB synonymous commands in Python/NumPy.
Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World, by Slavoj Zizek.
Fahndungsplakat zum Bundestrojaner
Elegance and the Surreals, Reg Braithwaite implements surreal numbers in Ruby.
entschwindet und vergeht, “the only good architects are dead architects.”
Dinatural Transformations and Coends, a bit of abstract Haskell.
Anecdote Driven Development, or Why I Don’t Do TDD, by Ovid.
Self has got a new web site! As well as a tech preview of the next release.
Dependent Types at Work (PDF), Lecture Notes for the LerNet Summer School Piriápolis, Uruguay, February 2008. A gentle introduction.
Interactive Theorem Proving for Agda Users, lecture slides.
c-repl, a REPL for C.
Er.js, Erlang-style concurrency with JavaScript 1.7.
“Top” four instant sound effect sites, an essential Internet guide.
Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine, WJW.
Headset Hotties, no thanks, I prefer Headph0ne Phet1sh.
Burn, a crazy flash game.
New Math, by Craig Damrauer.
Buttersafe, a web comic you must subscribe to.
Aus der Schande tausendjähriger Entwürdigung als Kreatur der Männer ist das Weib erwacht. Es will Mensch sein, die Rechte und Anerkennung des Menschen haben. Daß die kämpfenden Frauen unserer Tage im Langen nach dem Gute der Freiheit vorbeigreifen und statt Menschenrechte Männerrechte begehren, soll uns nicht verdrießen. Die Not und die Verstocktheit der Zeit hat den Frauen Männerpflichten auferlegt. Vielleicht schafft sich doch einmal die Einsicht Bahn, daß nun nicht die Assimilation ans andere Geschlecht, sondern die Befreiung von seiner Herrschaft – das ist die Freiheit des Weibes in Liebe und Mutterschaft – das Glück des Frauentums wäre. Sie müssen ihre Ziele weit setzen, die Frauen, die in den Kampf getreten sind. Die Neubildung aller gesellschaftlichen Formen auf dem Boden des Mutterrechts müssen sie verlangen. Wenn sie es dann einmal erreichen, daß kein Weib mehr ein anderes deswegen verachtet, weil es Mutter ist, dann müssen sie die Genugtuung fühlen, daß ihr Werben und Kämpfen nicht umsonst war, wie sie selbst Zeugnis dafür sein sollten, daß die herrlichen Frauen der Romantik nicht umsonst die Vorbilder freier, schöner Weiblichkeit waren.
— Erich Mühsam, Idealistisches Manifest
Reverse HTTP is designed to enable the application layer encoding and semantics to be built upon HTTP uniformly for requests in either direction between a non-server host and server host.
Dynamic Languages Wizards Series, Spring 2001, videos of three panels.
Everywhere the lanes have changed leading to the dark
Everytime I go from you it just makes things so hard
All I want to say to you somehow in return
Everything we know from life never will get burned
— Pierced Arrows, The Wait
Optical Tracking, History of Apollo Spacecraft Tracking from Pine Mountain Observatory.
Origamic Architecture, stunning sculptures cut out of paper.
Scanwiches, scans of sandwiches for education and delight.
Depicting Europe, by Perry Anderson.
A 24 Puzzle, Aaron Swartz wonders: “in the few minutes you have before the building is reduced to rubble, where do you upload the video to maximize the chance that it will get published?”
Pierced Arrows, the successor band to Dead Moon stays in their tradition being masters of lo-fi.
Follow Cost calculates just how annoying it will be to follow a particular user on Twitter. Annoyance is measured in milliscobles, or 1/1000th of Robert Scoble’s Twitter output.
Mongoose, a compact and embeddable web server.
Fully Distributed Representation (PDF), by Pentti Kanerva. “It is shown how the information of a conventional record with fields is encoded into a long random bit string, or a holistic record, that has no fields, and how the fields are extracted from the holistic record. It is argued that holistic representation should be used in modeling high-level mental functions.”
Comme Appelé du Néant—As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck: Part 1, Part 2 (PDF).
It’s the same story the crow told me
It’s the only one he know —
like the morning sun you come
and like the wind you go
Ain’t no time to hate,
barely time to wait
Wo-oah, what I want to know,
where does the time go?
— Grateful Dead, Uncle John’s Band
Pure is a modern-style functional programming language based on term rewriting. It offers equational definitions with pattern matching, full symbolic rewriting capabilities, dynamic typing, eager and lazy evaluation, lexical closures, built-in list and matrix support and an easy-to-use C interface. The interpreter uses LLVM as a backend to JIT-compile Pure programs to fast native code.
Redis is a key-value database. It is similar to memcached but the dataset is not volatile, and keys can be strings, exactly like in memcached, but also lists and sets with atomic operations to push/pop elements. Replication and other interesting features are a work in progress.
Fluid Grids, by Ethan Marcotte at A List Apart. Pretty cool if you don’t mind calculation.
人はいさ
心も知らず
ふるさとは
花ぞむかしの
香に匂ひける
— 紀貫之
Rack Middleware at Railscasts.
Kaiten sushi time in real Japan, just put the camera on a Sushi conveyor belt!
Newspeak Prototype Escapes into the Wild, woohoo. There are versions for Linux, OS X and Windows. And it has a pretty innovative IDE.
How to halve a number in Coq.
The Quick Brown tracks changes in Fox News headlines.
lightcloud, a distributed and persistent key-value database Built on Tokyo Tyrant. This could be hot.
A Dialogue on Infinity, between a mathematician and a philosopher. A blog by Alexandre Borovik and David Corfield with guests.
Lovecraftian School Board Member Wants Madness Added To Curriculum, “Our graduates need to know about those who lie beneath the earth, waiting until the stars align so they can return to their rightful place as our masters and wage war against the Elder Things and the shoggoths!”
Tessellate: A web-based tetromino game, extremely configurable version of Tetris implemented as Java Applet.