Erik Naggum (1965-2009) RIP, also see the obituaries by Tobias C. Rittweiler and by Kent Pitman.

The Death of MJ Mach II, I’m not the only one that thought of these Dan Bern lines: “The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing / America breathed a sigh of relief…” when I heard the news.

curucamp, “The Central European Ruby Camp is a meeting of the Ruby communities of Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine. The goal is to connect the communities, to share ideas and to intensify the exchange between the communities.” I’ll be there.

The Generation of Gothic Text, by Susan Laflin. “Despite many years of work on handwriting recognition, human readers remain more successful than any existing computer system when it comes to deciphering poor quality handwriting. It therefore seems reasonable to attempt a method of recognition which is closer to that used by the human reader.”

Secrets of Simplicity: rules for being simple and usable, slides by Giles Colborne. (I really like that post-it style he uses to annotate slides.)

Niklas Luhmann erklärt den Zettelkasten, auf YouTube.

Geometries in Polaroid, by Grant Hamilton.

The Restoration of Early UNIX Artifacts (PDF), Warren Toomey at Usenix09.

Guile 1.9.0, I didn’t think it still lives. Now it has got a compiler, a VM, supports ECMAScript, soon Elisp(!) and does native threads.

Video For Everybody is very simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element which offers native playback, and provides fallback for older browsers.

Gray code at the pediatrician’s office, a nice application.

A new alternative to git submodules: git subtree, really useful.

The secret life of numbers, “How do you spark off an interest in maths when the curriculum seems dreary?”

Lists by death toll on Wikipedia. Features, among others, accidents, battles, wars, and natural disasters.

Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue: Death is not the end, great Dylan cover.

Risks of eating pine nuts, for the list of things I don’t want to know about.

Because everything’s funnier. In The Butt.

Timeline of non-sexual social nudity

Would You Hug A Porcupine?

JSDaliClock

LSD girl

Dushi

Rip is an attempt to create a next generation packaging system for Ruby. Deserves investigation!

Sicherheit statt Freiheit, Gernot Hausar in Telepolis: “Eine Tour de force durch die Welt der Informationsmanipulation.” Lesebefehl.

Flow in Games, thesis by Jenova Chen. “[T]his thesis uses Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory and provides players with subconscious choices to help them actively customize their optimal video game experiences.”

Wer kennt dieses Zeichen?, ist mir auch schon aufgefallen und ich hab richtig erraten was es bedeutet, aber konnte bisher keine Quelle dafür finden.

Quarter Shrinker, a device which uses electromagnetic forming in order to shrink quarters down to the size of a dime.

we love typography, a place to bookmark and savour quality type-related images and quotes.

Zizek on Porn, “Why is porn afraid of good narrative?”

Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List (PDF), can be very useful.

The Simpsons Minus The Simpsons, WJW.

three frames, another idea I had before!

The Pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian

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They put up this advertisement a few months ago, and I wanted to post all the time how bad it is.

Today I’ll tell you why it is good.

Obviously, you will notice the typography, an aggressive mix of a rather nice corporate identity and Arial that just jumps into your face, and makes you want to rip your wet, crying eyes out, and throw them on the railway line.

Furthermore, note the spacing: the asymmetry, the wasted space, the alignment of text chunks to the corners. The intimacy the bullet dots have with their list items.

This tension of uglyness is the key. It makes you look at the ad everytime you wait for the train. It targets the people who see the ad regularily: You look at it everyday, you cannot ignore it. Anyway, they wouldn’t attract one-time visitors of the ad.

Imagine the ad was beautiful. You’d look at it once, and then it would just fade away. They are laywers, and they do boring stuff. They can’t put attractive women/nice landscapes/shiny things on it to make you look at it more often.

I think it works. It’s really subtle.

Lord of the Cloud, John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter. An Edge Roundtable.

Nietzsche, (most of) the collected works, in English, nicely formatted HTML.

Simple graphs with Math.Combinatorics.Graph, a cool Haskell library.

PCLSRing: Keeping Process State Modular, classic paper by Alan Bawden.

Origami Photo Gallery, crazy stuff.

Social Media Venn Diagram

Wikipedia, 5000 pages, fully printed.

DejaVu Sans Mono vs. Apple Menlo

Managing Werewolves

Unix turns 40, I don’t want to know what crap we’d have to use today if no-one came up with Unix.

Lectures on Jacques Herbrand as a Logician

ZFS on NetBSD, I can’t wait for it!

clue, an ANSI C compiler targeting high level languages.

A Taste of 2.8: Continuations in Scala.

My First Wiki, the history of the shortest Wiki, SigWik.

Oulipo and the Eodermdrome challenge, The word “EODERMDROME” is itself an eodermdrome.

Peter Landin, rest in peace.

Treq Lila, John Baez’s album of generative music.

Tom Swifties are curious puns that monkey with the description of reported speech for comic effect. E.g.: “Who discovered radium?” asked Marie curiously.

Blood in Tiananmen

Teen and Transgender Comparative Study, a correlation of two stages of transformation, pairing teen girls (12–14) with like adult male-to-female transsexuals. Recommended.

How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing, by Philip Greenspun.

Node, a purely event-based I/O for V8 Javascript. MIT-licensed.

Google Wave, a new collaboration and communication product. This could be big. (Has some nice theory behind it, too.)

On a Basic Property for Computing Longest Prefix, a piece of Squiggol.

1 line CSS Grid Framework, cute.