Ruby 1.9.1 Preview 1 is out, please patch my software.

Zit: the git-based single file content tracker, by Giuseppe Bilotta.

Wide Finder 2: processing 42GB of httpd logs, 300X faster than naïve Ruby.

BSDBuild is a simple, self-contained and portable build system derived from the traditional 4.4BSD share/mk files. BSDBuild uses BSD-style makefiles, but without BSD make extensions (it uses standard Bourne script fragments instead), so the build system is portable to most operating systems and make flavors.

Unprogramming a permutation machine, best piece of Prolog I ever saw.

blacknwhite, “your MSIE users will see your website with a grayscale color.”

The Atlas of Hidden Water

Confessions of a Naked Sushi Model

Heart allograft transplanted twice, recycling at work.

Websites that look like editors. Emacs: chatr (even with keybindings!), Planet Emacsen. Sam: 9grid.it. I know there was a vi-style one too, but I can’t find it—please mail if you know it.

Career advice, by Terrence Tao.

Math mode, a comprehensive compilation of all things typesetting math in by Herbert Voß.

The Spec’s in the Mail, Rohit Khare summarizes the history of SMTP.

MsgGroup archives, what a true gem I found! This is like the first mailing list on the net, featuring one of the first flamewars (on the privacy of FINGER, see #794, 008_may78-feb79), the creation of Header-People (another early list meant to standardize mail headers, but often ending in huge flamefests), and the introduction of DNS.

Identifying Principles for Internet Governance: Studying the Early Days of MsgGroup Mailing List, by Ronda Hauben.

Operads and their Monads, “it’s time to write some code illustrating them.”

Fran, the finite state automaton

A Case for Dependent Families, by Conor McBride “These are the slides of the talk I gave as my ‘valedictory seminar’ from the Edinburgh LFCS. It was very nice of them to invite me.”

Making Soap from Kitchen Grease, uh, yum.

Ur is a programming language designed to introduce richer type system features into functional programming in the tradition of ML and Haskell. Ur is functional, pure, statically-typed, and strict. Ur supports a powerful kind of metaprogramming based on row types. By Alan Chipala. Hot!

Multiple Dispatch in Practice (PDF), by Radu Muschevici, Alex Potanin, Ewan Tempero, and James Noble. “This paper presents an empirical study of the use of multiple dispatch in practice, considering six languages that support multiple dispatch, and also investigating the potential for multiple dispatch in Java programs.”

Tsunami UDP Protocol, a fast user-space file transfer protocol that uses TCP control and UDP data for transfer over very high speed long distance networks (≥ 1 Gbps and even 10 GE), designed to provide more throughput than possible with TCP over the same networks.

Gerrit, a Web Based Code Review tool for Git.

Waste Towers

Garamond Powerline

99 Ecstasy tablets

Human Living Vampires, “Vampirism and sexual behavior are clearly linked.”

Introducing New People to Hunting, by GhostOfTiber. “There needs to be a bridge from the classroom to actual hunting.”

What is Categorification?, by John Baez.

Collaborative Diffusion: Programming Antiobjects (PDF), paper by Alexander Repenning. This is in style of “programming particles influenced by a field”, if you remember Ian Piumarta’s talk at S3.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!

CameraBag group, “CameraBag is a photography app for the iPhone which simulates five different (mostly) old-school camera types, adding a lot of style to your photos.” I love the look.

Proof of de Morgan’s laws by rewriting due to Kai Cieliebak.

(Update: Mistake in my transcription found by Gregory Brown and his girlfriend.)

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at Kerouac’s grave, Lowell, MA – 1975, he died October 21, 1969.

Why We All Love To Hate Haider, by Slavoj Žižek (2000).

oVirt is the next step in open virtual machine management. “From running a few virtual machines on a single host to managing thousands of VMs over hundreds of hosts on a network, oVirt is built to make virtualization easy and expand to meet your needs.”

Rack::Cache is suitable as a quick drop-in component to enable HTTP caching for Rack-based applications that produce freshness (Expires, Cache-Control) and/or validation (Last-Modified, ETag) information.

My s.andwi.ch, a sandwhich “database” that actually stores all data in the URL. Genius.

Bubble Wrap Toy, Finger Feast, “If in your version of Heaven thousands of angels are on call with endless miles of bubblewrap for your consumption, then the PuchiPuchi Bubble Wrap Toy might be for you.” Must have.

Why Calculating is Better than Scheming (PDF), Philip Wadler’s paper from 1987 arguing ML-style functional languages are better for teaching than Scheme.

What’s the use of a transfinite ordinal?

Lambchop Quad, NSFW.

Coover Links: links in which the start of a sentence lies in one side of the link while the end of the sentence lies at the other.

NATURE’S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4-FLAVOR THYME CUBE, No human or god can match Nature’s simultaneous 4 flavor revolution in 1 Earth plant.

WiTFi, “getting WiFi to cover my entire apartment has been a constant battle, one that I’ve had to solve with no less than five different wireless devices creating three different networks, two in the 2.4GHz band and one up in heady 5GHz-land.”

Fucking Short Versions of Great Movies.

The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System, classic by Dennis M. Ritchie.

The forthcoming launch of the Tricki, “I am delighted to be able to say that the Wiki for mathematical problem-solving techniques is going to exist very soon.”

On this perfect day, Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault were both born on October 15. Nietzsche in 1844, and Foucault 82 years later, in 1926. Towards the end of his life, Michel Foucault stated: “I am a Nietzschean.”

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White, “All you have to do is replace a few key words throughout the text and presto! Pearls of software development wisdom, delivered in near-perfect English.”

Stuff I love: Muji Chronotebook, must buy. Awesome. (While we are at it, also get a six pack of the Muji Gel Ink Pens. They dry instantly, have pitch-black ink and are available in different thinknesses.)

Sensual Mathematics, an interview with Chaitin. (And even there exclamation marks overbound!)

Helvetica and Alternatives to Helvetica, a fairly good survey by Stephen Coles.

I Also Dated Zarathustra, by Sharon Wahl. “All lines spoken by Zarathustra were assembled from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”

Polizeibericht vom Wochenende, der Spiegel übertrifft sich selbst.

A Programming Language, PDF scan of the classic book on APL by Kenneth Iverson. Must read.

make-method-lambda considered harmful (PDF), by Pascal Costanza and Charlotte Herzeel. “We discuss a particular dark corner of the CLOS MOP, the meta-level function make-method-lambda, whose purpose is to influence the expansion, and thus the semantics, of defmethod forms.”

Beyond Flash, an addendum, a commented talk on the future of Flash by Jonathan Harris.

Don’t Just Do Something, Talk, by Slavoj Žižek.

Riotclitshave: The Blog That’s Worth a Billion Words, Coilhouse has an interview with the author. (Both highly recommended! NSFW.)

Certified Programming with Dependent Types, an in-progress textbook about practical engineering with the Coq proof assistant, by Adam Chlipala.

Untangling with Continued Fractions, part 5

Wie Jörg Haider vom rechten Weg abkam.

A Never Ending Tale

Allegories In Digital: Keith Thompson, “Gorgeous detailing decorates mutants, deities and demons, some of it recognizable, like this machine-beluga or the violin necks in the legs of the lovely musician below.”

Representing ordinal numbers in the computer and elsewhere, by Mark Dominus.

Louder than a bomb, four shots of mushroom clouds.

Slice and Dice, One man’s vandalism is another’s political art. Just ask Poster Boy, the Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups.

lisp50, for Lisp’s 50 birthday at OOPSLA 2008 there will be Clinger, Constanza, Teitelman, JonL, Pitman, MyCarthy, Kay, Gabriel, Steele and many others.

The Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog

LeekSpin with time counter, with spin counter, and what’s it all about.

The eyeballing game, my record is 1.82.

Rososo, shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. A very simple news reader, but it should have OPML.

High pure Soviet union made Caesium, in ampule under argon. 1361,1 gram! And other lovely chemicals.

Apple announces October 14 notebook event in Cupertino, finally.

Lessons From The Science of Nothing At All, by Richard P. Gabriel. This is a must read:

The Ambition of the Short Story, “The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.”

I’m toying bit around with the formatting for the next days, since some people find slashed lists too hard to read.

Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8, Bob Dylan released a new album in the bootleg series. Thorough review of me follows.

Heraus zur großen internationalen Kampfdemonstration für Freiheit, Demokratie und Menschenrechte! Der Chaos Computer Club (CCC) ruft alle Mitglieder, Hacker, Freunde, Bekannten, Verwandten und Sympathisanten auf, zahlreich und mit lustigen Transparenten zur internationalen “Freiheit statt Angst 2008 – Stoppt den Überwachungswahn!”-Demonstration in Berlin am 11. Oktober zu kommen.

Welcome Anarchaia readers! You probably are a bit shocked now, but you don’t need to be. Stick around a bit, read the intro and don’t forget to subscribe if you want to get updates.

More design tweaks, as usual the devil is in the details. I added 4px additive leading to every paragraph, a necessary compromise between a full line height (which would have ripped the layout) and nothing at all (which was too dense, making it difficult to read).

Somehow typography is easier when you do it for paper.

I have to admit I forgot where I picked up this scan of Cybernetic Serendipity: the computer and the arts (PDF, 11.2 MB) from 1968, but it is too interesting to let it settle dust in my tabs. Remember:

You can create art and beauty on a computer.

To quote from the introduction:

It is very rare, however, that new media and new systems should bring in their wake new people to become involved in creative activity, be it composing music, drawing, constructing or writing.

This is what happened in the advent of computers. […] People who would never have put pencil to paper, brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate and often look identical to what we call ‘art’ and put in public gallieries.

The book is full of such art.

It also includes one of the first digital images ever scanned, which took 16 hours to plot again—depicting Norbert Wiener.

There are articles written by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage on computer music, by Norbert Wiener on cybernetics, by Lionel Penrose (Roger Penrose’s dad) on automatic mechanical self-replication (available 40 years later).

It features an article on how Music IV is used, an early predecessor to Csound that still exists today, on simulated synaesthesia, on combinatorial geometry and on computer-proportioned buildings. Sketchpad already is dismissed as “now ‘antique’”, in spite of being just six year old.

One article compares Mondrian’s “Composition with lines” to computer generated art. There are even ALGOL programs for “rendering” balls.

And then, there are computer-aided haikus:

eons deep in the ice
I see gelled time in a whorl
pffftt the sludge has cracked

It’s a true gem, don’t miss it.