Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
31dec2007
Rails Is A Ghetto, by Zed Shaw. Rant of the month.
Frame Not Included, delightful daily photolog.
I am painting my mistakes
Underneath your soft embrace
They’re all marching to Pretoria but my dear
The Colts are on TV
And I guess we’ll have to see
How it goes, how it is
In the Christian New Year
— Dan Bern, Trudy
Pipelines Using Fibers in Ruby 1.9, yay for delimited continuations (almost).
Jibbed is a LiveCD based on the NetBSD Operating System that works directly from a CD, without touching your hard drive.
Welcome to my ~/bin, Mark Dominus just put it online. Good talk as well.
Dinner For One, ein must-have an jedem Silvester. Reposted.
24C3: Hacker wünschen “guten Rutsch ins Jahr 1984”, auweia.
31.12.2002, und damit endet KDs Tag um Tag.
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!
— Auld Lang Syne
The Greatest Contribution to Programming Languages would be better tools to make them, Jonathan Tran claims. Aah, all the time I spent writing pretty-printers.
2007 music wrap-up, by Jamie Zawinski.
Beach container mystery resolved, “The 27m container has been identified by the coastguard as a beer fermentation tank.” %-)
I hereby wish you a happy new year, unless you don’t want one, in which case I wish you a crappy new year instead. — Mark Dominus
Bluewall is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian SID and pkgsrc. It aims to create a complete pkgsrc-based GNU/Linux distribution.
Voltalinux, a Slackware-based distro using pkgsrc.
Slackware Linux with pkgsrc Packages, explained by Martti Kuparinen.
30dec2007
Pattern matching in metalua, very nice. Want that in Ruby as well…
expectations is a lightweight unit testing framework for Ruby.
Top 10 most popular OCaml programs.
OpenLierox is an extremely addictive realtime worms shoot-em-up backed by an active gamers community. YAY.
Born to win. I know I’m born to win.
It’s a funny old world that I am in.
I’ll fight to change it like it ought to be.
Born to win. I know I’m born to win.
— Woody Guthrie, Born To Win
SRU is a standard XML-focused search protocol for Internet search queries, utilizing CQL (Contextual Query Language), a standard syntax for representing queries.
Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.
Tell me will that hangknot slip, no it will not,
Will that hangknot slip, no it will not.
Slip around your neck, but it won’t slip back again
Hangknot, hangknot, that hangknot.
— Hangknot, Slipknot
Emulating an x86 Mac OS X, The goal is to get every Intel-based Mac OS X version running without modifications on virtualization software. It works for qemu already.
29dec2007
Optimus Tactus keyboard, WJW.
Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep, “In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.” Yay for crunchtime.
RFC 1751, a Convention for Human-Readable 128-bit Keys.
This morning I was born again, I was born again complete
I stood up above my troubles and I stand on my two feet
My hand it feels unlimited, my body feels like the sky
I feel at home in the universe where yonder planets fly
— Woody Guthrie, This Morning I Am Born Again
Kindle Easter Eggs: We have GPS!, and Minesweeper, which almost justifies the price.
rawdog is an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of
Grandeur. Written in Python, it uses Mark Pilgrim’s feed parser to
read RSS 0.9, 1.0, 2.0, CDF and Atom feeds. It runs from cron,
collects articles from a number of feeds, and generates a static
HTML page listing the newest articles in date order. It supports
per-feed customisable update times, and uses ETags, Last-Modified,
and gzip compression to minimise network bandwidth usage.
(Convert OPML with perl -ne 'print "feed 3h 1ドル\n" if /xmlUrl=\"([^\"]+)\"/')
mixriot.com has semi-daily remixes of serious DJing. Saved for future reference.
Doctest/JS: unit testing for Javascript made simple, by Ian Bicking.
Timeline of knowledge-representation, by John Barger.
3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already. — Jorn Barger, Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers
Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger, don’t be scared by the pic and acknowledge that his kind of weblog is not what commonly is thought of a weblog.
Any Excuse for a Party, Steve Dekorte questions.
All I need is a pair of pants, danah boyd: “I am a confident woman, but shopping demoralizes me. Your industry sells a standard of beauty, demanding women to conform and ostracizing them when they do not.”
Binary clock until 2008. Yay. Kind of meditative.
YAP6 Operator: Reduce Operators – Part II, by Adriano Ferreira. Yay for lazy folds and scans.
Gonna boil myself a tea bag
Gonna boil myself a tea bag
And If you’ll moze above my way
I’ll boil you off a tea bag too
— Woody Guthrie, Tea Bag Blues
Functional Programming Archaeology, about Backus’s FP and APL.
Second International Workshop on Plan 9, papers are online.
OLPC versus eeePC, “The eeePC has more ports, it can connect to Ethernet and an external monitor, the XO can’t.” (No ethernet? Ouch.)
Netscape Browser to Die a Quiet Death in February 2008, bury the dead.
Toolbox, a graphics program similar to .werkkzeug for Mac has been released.
28dec2007
2007 Trends in logo design.
vile-9.6 release, with Unicode and UTF-8 support. Yay.
FunForth (short for Functional Forth) implements some simplified aspects of the Haskell language, in particular, abstract data types and pattern matching.
I ain’t looking for no seven golden cities,
But I know there’s a fortune somewhere to find.
There’s a peace that I hear whisperin’ through the pinyons
And a love that’s taller than the ponderosa pines.
— Rich Mullins, Heaven Is Waiting
Purrr is a Forth dialect for microcontrollers. The main goal of Purrr is to fill the gap between low and high level languages for 8-bit Flash ROM based microcontrollers.
Bush’s Last Day, a countdown.
Challenges for the Future, Benjamin Mann of DARPA has constructed a list of 23 challenges for mathematics over the next century. Still 2 or 3 to go on Hilbert’s list, tho.
All eyes on the city, “Like some rogue branch of the independent film industry, private security firms are now installing what The New York Times calls “one of the most comprehensive high-tech public surveillance systems in the world,” and they’re doing it in China.”
Programming Language Theory Texts Online, nice list.
Fe is a small and easy to use folding editor. Lean and with emacs keybindings, but no undo?
I gotta tell you all about it
I gotta scream and shout it
And I say yeah
— Devo, Uncontrollable Urge
Draco is a semi source based GNU/Linux distribution, using pkgsrc as the default package manager. Draco seperates the base system from the third-party packages. This gives you a simple and clean distribution to use as you see fit. Sounds very interesting, but it’s pretty fresh.
A Wake Up Call for the Logic Programming Community, by Tom Schrijvers. “In the 6 six years that I have been doing research in the Logic Programming community, I have met a lot of nice people and heard about a lot of interesting research ideas. However, the community itself isn’t exactly thriving and LP has a serious PR problem. It’s my fear that if we happily continue along our current path, then there will be little left of LP and its flagship Prolog in a couple of years.” I hope it works.
Absurde Mathematik: Paradoxa wider die mathematische Intuition, guter 24C3-Talk, Paper ist online.
Wrapping up 2007, Matt Webb made a list I should make as well: “I have notes for essays I’ll never write. Here I’ve collected what’s been on my mind the last couple of months.”
Theorem proving support in programming language semantics, “We describe several views of the semantics of a simple programming language as formal documents in the calculus of inductive constructions that can be verified by the Coq proof system. Covered aspects are natural semantics, denotational semantics, axiomatic semantics, and abstract interpretation.” This is becoming more relevant in the future.
27dec2007
ssh-xfer is a hackish but handy way of transferring files from remote hosts to your local computer.
bcvi: run vi over a ‘back-channel’, a great hack that could be adapted to remote URL opening in the local browser as well, for example.
opentracker is a open and free bittorrent tracker project. It aims for minimal resource usage and is intended to run at your wlan router. Very efficient implementation.
LIGHT READING 1500 cinematic explosions, by Elizabeth McAlpine. “The whitest frame from 1500 different cinematic explosions has been taken and compiled together to make a minute long white flickering movie the sound track has become an agitated micro sound due to the editing process.”
Don’t want you to touch me
Don’t try to help you’ll only make it worse
Don’t tell me it will be okay
Nothing’s gonna be okay anyway
It doesn’t matter im gonna turn my TV on
Cause everything looks beautiful on video
— The Expoxies, Everything Looks Beautiful on Video
24C3: Preview der Dampfmaschinen-Telegraphie, ultimate retrohacking.
Reading List, The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students and is presented here for those who want to learn more about the ideas and philosophies that influenced the creation of Squeak.
Gazest is a wiki based community engine. Why another wiki? Gazest tries to be better by not flattening the history of changes. This storage model is heavily inspired by distributed revision control systems like Git and Mercurial.
Smart Languages and Dumb Parsers, “Now I’m starting to wonder if a dumb parser is a necessary ingredient in a highly extensible language.” Examples are Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk.
Too many files: Reiser FS vs hashed paths, a benchmark.
eCache is an anonymous bank operating through interfaces in the Tor network. The bank issues cryptographic certificates, “Digital Bearer Certificates”, that can be exchanged among the banks users. The certificates can be bought and sold for real money through the bank. The owners and operators of the bank is unknown and the bank is said to operate outside the laws of any country.
Adventures in Stacking, “It’s the combinatorial architecture of the well-balanced stack.” Fantastic.
It’s aginst th’ law to eat, It’s aginst th’ law to drink
It’s aginst th’ law to worry, It’s aginst th’ law to think
It’s aginst th’ law to marry or to try to settle down
It’s aginst th’ law to ramble like a bum from town to town
— Woody Guthrie, Aginst Th’ Law
I completed reading, 104 books Matt Webb read this year. Wow.
Design your functions for partial application, a Haskell tip by Bryan O’Sullivan.
24C3 Wiki, I’ll follow the streams.
GitGui.dmg, this is a self-contained git-gui package for Mac OS X.
26dec2007
What’s new in Perl 5.10, 4 micro articles.
JOMP: The Javascript One-metaclass Metaobject Protocol, “The beauty of this design, as far as designing an MOP is concerned, is that we only need a single metaclass (or whatever you want to call it for a prototype-based language). By modifying the behavior of objects, we can achieve a great deal of additional power. In fact, we can add a wealth of metaprogramming techniques to the language simply by intercepting the setting and getting of properties.”
ZSNES on the XO, yay.
Talloc: The Power of C, a malloc-replacement that’s so clever and elegant it makes me want to slap myself.
The castle started spinning
Or maybe it was my brain
I can’t tell you what she did to me
But my body will never be the same
— Prince, Darling Nikki
Planet Battery, “Earth beneath our feet might act as a gigantic circuit built by microbes to power their metabolic systems.” It’s not a planet at all, then, but a bio-electrical deposit rotating itself in space. A living battery.
Industrieschnee ist Schnee, der durch Emissionen (vor allem von Wasserdampf) oder Abwärme von Industrieanlagen, insbesondere Kraftwerken, hervorgerufen wird.
specs is a Behaviour-Driven-Design framework for Scala. Their tables feature is pretty nice.
Come a little closer huh, ah will ya huh.
Close enough to look in my eyes, Sharona.
Keeping it a mystery gets to me
Running down the length of my thighs, Sharona
Never gonna stop, give it up. Such a dirty mind.
— The Knack, My Sharona
Taxicab Numbers with Haskell.
European Common Lisp Meeting 2008, “Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz are proud to announce the European Common Lisp Meeting 2008. The meeting will consist of a Sunday full of talks on April 20, 2008, with optional dinners on Saturday and Sunday evening.”
Complaints I’m Seeing About Common Lisp, by Dan Weinreb.
Ruby 1.9—Right for You?, PragDave evaluates.
25dec2007
isitchristmas.com, YES.
Ruby 1.9.0 is released, announce by matz. ChangeLog.
Fossil, a Software Configuration Management System. “Fossil should be ridiculously easy to install and operate.” It’s from the SQLite author, could be successful (even if it reminds me a lot of Monotone).
Nevertheless they could not understand
that I’m a black man, and I could never be a veteran.
On the strength of situations, I’m real.
I got a raw deal, so I’m lookin for the steel,
Looking for the steel.
— Tricky, Black Steel
happy xmas tree!, a valid, semantic, and imageless tree from britta to you.
YAP6 Operator: Reduce operators, by Adriano Ferreira. Yay for folds.
Wondermark #365: The True Meaning of Christmas.
This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 260), John Baez: “Since it’s Christmas Eve, I thought I’d list some free books you can download. I’m a big fan of giving the world presents… and I’m not the only one.” Lists some really good stuff.
A practical scalable distributed B-tree, by Marcos K. Aguilera and Wojciech Golab. “Our algorithm supports practical features not present in prior work: transactions that allow atomic execution of multiple operations over multiple B-trees, online migration of B-tree nodes between servers, and dynamic addition and removal of servers. Moreover, our algorithm is conceptually simple: we use transactions to manipulate B-tree nodes so that clients need not use complicated concurrency and locking protocols used in prior work.”
docex module, a framework for running unit tests and examples, written in docstrings, by Peter Norvig.
Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated.
I hate you, Edsger Dijkstra! — _why
This Hack Was Not Properly Planned, _why on the spontaneity of hacking. “Unit testing, in particular, is designed to reel in spontaneous hacking. It is like framing a picture before it has been painted. Hacking, at heart, will continue to be something of spontaneous order, something of anarchy, and the landscape of hacking is something which comes from human action but is not of human design.”
24dec2007
Merry Christmas! or what ever you happen to celebrate to the entire Anarchaia readership.
Gazelle is a system currently in development for parsing context-free grammars, especially programming languages. It takes inspiration from yacc/bison and ANTLR, but seeks to take these ideas to the next level.
I hate web sites that just tail off irritatingly so you’re never sure if they’re dead, it’s kind of sad to see the 2lmc spool die.
Email in the 18th century, “More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane – wireless and without need for electricity.”
I waited in the shadows all night
But when he came he gave me a fright
I wanted to reach out and hug him
But just stood there, my knees trembling
Santa came and took away my smile
Santa came on a nuclear missile.
— Heather Noel, Santa Came On A Nuclear Missile
ruby_parser version 1.0.0 has been released!, Ryan Davis says: “ruby_parser (RP) is a ruby parser written in pure ruby (utilizing racc–which does by default use a C extension). RP’s output is the same as ParseTree’s output: s-expressions using ruby’s arrays and base types.” Awesome!
Composing Contracts, “This document is an unofficial example implementation of the system originally described in the paper Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering, by Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, and Julian Seward.”
AirTraffic of Zürich, mashed up on Google Maps. Great stuff. (Works better in Firefox.)
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground. How we found the same old fears.
Wish you were here.
— Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
Using Archiveopteryx on the Mac, a installation walkthrough.
Archiveopteryx stores email in a database and provides access to it through IMAP and more. Uses PostgreSQL.
graphito.net is a nice design-related blog.
365 Chiat Days, how a designer uses his desktop over the year. I kind of like the idea of making circles and Venn-diagrams with icons, but I ever save stuff there, actually.
23dec2007
Turning a Sphere Inside Out, the fun starts at 1:30 and will hook you. Very recommended.
MG4J (Managing Gigabytes for Java) is a free full-text search engine for large document collections written in Java. As a by-product, it offers several general-purpose optimised classes, including fast & compact mutable strings, bit-level I/O, (possibly signed) minimal perfect hashing for very large strings collections, etc.
In my heart I hear you sing again
Every note as natural as then
and when I sing those songs
for family and friends,
in my heart I hear you sing again
— Woody Guthrie, I Hear You Sing Again
Haskell-Join-Rules is a proposed Haskell language extension that introduces join style patterns which are compiled into CHR rules. Join patterns is a concurrency abstraction based on join calculus, with implementations found in JoCaml and Polyphonic C#.
Combining Events and Threads for Scalable Network Services — Implementation and evaluation of monadic, application-level concurrency primitives, by Peng Li and Steve Zdancewic.
Flower is a new kind of user programmable web service, especially well suited for applications which process, store, and query XML data sets. By Tom Lord.
The mechanically verified Ruby 1.9 changelog, nice trick by Mauricio Fernandez.
Oh, if you ain’t got the do re mi, folks, you ain’t got the do re mi,
Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee.
California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see;
But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot
If you ain’t got the do re mi.
— Woody Guthrie, Do-Re-Mi
Question: Does the URI Length Recommendation of 255 bytes Matter Anymore?, by M. David Peterson. Hahahahahahaha.
Design Patterns In Ruby, a review by Pat Eyler.
22dec2007
The XCDE Library is a native system written in C to compress, index and query XML files. The library includes an API that allows users to store, index, compress and query XML documents and some commands (written using the API) for implementing higher-level queries and/or for document (de)compression operations.
Implementation Patterns, Mark Bernstein raises an important point when we look at old software: “languages did improve, to be sure, but the key change is that people mastered a new style of programming. It’s not just object-oriented programming; it’s small methods on small objects.”
It’s Honeyky Hanukah, makes me feel glad,
This box for mother and this box for dad,
For sister and brother, nice ribbons I’ll tie,
It’s Honeyka Hanukah time.
— Woody Guthrie, Honeyka Hanukah
How big is Tinderbox?, Mark Bernstein counts 74kloc. Not very much IMO, is it?
CSS Grid Positioning Module Level 3, I like.
Continuation passing as a reflection, that diagram makes it pretty clear how a CPS-transformation does manifest evaluation order as well.
Unix makes Computer Science easy, a tour of common utilities and which algorithms they implement.
risd’s next president is John Maeda.
Professor Moriarty probably didn’t get his start this way, what an accident.
That old dust storm’s killed my baby,
But it can’t kill me, Lord
And it can’t kill me.
— Woody Guthrie, Dust Can’t Kill Me
How Media Studies Can Massage Your Message, by Molly E. Holzschlag at 24ways.
24C3: Chaos Computer Club lädt mit Volldampf zum Congress in Berlin, “Das Motto des 24. Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) “Volldampf voraus!” atmet den Geist der digitalen Revolution. Es formt sich der neue Entdeckergeist des 21. Jahrhunderts. Nanotechnologie, Netzwerke und der Abschied von der Kohlenwasserstoffenergiewirtschaft schaffen vollkommen neue potentielle Zukünfte. Aus Dampfkesseln werden Datenschleudern, der Geist des Möglichen greift wieder um sich: die Aussicht auf eine Zukunft, die nicht düster und deprimierend sein muss. Innovation und Forscherdrang kehren zurück. Die Geschwindigkeit des Technologiefortschritts ist wieder zur bestimmenden Triebfeder der Gesellschaft geworden, die vor 150 Jahren vollzogene Abkehr von Wasser-, Wind- und Sonnenkraft wird neu überdacht.”
21dec2007
Memories of 20 Years of Perl, by chromatic. “Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they’ve solved and memories they’ve made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.”
YAP6 Operator: The Cross Operator, by Adriano Ferreira.
Compressed Indexes for Dynamic Text Collections, by Ho-Leung Chan, Wing-Kai Hon, Tak-Wah Lam, and Kunihiko Sadakane.
A New Approach for Document Indexing Using Wavelet Trees, by Nieves R. Brisaboa, Yolanda Cillero, Antonio Farina, Susana Ladra, and Oscar Pedreira. More approachable introduction to self-indexes.
Hear the curfew blowing,
Hear the curfew blowing,
In the coal black midnight,
Hear the curfew blow.
— Woody Guthrie, When The Curfew Blow
Bus Scheme is a Scheme written in Ruby, but implemented on the bus! Finally Phil Hagelberg implemented his own Lisp.
Compressed Text Indexes: From Theory to Practice!, by Paolo Ferragina, Rodrigo Gonzalez, Gonzalo Navarro, and Rossano Venturini. “A compressed full-text self-index represents a text in a compressed form and still answers queries efficiently. This technology represents a breakthrough over the text indexing techniques of the previous decade, whose indexes required several times the size of the text.” If that works, it’s fantastic. (mfp: Implement that in OCaml and wrap it for Ruby.)
Tell me, could you ever tell the secret of the sea?
Of these high rolling waves along the shore?
The footprints of the lovers that come here to love,
By the tides washed away forever more
— Woody Guthrie, Secret Of The Sea
WSGI is tubes, tutorial by Ian Bicking.
WSGI: Python Web Development’s Howard Roark by Noah Gift. Yay for WSGI.
More on widgets: When one e-mail is enough to break a system, ouch: XSS with full user privileges(!) by sending a mail.
20dec2007
Simpledb simply sucks, finally one notices.
Huemul is a new implementation of Smalltalk, directly compiling to x86. (Where is the source?)
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
— Woody Guthrie, Pretty Boy Floyd
The continuation passing transform and the Yoneda embedding, “They’re the same thing! Why doesn’t anyone ever say so?”
Origin of Advice, as in defadvice, that is. Explained by Pascal Constanza.
Maven: Broken By Design, Charles Miller rants.
And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky
— Woody Guthrie, Jesus Christ
Scripting — the fourth generation, Jean-Claude Wippler boldly claims: “If you’ve written more than 10,000 lines of code, it’s time to switch languages…” And after eight years, he’s still totally right.
Fun with Inform 7, small intro by Del Griffith.
Diagnostic Styling, by Eric Meyer. CSS outlines are easily forgotten.
19dec2007
Duke Nukem Forever, OMG a trailer has been released!!!
How to really bury a mainframe, “On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved 47-year-old IBM 650 mainframe Betelgeuse by holding a New Orleans style jazz funeral.”
Beowulf review in verse (!), by Dana Stevens.
Mr Highwayman
please don’t block the road
Puh hee hee
ple-hease don’t block the road
— Robert Johnson, Terraplane Blues
GSK is a portable framework for writing flexible servers and clients in C. It includes builtin support for HTTP and DNS as well as base 64, hashing functions, lowlevel network information (like ifconfig), efficient buffering, abstract socket i/o, and abstract datagram sockets.
Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson at BLDG BLOG.
In a way I wish that Moore’s Law would grind to a halt and we could get back to doing computer science. — Joe Gregorio
YAP6 Operator: Negated Operators, by Adriano Ferreira.
CouchDB Performance, defended by Damien Katz.
FamSpam, a mailing list for each family. Cool idea and great naming.
Ida Belle, don’t cry, this time
If you cry about a nickel, you’ll die for a dime
She wouldn’t cry, but the money won’t mine I love the way you do
— Robert Johnson, Last Fair Deal Gone Down
Announcing NetBSD 4.0, “Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs.” It’s dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro “itojun” Hagino
Meet “tamarin-tracing”, the new Tamarin VM contributed to Mozilla, parts are written in Forth. Neat.
Code’s Worst Enemy, Steve Yegge says: “I believe that code weight wrecks projects and companies, that it forces rewrites after a certain size, and that smart teams will do everything in their power to keep their code base from becoming a mountain. Tools or no tools. That’s what I believe.” Full ack, really must read.
18dec2007
Happy 20th Birthday to Perl, the world would be less without it.
CC0 is a protocol that enables people to (a) ASSERT that a work has no legal restrictions attached to it, OR (b) WAIVE any rights associated with a work so it has not legal restrictions attached to it, and (c) “SIGN” the assertion or waiver. Very cool.
RSpec 1.1 has been released with many interesting changes and additions. (I don’t get the Test::Unit part.)
And I’m blinded by the neon
Don’t try and change my tune
‘Cause I thought I heard a saxophone
I’m drunk on the moon
— Tom Waits, Drunk On The Moon
Abstraction Addiction at The Wiki. “I admit that I am an abstraction addict. I keep searching for higher-order ways to develop software. I strive to represent stuff with some kind of compact math-like notation or factor out the repetition and parameterize the differences rather than long-winded loops and IF statements.” Full ack.
shrubbery, Smart Html Renderer Using Blocks to Bind Expressions RepeatedlY, is a simple template engine, written in Python. Templates hold no logic, with nodes being cloned and repeated according the the data applied. Pretty neat.
I dreamed I was dying; as I so often do
And when I awoke I was sure it was true
I ran to the window; threw my head to the sky
And said whoever is up there, please don’t let me die
— Stars, Calendar Girl
The trouble with five, by Craig Kaplan. How to tile with pentagons.
A quick look at CouchDB Performance, disk use is horrible!
Ames Bros., Pearl Jam’s visual chroniclers, I love his style.
YAP6 Operator: Range Operators, by Adriano Ferreira. Crazy syntax, but rememberable.
YAP6 Operator: The Default Operator, by Adriano Ferreira.
17dec2007
The Django Book, version 1.0 is online.
Sepia is a set of Perl development tools for Emacs supporting code navigation and interactive evaluation.
Closing the Stage: From Staged Code to Typed Closures, by Yukiyoshi Kameyama, Oleg Kiselyov, and Chung-chieh Shan.
Saturday nights in neon lights, Sunday in the cell
Pills enough to make me feel ill, cash enough to make me well
Take me, take me to the riot
Take me…
— Stars, Take Me To The Riot
How I Cured Your Heart, “I put your heart back into your chest, sewed you up and laid down next to you, waiting for the sun to begin streaming through the windows.”
A RESTful version of Amazon’s SimpleDB, how to do it right.
The city of retroactive mathematics, BLDG BLOG on Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture: “But the above image could just as easily be an architectural diagram.”
I’m deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. — Linus Torvalds
Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix, by Richard Rutter at 24ways. Who has which fonts installed?
PEAR LIGHT: Nick Foley’s Portable LED Pears, nifty.
16dec2007
Word Aligned is an interesting programming blog.
More Stupid Testing Ideas: Generating TAP from TAP, really neat actually.
The night starts here, forget your name, forget your fear
You drop a coin into the sea, and shout out “Please come back to me”
You name your child after your fear, and tell them “I have brought you here”
— Stars, The Night Starts Here
Ancient history: the Digital logo, Ned Batchelder did it in PostScript back in the days.
Experiments in deliciousness: Bacon chocolate chip cookies with maple cinnamon glaze, yum or yeech?
Average Age of Virginity Loss, cool map.
IMO, the potential is there for Amazon to set principled web design back three to five years if SimpleDB gets traction under its current design. — Ryan Tomayko
Passage, a video game by Jason Rohrer. Worth trying out. Makes me kind of depressive.
Lift your head and look out the window
Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go
Listen! The birds sing! Listen! The bells ring!
All the living are dead, and the dead are all living
The war is over and we are beginning…
— Stars, In Our Bedroom After The War
5 Things for Bloggers to Do Before Dying, by Phil Wolff. This is serious, but the least thing you can do is to wget -r your dead friends site ASAP and keep it safe.
Simple Lambda Calculus in Prolog, more difficult than you may imagine. (That’s why there is Lambda-Prolog.)
Get In Shape, Dave Shea on navigation design and balance at 24ways.
15dec2007
A Dialogue on Infinity between a mathematician and a philosopher. A blog by Alexandre Borovik and David Corfield.
Pig Toy Gets Completely Squashed, Raises Like Terminator T1000, want have.
darcs-git.py, a darcs-like interface for git with ~20 commands.
Shiny tooth talons
coiled for grabbing a stranger happening by
And the day went home early
and the sun sank down into the muck of a deep dead sky
— Tom Waits, Don’t Go Into That Barn
Human-Order Sorting at LispCast.
In Ruby: sort_by { |item| item.to_s.split(/(\d+)/).map { |e| [e.to_i, e] } }
How Experts Fail: The Patterns and Situations in Which Experts Are Less Intelligent Than Non-Experts is a book-in-progress being written in a Wiki by Thomas David Kehoe.
A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant is a satirical musical about Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard.
Amazon SimpleDB and CouchDB compared, I still think we could and should make scalable relational databases (which does not imply SQL or a static schema!) that would serve some tasks better than what we have there.
You can never hold back spring
Even though you’ve lost your way
The world keeps dreaming of spring
— Tom Waits, You Can Never Hold Back Spring
Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning (PDF), by Daniel J. Abadi, Adam Marcus, Samuel R. Madden, and Kate Hollenbach. Column stores for RDF sound like a good idea.
Is distributed source control always the right answer?, by Jeremy Jones. “I just finished reading this piece of a conversation with Linus Torvalds regarding Git, and I remain unconvinced that going distributed would be the best thing for us. And I’m guessing that maybe most small teams of “closed” development probably don’t need a distributed source control system, either.”
14dec2007
Steve Jobs at home in 1982, <3. With all that mess in my room, ones wishes for a simple life like that.
Combining Programming with Theorem Proving (PDF), slides by Chiyan Chen and Hongwei Xi about ATS.
Alcohol was pouring through the victims
As on the rocks they laid their breath
Alcohol was fed to the mummies
As they all were happily led to death
— Meat Puppets, Eyeball
Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist, it’s that time of the year again.
Neukirchen’s Law of Debugging: The bug only appears again after you removed all debugging code.
What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB, it’s written in Erlang, is schemaless and supports a subset of SQL. I’d prefer having the BigTable source, though. ;-)
So anyway, congratulations to Six Apart for finally joining the open community of freedom-loving pussy eaters. — Mark Pilgrim, 0 + 1307
A New PickAxe, PragDave announces: “Ruby 1.9 is just around the corner, so it looks like a good time to create a new edition of Programming Ruby. So, I’m pleased to announce that the Third Edition of the PickAxe has just entered beta.”
Pills to the spills
drink to the shouts!
Still tryin to find out what its all about.
It’s just one more thing I’ve gotta find out.
— Presets, Are You The One?
WTC Tourist: He’s Everywhere!, the man comes around.
13dec2007
I still miss Leslie, Jason Kottke says. I do as well, and I regret not making a recursive wget of her site (as I have done when others died).
A Self-Applicable Partial Evaluator for Term Rewriting Systems (PDF), by Anders Bondorf. My ideas existed in 1989.
pcl: A Robust Monadic Parser Combinator Library for OCaml (PDF), by Chris Casinghino. Pretty nice, even without do-syntax.
That new day is just over the horizon, and by working together, we will awaken to that dawn. — Håkon Wium Lie, An open letter to the Web community
A Type-directed, On-line, Partial Evaluator for a Polymorphic Language, by Tim Sheard. This is amazingly powerful.
Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wii Remote, WJW.
Anti-Alkohol-Werbung wirkt kontraproduktiv, von Peter Mühlbauer. “Wissenschaftler fanden heraus, dass Saufexzesse bei britischen Jugendlichen das Sozialprestige steigern.” Darauf trinke ich einen!
She’s a princess, in a red dress
She’s the moon in the mist to me
She’s my Coney Island Baby
She’s my Coney Island Girl
— Tom Waits, Coney Island Baby
You Got It, You Sell It, And You Still Got It, Scrymarch on Richard Prince: Spiritual America, at the Guggenheim 2007.
Nemo, “It’s a new way of managing files. Or rather not manage
files. Currently it’s a cross between a calendar and a file browser
with labels.” Much like my mess.
Leuchtende Katzen, falls noch jemand ein Weihnachtsgeschenk sucht… jk.
Movable Type Open Source, it’s never too late.
Yet Another Perl 6 Operator: Boolean Operators, by Adriano Ferreira. Empty arrays are false…
The Husband Who Would Not Die, “John Darwin was living in a secret passageway connected to his old master bedroom. That is, before he fled to Panama. He’d sneak out through a secret door in the back of the closet at night and sleep next to his wife, warm and cuddly. The next day he’d go back into his secret room and read BLDGBLOG. He had faked his own death, see, to avoid paying bills.”
The New(er) Typography: Counterless, Bold and mostly Geometric, I like it.
I can’t explain the process in my brain
All I say comes out the same
Like white noise
I’ve been the one
— God Lives Underwater, White Noise
CUFP write-up, a write-up of the Commercial Users of Functional Programming meeting held this October is available, for those of us who didn’t attend.
Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery, by Simon Willison at 24ways.
anamorphic menorah, this rocks.
cutting edge maps, what a work.
12dec2007
Wie man die MacBook-Tastatur unter Leopard entnervt, endlich geschafft.
beanstalkd is a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service. Its interface is generic, but is intended for use in reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running most time-consuming tasks asynchronously.
Coproduct of free monads and web development, alpheccar does content-type dispatching the Haskell way.
The First Report on Scheme Revisited, by Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. Provides very good background information.
Someone’s masquerading in the galleries today
Beside the arch it is always following me
It seems
Confusion dance and echoes ringing loud
So clear
Vaging on these loops are filled with
Empty dreams
— Wire Train, Chamber Of Hellos
The Alphanum Algorithm, “People know how to sort strings containing numbers. Most sorting algorithms compare ASCII values, which produces a sorting order that is inconsistent with human logic. Here’s how to fix it.” I came up with that myself, but neat to see it described.
CommandShift3 is like Hot or Not, except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites.
Memcachedb is a distributed storage system designed for persistent. We simplely hacked from memcached and tugela.
Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61.
— Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Announcing darcs 2.0.0pre1, the first prerelease for darcs 2, with improved algorithms. Yay: “When using the darcs-2 format, darcs treats identical primitive patches as the “same” patch.”
Luminotes is a WYSIWYG personal wiki notebook for organizing your notes and ideas. GPLed.
ThinkFold is a realtime multiuser outliner as a web app.
11dec2007
Purely Functional Data Structures in OCaml, ported by Markus Mottl.
Computer broken, Joi Ito gives an example of where it’s good to have a backup handy.
Capa-Capa beery
force fed Queeny
as Spanky Para-Faucet
led Horsey to the water
— The Elastic Purejoy, Monkey Bone-Walker
giving back, danah boyd says: “As those who have followed this blog for a long time know, December is the month where I contribute 10% of my salary to worthwhile charities and encourage you to do the same.”
Ruby Dev Tools Survey Results, by Pat Eyler. I’d be interested to know how many use test/spec…
Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts, Brian Suda gives a quick intro.
Polly Anne lived an accident life,
She sang and danced with the wrong man.
And when she laughed,
She made everyone cry.
Polly Anne was an accident.
An accident.
— Agent Sparks, Polly Anne
David H. Shepard, 84, Dies; Optical Reader Inventor, “David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego.”
A Librarian’s Worst Nightmare: Yahoo! Answers, Where 120 Million Users Can Be Wrong, by Jacob Leibenluft.
10dec2007
Nobel Lecture of Doris Lessing: On not winning the Nobel Prize, “How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.”
Faltanleitung: Geldschein zu iPhone/iPod touch-Aufsteller, WJW.
Freefall on a windy morning shore,
Nothing but a fading track of footsteps,
Could prove that you’d ever been there.
Spoken on a cotton cloud like the sound of gunshot –
Taken by the wind, and lost in distant thunder.
— Duran Duran, Secret Oktober
Quagmire is an emulation of an impossible 8bit processor, where all memory is addressed in 2 dimensions, and is represented by pixel value. Program execution threads can run up, down, left or right. Sections of code are visible in memory, as are the processes as they run. Unlike a normal computer the internal process of the machine is visible. Programs are drawings. Whoa.
DTrace performance, interesting to see how it works, but the speeddown is disencouraging…
Data::Faker is a Perl extension for generating fake data.
Why Facebook is not the future of the web, by Matt Frye. A blog entry: “5) Facebook is full of useless crap and kinda slow – Poke, zombie, whatever.”
Erlang VM crash, discovered by Damien Katz in low-memory situations.
The intellectual impact of kuro5hin.org, by Delirium. Apparently pretty high, as long as you skip the comments. :-P
In your black eyes
I hoped that I would find
that you were hiding
hiding something
but in your black eyes
lit by the glow of a streetlight
you were hiding
you were hiding something
— Snowden, Black Eyes
This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 259) with some awesome nebula pictures.
Superspatial, a blot about Adventures In Contemporary Urbanism.
The Lost Border, photographs of the Iron Curtain by Brian Rose.
What’s all this E8 stuff about then?, Part 3.
A Provably Correct Translation of the λ-Calculus into a Mathematical Model of C++ (PDF), by Rose H. Abdul Rauf, Ulrich Berger, and Anton Setzer.
09dec2007
Rucola is a light weight framework that helps you write RubyCocoa apps. It allows you to build, test, and deploy applications using rake commands, eliminating the need to use XCode, however you can use XCode if you wish.
MPEG-4 Structured Audio is an ISO/IEC standard for describing sound. The sound descriptions generate audio when compiled (or interpreted) by a compliant decoder. MPEG-4 Structured Audio consists of several components, most notably an audio programming language called SAOL. SAOL is historically related to Csound and other so-called Music-N languages.
Treenorah, yay.
I still love you Judas
As I walk along this lonesome road
Like a somnambulist on a wire
— Firewater, I Still Love You Judas
The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor, an exposé of the politics of educational publishing by Tamim Ansary.
Fundamentals of CLOS, by Nick Levine and Ravenbrook Limited. Good intro.
Das Endziel aller bildnerischen Tätigkeit ist der Bau! — Walter Gropius
The Danger of Naïveté, Jeff Atwood nicely explains why naive shuffling doesn’t work as you think.
Tuna Fish Recipes at Google Base.
I’m going down among the saints
Raise our heavenly glasses to the heavens! Squalor Victoria! Squalor Victoria!
Raise our heavenly glasses to the heavens! Squalor Victoria! Squalor Victoria!
— The National, Squalor Victoria
When None Dare Urge Restraint, the best thing I’ve read on 9/11: “If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack – just shrugged and rebuilt the building – it would have been better than the real course of history.”
nvi.git repository by Sven Verdoolaege.
08dec2007
Rails 2.0: It’s done!, pretty good evolutionary changes.
De Bruijn Notation as a Nested Datatype, by Richard Bird and Ross Paterson. “One might suppose that in any datatype for representing de Bruijn terms, the distance restriction on numbers would have to maintained as an explicit datatype invariant. However, by using a nested (or non-regular) datatype, we can define a representation in which all terms are well-formed, so that the invariant is enforced automatically by the type system.”
Ostrich and egret and peacock had very small dreams.
Picturing them just reminded them of calendar scenes.
Nobody’s laughing when everyone’s weeping, it seems.
— Rasputina, How We Quit The Forest
A Growable Language Manifesto, by Rob Jellinghaus.
How to Make a Holographic Plate, The Easy Way!
decafbad recaffeinated, a lightweight meme stream from a lazy serial enthusiast. By Les Orchard. The first Tinderbox-powered tumblelog I see (the inheritance makes it very easy to do, I bet).
A golden fish like a pint of wine Rolls the sea undergreen, Glassily balanced on the tide Only the skin between. — Laurie Lee, Fish And Water
The Programmers’ Stone, “We know that stress impairs some cognitive functions. The loss of those functions can precisely explain why programming is hard, and show us many other opportunities to improve the ways we organize things. The consequences roll out to touch language, logic and cultural norms.” I found this pretty insightful. (And read the rest of the site as well if you find the time, it’s worth it. Especially thinking about thinking.)
Cectic on Pascal’s Wager, see for yourself. (Great webcomic, btw.)
07dec2007
URI Fragment Identifiers for the text/plain Media Type, yay!
No Longer Secret, Ryan Davis and Eric Hodel now work on Rubinius full-time. Great!
Forest Extension for Mercurial. “The Forest extension allows operations on trees with nested Mercurial repositories, called forests. Those to some degree correspond to multi-project CVS/Svn/… repositories.”
I can’t hear a word they say
Close my eyes and fade away
See their faces moving, lost in concentration
Animation animation
Listen to the sound
— SSQ, Walkman On
The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. Neato.
Holiday Gift Ideas from Amazon for the Budget-Minded and the Budget-Mindless, by lonelyhobo. “I’ve done the legwork for you and come up with some great gift ideas whether your wallet be a little heavy or a little light.”
Thai personal names from an i18n POV, by James Clark.
What’s a File?, slides by Mark Dominus.
One Geometry, “Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture, to the tune of Snoop Dogg and Pharrell William’s “Drop it Like it’s Hot”.” Words fail me.
When your Ricci flow stops at one geometry, one geometry, one geometry
If every loop contracts there’s no topology, no topology, no topology
So Poincare’s correct in dimension three, in dimension three, in dimension three
He’s just an unemployed don who’s living with his mom
But his name is Perelman and he’s got it going on!
— Stephen Sawin, One Geometry
Boring Stevey Status Update, Steve Yegge announces implementing JavaScript for/in Elisp. WJW.
Typesetting Tables, Mark Boulton shows how to do it right at 24ways.
SEED Conference 2007 Sketchnotes, by Mike Rohde. Really cool idea.
06dec2007
Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting…, State Of The Onion #11 by Larry Wall. Must read.
I don’t really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented. — Larry Wall, State Of The Onion #11
Retro Flip Down Desk Clock, cool.
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. Works amazingly well.
Jaql is a new query language being developed for JSON data.
Pycaml: The Python from/to OCaml Interface, “This is a bugfixed, extended, updated variant of Art Yerkes’ old “pycaml” module that provides a direct low-level interface between OCaml and Python.”
The Space of the Book, “A bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht has won an architectural interiors prize.” Awesome.
COMP4161 Advanced Topics in Software Verification (aka Theorem Proving — Principles, Techniques, Applications), great course from New South Wales teaching how to prove with Isabelle and how to implement HOL in parallel!
Watching T.V. at 4 am.
But that’s not when she needs a friend.
Staring at the bathroom floor.
Please don’t say you’ve got to go.
— Ladytron, amTV
From LCF to HOL: a short history (PDF), by Mike Gordon. Very interesting, and tells a lot about the design of ML as well.
HOL Light is a computer program to help users prove interesting mathematical theorems completely formally in higher order logic. It has a very fine Tutorial (PDF).
Hope is a small functional programming language, with polymorphic typing, algebraic types, pattern matching and higher-order functions. The version here is a fully lazy interpreter. The first language to have pattern matching as we know it from functional languages.
Turn my black hair whatever I needed
whatever I needed
But I’d still be the same to you
My heart would remain for you
— Radio Iodine, For You
The Structure of the Essential Haskell Compiler, or Coping with Compiler Complexity, by Atze Dijkstra, Jeroen Fokker, and S. Doaitse Swierstra. They use attribute grammars and a weave-like patch system.
EHC stands for Essential Haskell Compiler. UHC stands for Utrecht Haskell Compiler. EHC/UHC aims to be a full Haskell98 compiler with extensions and a platform for experimentation with Haskell and type systems EHC actually is not just a single compiler, but a whole series of compilers. Each compiler in this series adds some Haskell features or extensions to the previous compiler. It is specified as a delta to its predecessor.
The Carbon project is meant to develop a compiler for a strict, strongly-typed functional programming language similar to OCaml or SML. Wants to target LLVM as well.
05dec2007
Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.
It’s no wonder
The world is confused
Murder and weather
Is our only news
I will refuse!
— Pailhead, I Will Refuse
My Other Christmas Present Is a Definition List, by Mark Norman Francis at 24ways. “Definition lists. Ah, definition lists. Often used but rarely understood.” I love them.
Starting cluster of Erlang nodes on EC2, useful.
Augment is a system for gathering metadata from code and displaying it. This metadata will include test failures, test coverage levels, complexity metrics, and others. The display frontends are pluggable so as to interface with many editors and environments. Very cool thingy by Phil Hagelberg.
S Combinator is Injective, with Proofs, Shin-Cheng Mu “showed that S^-1 . S = id in, guess what, Agda!”
Hello
Tap in the code
I’ll reach you below
No one should brave the underworld alone
Hello, hello, hello
How do I reach you?
— Poe, Hello
Broken LaTeX: A LaTeX document that does not converge “The following LaTeX document does an evil hofstadterian trick with page references such that the references are always wrong.” Not that hard in a turing-complete language, is it?
ISO Ballot for PDF 1.7 Passed!, “Adobe has received word that the Ballot for approval of PDF 1.7 to become the ISO 32000 Standard (DIS) has passed by a vote of 13::1.” Nice.
04dec2007
RDDB is a RESTful document-oriented database written in Ruby. Querying is accomplished through views using Ruby for the view language and materialization can be handled locally or through a distributed system.
HAT-trie: A Cache-conscious Trie-based Data Structure for Strings , by Nikolas Askitis and Ranjan Sinha.
How to build the 2007年12月03日 standard workstation, by D. J. Bernstein.
milky silky salty yummy ooey gooey chocolate bunny broil sizzle shake bake nuke deepfry chicken fried steak watermelon summer peach cherry licorice chocolate cheese yum yum
— The Spores, Yum Yum
Vi Input Manager by Jason Corso. “This bundle patches the Cocoa Text System to add a Vi-like command mode.” WJW.
Wishlist-o-Matic, “The Pragmatic way to get what you want for Christmas.” Awesome.
Trees, and how to do them in Blender. Impressive.
Arithmetic for lists, Philip Wadler says: “Here are analogues of sum, product, and exponentiation for lists.”
Parametric datatype-genericity, by Jeremy Gibbons and Ross Paterson. “Datatype-generic programs are programs that are parametrized by a datatype or type functor. There are two main styles of datatype-generic programming: the Algebra of Programming approach, characterized by structured recursion operators parametrized by a shape functor, and the Generic Haskell approach, characterized by case analysis over the structure of a datatype. We show that the former enjoys a kind of parametricity, relating the behaviours of generic functions at different types; in contrast, the latter is more ad hoc, with no coherence required or provided between the various clauses of a definition.”
Subtext 2: No Ifs, Ands, or Buts, 38 minutes flash video by Jonathan Edwards.
Newton Storage History, something can be learned here.
Who are they
And where are they
And how can they possibly
know all this
— Jem, They
Programming CouchDB with Javascript, Jan Lehnardt: “To illustrate how easy and straightforward writing applications for CouchDB is, we are going to build a simple todo-list application in Javascript.”
Why should I use perl 5.10?, some good reasons by grinder.
A Preview of HTML 5, by Lachlan Hunt at A List Apart. “To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics.” I like.
Designing For Flow, by Jim Ramsey at A List Apart. “Flow, as a mental state, is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.”
flog: Profiling Complexity, introduced by Pat Eyler. I do not believe in metrics like these.
03dec2007
libdistance computes the distance between two pieces of data.
Inconsolata, a new console font. Looks pretty good.
Server Rooms and the Future of Humanism, “Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not.”
Wasting time in the fast food line
I decide to walk the fine line
and celebrate life, celebrate death I choose
to celebrate the first
I celebrate the first
— Tegan And Sara, The First
Down with the bureaucracy of syntax! Pattern matching for classical linear logic (PDF), by Philip Wadler. “This paper introduces a new way of attaching proof terms to proof trees for classical linear logic, which bears a close resemblance to the way that pattern matching is used in programming languages.”
Feed reading, Jason Kottke’s insightful way of organizing feeds.
istwitterdown.com, essential.
TortoiseHg is a shell extension that let users of Mercurial SCM (Hg) work directly from MS-Windows Explorer.
Tax the Churches, neat idea.
Have you been a slave to sin?
Have you seen what’s happening?
Will you ever see enough?
Wash away the history
Have you seen what’s happening?
Will it ever be enough?
— Lorelai Oksana, Yeah… Whatever
Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal, “Six Apart, the world’s leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities.” Whooohw.
Catalyst Advent Calendar, 25 days of Catalyst tips!
Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?, danah boyd wonders.
02dec2007
boyd’s law of social network sites, “Adding more users to a social network [site] increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.”
It’s Nice That, cool new design blog.
Simon’s sleeping on the floor
what’s she dreaming
Simon watches eyelids as projections flicker there
I don’t wanna wake her but her whispers sort of scare me
— Pretty Balanced, Simon’s Sleeping
zu behaupten, täglich stundenlang auf den bildschirm zu glotzen würde die menschen die das tun vereinsamen lassen, ist so ziemlich der grösste humbug den man sagen kann. vielleicht ruiniert man sich die augen dabei, aber nicht das sozialleben. — Felix Schwenzel
iSight Screensavers is a collection of screensavers that use video from an iSight or other camera to morph fluid, create fire, and interact in fun and highly visual ways. Wow.
The future warehouse of unwanted books, “A warehouse is being constructed to house the books that no one’s reading.”
Astronomers Destroy Universe, by John Baez. “Has observing the universe hastened its end?” Love it.
And the politicians lie,
and the movie stars cheat,
and the athletes get high,
while the rest of us sleep.
— Gram Rabbit, The Rest Of Us Sleep
Blogging about logging, Christel “christel” Dahlskjaer on IRSeek on Freenide.
01dec2007
The Ministry of Type, nice typographic weblog.
19th-century elementary arithmetic, only fun without calculators.
Once in a while, once in a while
You got to burn your lips, keep your feelings alive
Once in a while, once in a while
You got to burn down your house, keep your dreaming alive
— The Kills, The Good Ones
RubyInject is a Mac OS X framework that allows you to inject at runtime the Ruby interpreter into any running application, using the mach_star mechanism. It will spawn a new thread on the remote process, initialize the Ruby interpreter, start a new DRb server that exposes an expression evaluator object, and advertises the DRb server URI on Bonjour. Whoa!
Jimmy Wales Grows Them Good and Organic, yummy “stir-fried wikipedia”.
Perl on Rails, on the sites of the BBC. Most stuff still is just static pages, yay.
Information for distributors, djb’s qmail (and probably all his other stuff) are now officially public domain. And there was much rejoicing.
etracker is a OSC tracker implemented in Emacs. WJW.
Starting FORTH – online edition, an updated version of Leo Brodie’s classic featuring all the lovely and _why-ish drawings.
Predicting the winner of the 2008 US Presidential Elections using a Sony PlayStation 3, conclusion: Don’t use MD5.
All you Catholics wearing condoms, you are going to hell
All us fatties eating bonbons, we are going to hell
Unbaptized babies learn to limbo, purgatory is hell
And your religion is a gamble and you are going to hell
— The Bastard Fairies, We’re All Going To Hell
Exotic Technique for Preparing Lemon Zest Lemonade, by SirPoolie. “If you take the effort to make natural homemade lemonade, it must be made second to none. This process allows you to extract lemon oil from zest shavings of the common citrus lemon, effectively adding quite an appealing kick to the popular pick-me-up. There is no commercial lemonade product that can even begin to compare with this recipe. The flavor is quite distinct, with a bold refreshing lemony accent.”
RogueLulz, Part I: Drawing the Map, Walking Around, Basic Monsters and Attacking, by Joe Sixpack. “The first of a multi-part series on how to write an 80’s style roguelike.”
24ways: Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6, by Drew McLellan. The web development advent calendar starts again.
Air Brain, “These air filters, by Mathieu Lehanneur, seem so hilariously inefficient and bizarre to me, but hey – I love the idea. They turn plants into air filtration machines – miniature ecosystems put to work.”
Legitimate uses of micro-benchmarks: parameter passing and function call costs, comparing C, OCaml and Haskell.
repcached is memcached which implements master/slave asynchronous replication feature.