Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)
06jul2008
Cthulhu Cthursday: Spored, awesome. Cthulhu fhtagn!
Almonnaise, a Vegan Mayonnaise Recipe. Surely good with a steak, too.
Don’t tell me you don’t know the difference
Between a lover and a fighter
With my pen and my electric typewriter
Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal
I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel
— Elvis Costello, Everyday I Write The Book
Steal This Wiki is a collaborative ground up rewrite based on Abbie Hoffman’s seminal work, “Steal This Book”. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can download the original book in PDF form.
Why I Still Use Windows 95, badass.
If your language significantly benefits from syntax coloring then it’s
syntax is too complicated. Syntax highlighting is no substitute for
simple and consistent language design.
— Steve Dekorte
Bicameralism is a controversial hypothesis which argues that the human brain once assumed a state known as a bicameral mind in which cognitive functions are divided between one part of the brain which appears to be “speaking,” and a second part which listens and obeys.
I crave your company
And fall in the dark so be my lantern
Never have I seen that face on one so young
So shi-shine on me
Shi-shine on me
— Tanya Donelly, Lantern
Don’t knock brutalism, “This stark architectural style became synonymous with 70s ugliness, but is it about to undergo a renaissance?”
Rot-Schwarz-Gold, “Rot-Schwarz-Gold statt Schwarz-Rot-Gold: Schon wieder war in der ARD die falsche Deutschlandfahne zu sehen. Bei einer Liveübertragung flatterte sie plötzlich übergroß hinter einem Reporter – offensichtlich machte sich ein Fan einen Jux aus der peinlichen “Tagesthemen”-Panne.” Made my day.
05jul2008
SimplyNoise.com, the best white noise generator on the Internet. Shhhsshsshshssshshshhhshsssh.
Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904, vollständige elektronische Faksimile-Ausgabe.
And if God is great and God is good why can’t he change the hearts of men?
Well maybe God himself is lost and needs help
Maybe God himself he needs all of our help
Maybe God himself is lost and needs help
He’s out upon the road to peace
— Tom Waits, Road To Peace
git-stitch-repo, stitch several git repositories into a git-fast-import stream. Neat.
‘It’s perfect madness’, “Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time.”
Ethik in der Wissenschaft, Lyssenkoismus, Bogdanow, die Katholische Univesität Eichstätt und die Ecoli-Bakterien.
open source code in google, 24h are enough for permission to release, neat.
And the sky split and the planets hit,
Balls of jade dropped and existence stopped, stopped, stop, stop.
Little sister, the sky is falling, I don’t mind, I don’t mind.
Little sister, the fates are calling on you.
— Patti Smith, Kimberly
jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works. Pretty nice.
04jul2008
Traced values for Haskell. Really really nifty!
firefox-mac-pdf, is a Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X. Finally a good reason to upgrade to Firefox 3.
I have never burned an American flag
If I did it was an accident
I have never dropped a bomb or defaced the
Washington monument
But you won’t find a flag on my doorstep
On the fourth of July
Too many criminals try to wrap themselves inside of it
It stands for too many lies
— Dan Bern, My Country Too
Solar water disinfection, also known as SODIS, is a method of disinfecting water using only sunlight and plastic PET bottles.
Google C++ Testing Framework, pretty nice actually. (I like how they use << for diagnostics.)
WiX (pronounced “wick”) is a text markup format. Its syntax is a blend of Donald Knuth’s TeX and various wiki markup.
I dream of the lies I told you
Wishing they were right
I dream of this day with you
Wishing it was just beginning
I dream of a New American Language
I dream of new beginnings
I dream of saturation bombing
I dream mostly about love
I have a dream.
— Dan Bern, New American Language
worms.c: formatting of complicated conditionals, Kragen Sitaker refactors old C code.
happy minimalism, Astrid Hagen shows some pictures of Ann Sophie Stærk.
Definition of Free Cultural Works, “This document defines “Free Cultural Works” as works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and/or modified, by anyone, for any purpose. It also describes certain permissible restrictions that respect or protect these essential freedoms. The definition distinguishes between free works, and free licenses which can be used to legally protect the status of a free work. The definition itself is not a license; it is a tool to determine whether a work or license should be considered “free.”” A sane guideline, non-free CC licenses are detailed on the page as well as issues of the GFDL.
03jul2008
Franz Kafka, today is his 125th birthday.
Subterranean Homesick News, a great hack: showing news keywords on Bob Dylan’s paper cards.
HTTPMR is an implementation of Google’s famous MapReduce data processing model on clusters of HTTP servers. Clever.
robotfindskitten: a zen simulation in JavaScript!
You’re gonna walk that endless highway,
Walk that high-way till you die.
All you children goin’ my way,
Better tell your home-life sweet goodbye.
— J. R. Robertson, Endless Highway
Recursion Schemes: A Field Guide, by Edward Kmett. Very useful.
The Heap Lambda Machine, by Anton Salikhmetov. “This paper introduces a new machine architecture for evaluating lambda expressions using the normal-order reduction, which guarantees that every lambda expression will be evaluated if the expression has its normal form and the system has enough memory. The architecture considered here operates using heap memory only. Lambda expressions are represented as graphs, and all algorithms used in the processing unit of this machine are non-recursive.”
A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. — Franz Kafka
Functional Programming in…Ada?, yikes.
About problem formulations and ordered permutations, Mauricio Fernandez is still alive.
Formal Methods in the Movies, funny.
The Dangers of Auto-Replace, mwhahahahahaha.
02jul2008
sacrilege.el, enjoy!
A Brainfuck interpreter written in Brainfuck. Amazingly compact!
Eee Monitor shots reveal Linux’s iMac rival, ASUS is doing good stuff lately.
And the kissing and the colour come crashing down
Down down down
Down around me
Down down down
Around
— Sisters Of Mercy, Burn
Lina Scheynius, really good photography. PNSFW, nudity.
PMake: A Tutorial, by Adam de Boor. BSD make seems to be much nicer than GNU make.
RubyFrontier is a way of maintaining and generating Web sites. It imitates UserLand Frontier, but it’s written in Ruby.
WokFi is a term now commonly used to indicate a style of Wi-Fi antenna made out of simple low-cost Asian cookware scoops, or similar easy to find household metallic reflective items.
Ometa for Scheme, yum.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, explained by Chris Edward Dupilka.
The thought to talk
they walk the talk
so lets just go from place to place
and as long as we don’t talk from face to face
— Clan Of Xymox, Stranger
Collaborate and Connect with Subversion, by Ryan Irelan at A List Apart. “Technology can promote teamwork and keep projects in check. Enter Subversion.” Yay. ;)
Getting Out of Binding Situations in JavaScript, by Christophe Porteneuve at A List Apart. “Overall, binding in JavaScript is not a difficult concept, but it is far too often ignored or glossed over by JavaScripters, which leads to confusion.”
Eliza is a sequencial, functional logic programming language. It borrows concepts from Prolog, Lisp, Icon, Haskell, Bash, Oz and C/C++. From Prolog it borrows backtracking. From Lisp stems the concept of first-order-functions. This concept had a great influence on the design of the language.
01jul2008
Non-Deterministic Recursive Ascent Parsing, by Renee Leermakers. “A purely functional implementation of LR-parsers is given, together with a simple correctness proof. It is presented as a generalization of the recursive descent parser.”
The Absolute Film, by Dr. William Moritz. “Absolute Film, by contrast, would present things which could be expressed uniquely with cinematic means.”
Hey desert wind
Carry me away
Someplace where I know what to do and what to say
And hey, when I’m sleeping
I dream of a camel sleigh
And a desert wind to carry me away
— Dan Bern, Desert Wind
BundleBuggy is a system for tracking the status of merge requests made on mailing lists.
Ice Cube Maker, Tetris style. Wanthave.
Faustfeathers, a play by John Kessel.
You say the city looks different, it s somehow lost its charm
Fire engine fly by with its annoying alarm
Did the angels ever really look this sad and blue?
You say the city has changed, well maybe it’s you.
— Dan Bern, City
Dependently Typed Programming 2008, a TYPES topical workshop. Slides are available. Recommended, especially Lennart Augustsson’s.
das blinde-kuh-system, Lydia schlägt vor: “Lösungsmöglichkeit 1: Rückwärtsgang ausbauen.”
30jun2008
Brown Dyed Hotel, a wellmade and doable “get to the next page” game.
ContextFree.js & Algorithm Ink: Making Art with Javascript, cool stuff by Aza Raskin.
Honk if you’re lonely tonight
If you need a friend to get through the night
A toot on your horn, a flash of your brights
Honk if you’re lonely tonight
— Silver Jews, Honk If You’re Lonely
V6 Thompson Shell Port, “Osh(1) is an enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Sixth Edition (V6) Unix shell (circa 1975), aka the Thompson shell. The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. Sh6(1) (a port of the original shell) and glob6(1) (a port of the global command) are also included in this package.” (I didn’t know there was a goto(1)).
Fractal Pizza, WJW. And olives, yum.
Fibonacci Numbers Spelled Out, an exercise in generatingfunctionology by Ivan Galkin.
Der Traum ist ein Traum, zu dieser Zeit,
doch nicht mehr lange, mach dich bereit
für den Kampf um’s Paradies!
Wir haben nichts zu verlieren außer unserer Angst,
es ist unsere Zukunft, unser Land.
Gib mir deine Liebe, gib mir deine Hand.
— Ton Steine Scherben, Der Traum Ist Aus
Death’s Acre: Tour the Body Farm (graphic!), “A body farm is a research facility where human decomposition after death can be scientifically studied in a variety of settings. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the decomposition process, permitting the development of techniques for extracting information (such as the timing and circumstances of death) from human remains.”
Hardware Design and Functional Programming: a Perfect Match, by Mary Sheeran. “This is a slightly odd paper that explains why I am still as fascinated by the combination of functional programming and hardware design as I have ever been. It includes some looking back over my own research and that of others, and contains 60 references.”
29jun2008
9vx is a port of the plan 9 operating system to FreeBSD, Linux, and OS X, using the vx32 sandboxing library to run “user” programs. 9vx runs as an ordinary user program, but behaves like a separate VM running plan 9. Excellent and it already works! (Sources of vx32)
Google C++ Style Guide, has some interesting parts.
Don’t think lover
Love lasts forever
— A Place To Bury Strangers, Don’t Think Lover
Revising HIV’s History, “The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) responsible for most of the AIDS cases in the world infected people approximately 100 years ago, more than 20 years earlier than previously believed, according to findings presented here this week at the Evolution 2008 meeting.”
tolua is a tool that greatly simplifies the integration of C/C++ code with Lua. Based on a cleaned header file, tolua automatically generates the binding code to access C/C++ features from Lua. Using Lua API and tag method facilities, tolua maps C/C++ constants, external variables, functions, classes, and methods to Lua.
When you git good lovin’, never go and spread the news
Yes, he’ll double-cross you, and leave you with them empty bed blues
— J. C. Johnson, Empty Bed Blues
Freshman electromagnetism questions: answer 3, I imagined it like that!
A blessed man’s formula for holey containers, “I love the way derivatives of types tell you about holes in containers. It works the other way too and holes can give insight into derivatives.”
28jun2008
Dreaming Of Better User Interface, by Hank Williams. “In a giant double fold newspaper, I can see far more than I can see on a computer screen.”
oiu isn’t unix, an experimental operating system design using persistent memory and a forth-like language.
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
— Bob Dylan, Masters Of War
Some printable paper rulers, nice.
Museum of Menstruation, devoted to menstruation and selected topics of women’s health! WJW.
Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda’s flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views and reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting. Very early, but looks promising.
Scheme Implementation Choices, a comparison.
The Beagle Board is a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer based on Texas Instruments’ OMAP35x device family, with all of the expandability of today’s desktop machines, but without the bulk, expense, or noise. ARM-based, runs Linux.
She’s taking hold of her sins now
For the first time
Well she’s been told about sins now
But it feels fine
— Jesus And Mary Chain, Teenage Lust
The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator, awesome thingy.
Edwards starfish, Weierstrass turtle, Jacobi-quartic squid and Hessian-ray, LMAO.
27jun2008
Crosscompiling NetBSD with build.sh, freaking easy and really awesome. Now I wish pkgsrc could be cross-compiled as well…
Indeterminacy of translation, “Consider Quine’s example of the word “gavagai” uttered by a native upon seeing a rabbit. The linguist could do what seems natural and translate this as “Lo, a rabbit.” But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: “Lo, food”; “Let’s go hunting”; “There will be a storm tonight” (these natives may be superstitious); “Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage”; “Lo, an undetached rabbit-part.””
We will survive as thieve we will survive as freaks.
Turn around, turn around turn around
And take a look at the crowd…
— Le Tigre, TGIF
Taylor Series: A matter of life or death, crazy story.
Shakespearean Insulter, for thou spongy beef-witted skainsmates!
Patagonia, talk at Interesting08 by Matt Webb.
SeisMac is a Mac OS X application that turns your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a seismograph. It access your laptop’s Sudden Motion Sensor in order to display real-time, three-axis acceleration graphs. Version 2.0’s enhancements make SeisMac an even more valuable tool for classroom demonstrations of seismic concepts and techniques. Cool!
The thrill of flirtation
On endless vacations
Keen as a thing that is keen
— Whale, Losing Ctrl
Sneaking Buckybase data into Google Spreadsheets for Fun and Gadgets, applied and useful Web 2.0.
For whom the bell tolls, “As if, down there in the bedrock, or perhaps a few miles out at sea inside a submarine, every few seconds you hear the tolling of a massive church bell – but it’s not a bell, it’s the 728-ton spherical damper inside Taipei 101 knocking loose against its structure.”
26jun2008
The New Modernist, a blog by Edward Lifson, “Something beautiful every day.”
Cue is a small mail user agent. Uses MH for infrastructure, and is amazingly useful for its size. (No threading, though.)
A few years ago, I coined the term “life hacks”, which has gone on to become an entire industry of hints and tips that I am, by my congenital laziness, unable to use or benefit from. It is some sort of karmic punishment. — Danny O’Brien
Sunny Day Sky, a new Orisinal game! Wonderful as ever.
Getting Git, excellent talk by Scott Chacon. Watch it if you don’t know git yet (well)!
How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, by Paul McHenry Roberts. “As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of nothing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an electrician or a confidence man.”
You may not be what everybody needs.
But Tennessee, you’re good enough for me.
I can see stars shining in your night.
Your daytime sings like Cash and Patsy Cline.
— Mindy Smith, Tennessee
mult is an on-going research project to create a high-performance instance multiplicity system. An “instance” is defined as the operating environment within an operating system: in effect, those entities and resources available to a process tree rooted at init(8). An instance multiplicity system has several init(8) trees, each of which is isolated from the others.
25jun2008
Mathematica: The Scrapbook, contains pretty interesting stuff.
Lit 101 Class, in three lines or less. By Ben Joseph.
In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me
— Grateful Dead, Attics Of My Life
Eulogy for George Carlin*, by yuo. *adapted from another eulogy in order to save time. WJW.
Advice to public speakers: using microphones, by Charles Miller.
I’ll Let You Be In My Dreams, If I Can Be In Yours, Bob Dylan On Abraham Lincoln. And what he really said.
Wake of the flood, laughing water, forty nine
Get out the pans, don’t just stand there dreaming, get out the way
Get out the way
— Grateful Dead, Here Comes Sunshine
Mister anywhere you point this thing, great shot.
Reviewing Conference Papers, notes by Mark Bernstein.
24jun2008
Introducing Buckybase, a social web database with bidirectional hyperlinks, by Manuel Simoni.
Vicissicalc, a tiny spreadsheet by Darius Bacon. Amazingly small.
polyparse is a collection of parser combinator libraries in Haskell.
NetSurf is a web browser for RISC OS and UNIX-like platforms including Linux. Does HTML 4.01, CSS 2.1, soon HTML 5 and SVG, but no JavaScript yet.
So when in doubt just call my name
Just before you go insane
If I ever leave this world
Hey I may never leave this world
But if I ever leave this world alive
— Flogging Molly, If I Ever Leave This World Alive
My old Sony MDR-V700 DJ headphones, when plugged into my outboard computer speakers, somehow pick up transmissions between ambulance drivers and dispatch…
Revisiting Coroutines, by Ana Lucia de Moura and Roberto Ierusalimschy. “This paper defends the revival of coroutines as a general control abstraction. After proposing a new classification of coroutines, we introduce the concept of full asymmetric coroutines and provide a precise definition for it through an operational semantics. We then demonstrate that full coroutines have an expressive power equivalent to one-shot continuations and oneshot partial continuations.”
NetBSD/i386 on Asus EeePC, everything except the webcam works! (And a UVC interface is a GSoC project.)
Walk away me boys
walk away me boys
and by morning we’ll be free
wipe that golden tear
from your mother dear
and raise what’s left
of the flag for me
— Flogging Molly, What’s Left Of The Flag
The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond, Alan Kirby says “postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.”
The city may be defined as the social institution enabling people unknown to each other to nevertheless live together. — Dirk Baecker, What Is In A City?
Project Xanadu, reloaded, von Burkhard Schröder. “Was ist und zu welchem Ende betreiben wir Online-Journalismus? Wie setzt man Links, warum und wohin?” Redakteure, bitte lesen!
STOP! Hammertime!, a Firefox plugin: “Simply install and marvel as you hear MC Hammer sing whenever a page is stopped!”
Scarf, nicely typeset.
23jun2008
Updates on Drew Yao’s Terrible Ruby Vulnerabilities, heh.
New default license: 2-clause BSD license, “Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a 2 clause BSD license.” And there was much rejoicing.
tcerl, a port of tokyocabinet to erlang, and tokyocabinet based erlang term store. Neat.
Give me an answer
Give me a sign
I’ve been climbing up this ladder
I’ve been wasting my time
— Radiohead, Up On The Ladder
yahoorezinr.com, WJW.
Indiana Jones and Nuke the Fridge, the making of phrases.
If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous. — David Gelernter, The Second Coming – A Manifesto
The Universal Edit Button is a green pencil icon in the address bar that indicates a web page is editable. It is similar to the orange “broadcast” RSS icon that indicates there is an RSS feed available. Great idea!
Kilim is a message-passing framework for Java that provides ultra-lightweight threads and facilities for fast, safe, zero-copy messaging between these threads.
Computation and the Periodic Table, talk by John Baez. “By now there is an extensive network of interlocking analogies between physics, topology, logic and computer science, which can be seen most easily by comparing the roles that symmetric monoidal closed categories play in each subject.”
Pure Type Systems type checker in Prolog, plain wonderful.
Facon is a mocking library in the spirit of the Bacon spec library. Small, compact, and works with Bacon.
JSqueak, Smalltalk interpreter written in Java by Dan Ingalls.
Topologie von Flächen XIX, “Eine mathematische Spielerei: was passiert, wenn man den Drehimpuls der Erde stetig erhöht?” Sehr lustig. :-)
The Next Euruko will be held in Barcelona in the first quarter of 2009.
Reddit goes open source, but not DSFG free software.
Your ears are burning
Denial, denial
Your ears should be burning
Denial, denial
— Radiohead, House Of Cards
Insane Architecture, Ian Lance Taylor: “My personal observation is that the towns of Silicon Valley make me feel insane. It seems therefore plausible that Silicon Valley is in some way associated with Cthulhu.”
Babelmark is a testbed for side-by-side comparaisons of the output of various Markdown implementations.
Moving Past BlueCloth, Ryan Tomayko provides two new libraries for Ruby.
Minimal, James Bennett on his IMO great minimalist redesign.
18jun2008
meg wachter: “dumped”, messy.
Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps, I noticed it was different.
Phone in the Toilet?, My friend Sara sent me an email: “Linda, Sorry that I’m not able to call you back. My phone fell into the toilet.”
And the tower bells chime, ding dong they chime
They’re singing, Jesus died for somebodys sins but not mine.
— Patti Smith, Gloria
Tomatoes: not coming back, by IHCOYC. “A notice posted on the door to my local McDonalds announced that it, as a corporation, “supports” the FDA’s latest contamination scare regarding tomatoes and salmonella, and as a result they have “voluntarily” and “temporarily” stopped serving tomatoes on sandwiches that formerly contained them. This is “temporary” only in the same sense that all other earthly things are temporary. They will never return.” And now drop the disgusting slice of cucumber.
What is *jour and why they are killer apps for RailsCamp08, Dr Nic on creative use of Rendezv^WBonjour.
Faring thee well now
Let your life proceed by its own designs
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
— Grateful Dead, Cassidy
Own a piece of the crypto wars, I really liked the PGP hardhack.
Colorforth 2.0 for stand-alone and Windows. With documentation!
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