/ Hacking

27

The Comparative Literature of Massive Construction Sites, “I thought that perhaps there should be a comparative literature of construction sites: famous monuments, tombs, bridges, houses, and cities throughout history, together with the thoughts of the people who built them.”

Atelier in Ushimado, by Tezuka Architects. Plain awesome.

And it’s so sad that you’re so sad and you’re so bad for me
I followed your perfume as you ran down the street
I caught you and held you and pushed back your fringe and swore undying loyalty
— The Indelicates, New Art For The People

IMGA5411 by zinenzo

CSpec is a Behavior-driven Development framework for C. It provides a spec framework for describing the behavior of the functions of your system. The syntax is inspired from RSpec to be as legible as possible.

Unobtainium is a humorous neologism that refers to any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials. Lovely.

water effect by blaskino

You have gone so far
You have gone too far
So tonight
It’s just me and the minibar
— The Dresden Dolls, Me And The Minibar

Pseudo-persuasion in online discourse, David A. Black: “I know it’s pointless—I’m not going to make a dent in it—but I feel moved to say something about the biggest problem in online discourse: pseudo-persuasion.”

Stripped, by John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone, 2006.

How to make a RAILGUN!, “Warning: if you screw up with this you could electricute yourself.”

26

Setting up a new remote git repository, it’s easy.

gcalc, a small Ruby script to use the Google calculator from the shell.

eat me. by nora/sskizo

Free online: Full documentation for the Large Hadron Collider, very nice.

This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
This train is bound for glory,
Don’t carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.
This train is bound for glory, this train.
— Woody Guthrie, This Train Is Bound For Glory

Bathroom Art, WJW.

Jack, write Rack apps in JavaScript.

Opentape, a free way to make and host your own web mixtape. Pretty nice.

A Comic by Larry Gonick about the Weaire-Phelan foam.

CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time, by Dave Shea at A List Apart. “It’s high time to revisit the CSS Sprites technique from four years ago, and see if we can’t interject a little bit of movement of our own.”

Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer, by Aaron Rester at A List Apart. “By adding a new metaphor to our theoretical toolboxes, we can gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of what we create and how our users interact with it.”

Skylight by pwr27

‘Bee’ system prototypes represent the future of connectivity in emergencies, “The Bee will allow communication, connectivity and data access in field conditions where such technologies are often difficult or impossible to use.”

Who says we die?
Before we live
I promise you walls of grace
to carry on
When we’re lost
We’ll find a way
— Shiny Toy Guns, I Promise You Walls

fleshmap: listen, “What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre.”

EnRUPT is a new small and simple scalable word-based symmetric cryptographic primitive that can be used to construct fast and secure block ciphers, hash functions, stream ciphers, RNGs and MACs. It accepts keys and data blocks of any size. It is currently the simplest of all the block and stream ciphers and hash functions. PDF paper.

25

The Monad.Reader Issue 11 (PDF), by Douglas M. Auclair, Kenneth Knowles, and David F. Place. Featuring “How to Refold a Map”, “First-Order Logic à la Carte”, and “MonadPlus: What a Super Monad!”.

BERRIES fly :-) by DDiamond1

And where is the love?
Who knows what to do?
The men and the women carry us through
Across the river, to the promised land
— Dan Bern, Where is the Love?

Directing JavaScript with Arrows (PDF), by Khoo Yit Phang, Michael Hicks, Jeffrey S. Foster, and Vibha Sazawal. “JavaScript, being a single-threaded language, makes extensive use of event-driven programming to enable responsive web applica- tions. However, standard approaches to sequencing events are messy, and often lead to code that is difficult to understand and maintain. We have found that arrows, a generalization of monads, are an elegant solution to this problem.”

Ubuntu Satanic Edition, Linux for the Damned: It brings together the best free software and free metal music on one CD.

You are my whore, you are the one I adore,
you are the one that my twisted heart adores,
like a dog I will gnaw, like a dog I will paw,
you’re the one that my twisted heart adores.
— The Tiger Lillies, Whore

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. Essential.

DSC_0752 by ebyard

100 lines of C that can parse any Protocol Buffer, neat.

Tactical Landscaping and Terrain Deformation, “Over on Wired this weekend I read about a game called Fracture, by LucasArts, which features “terrain deformation” as a central factor in gameplay.”

24

Baynoon is an object database server that understands and efficiently implements relationships (one to one, one to many and many to many) between entities using a simple query language.

Dreimorengesetz is a German term which translates to “three-mora rule.” This name is given to the rule for placing the accent in a Latin word.

by Aurelija K.

Cthulhu For President: The Dawning of a New Era, “Why vote for a lesser evil?”

To make a name for learning
when other roads are barred,
take something very easy
and make it very hard.
— Piet Hein, Wide Road

libjlog is a pure C, very simple durable message queue with multiple subscribers and publishers (both thread and multi-process safe). The basic concept is that publishers can open a log and write messages to it while subscribers open the log and consume messages from it.

Ultralight Backpacking: The “Why” and the “How”, by JackStraw. “This story is about ultralight backpacking: exploring the wilderness with an extreme minimum of equipment.”

La escalera azul by Hooverphonic

The Nationalists, the Socialists,
The Communists, the Capitalists
They all agree you don’t exist
And they all watch as you slash your wrists
— Tiger Lillies, Gypsy Lament

riot gwwwls, “I remember very distinctly the quiet Goth girl who did web design coming in late at night, when I was sitting there working on my own zine, and photocopying hundreds and hundreds of her Goth zine, and no one said anything of course because they were doing the same thing.” (Where are they now?)

Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 2, “As I’ve previously mentioned, you only need twists, antitwists and rotations to untangle a rational tangle.”

First, Second, or Third Person?, Mark Bernstein wonders: “When planning a Web site, when is it best to use first person? When do you choose third person? Under what circumstances is it wise to directly address the reader?”

23

product placements (2008), 70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA. “If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will—as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.” Plain brilliant.

TinyScheme is a lightweight Scheme interpreter that implements as large a subset of R5RS as was possible without getting very large and complicated. Less than 5kLOC and easy to extend.

073 by Deborah :-)

Any asshole can open up a museum
Put all of the things he loves on display
So everyone could see them
The house, a car, a thoughtful wife
Ordinary moments in his ordinary life
— Rilo Kiley, It’s A Hit

Notebooks for Left-handed, Right-handed and Ambidextrous People, “For my notebooks, I redesigned traditional looks and made the ruled lines slightly slanted in right angles and direction, through research, for the right-handed, left-handed and ambidextrous people.”

Higher-Order Mixfix Syntax for Representing Mathematical Notation and its Parsing (PS), dissertation by Stephan Albert Missura. This is really awesome.

Tail Call Optimization doesn’t exist in Haskell, this raises a good point.

Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.

How To Launch Software, by Aaron Swartz.

BombPinkLL-animate by B.Smile

The Freehacker’s Union, by Zed Shaw. “Business Is Killing The Art Of The Hack”.

Wake up in the morning
I shall wake up and so shall you
And I wake up, the sun is beautiful
And it is warming you and I
Fragile as we lie
— Eisley, One Day I Slowly Floated Away

Our writing is now complete!, Real World Haskell goes to copy edit.

Sex and the Olympic city, “Tomorrow night thousands of young men and women with the most fit, toned bodies in the world will mingle for the last time before they fly home. What might they get up to?” Who wouldn’t.

Structurally Recursive Descent Parsing (PDF), slides by Nils Anders Danielsson, joint work with Ulf Norell. “Rule out left recursion by restricting the types.”

22

iHologram, “I’ve just finished coding an application for the iphone/ipod touch. It gives the illusion of a 3d hologram jumping off the screen.” Very nice.

The SCP parsing algorithm: computational framework and formal properties, by Quesada Moreno and José Francisco. “This paper presents a new parsing algorithm for unrestricted context-free grammars. Basically, it may be described as a bidirectional bottom-up parser that is driven by an event generation strategy and is based on a sophisticated Syntactic Constraint Propagation (SCP) technique which uses strong top-down predictions.”

SGcherry-branch by enji.beck

Don’t move so slow, don’t move so slow,
dont move so slow, dont move so slow
so move, yeah move.
I got nowhwere to go, I’ve got nowhere to go
— Tegan And Sarah, I Can’t Take It

Haskell is an obscure and mostly disused esoteric programming language named after the planet Haskell, a large and moving planet orbiting Aldebaran. It was developed in 1969 by Donald ‘Waddler’ Duck.

A conversation with Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill at ACM Queue. Suck-ass site interface, but worth reading. Just to hear they all still use vi.

Morseall allows you to control your Linux computer by tapping morse code on the mouse buttons. -/…./../… .-./—/-.-./-.-/…!

Melliès on Functorial Boxes, “John once mentioned the slides of Paul-André Melliès’s talk Functorial boxes in string diagrams. Now you can read a 44 page tutorial on this topic.”

Corpse kept upright for 3-day wake in Puerto Rico, why not.

If I had rubies and riches and crowns
I’d buy the whole world and change things around
I’d throw all the guns and the tanks in the sea
For they are mistakes of a past history.
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.
— Bob Dylan, Let Me Die In My Footsteps

cafe.jpg by the32side

Websense reports China Netcom DNS cache poisoning, let the games begin.

Chain.js is a jQuery plugin, providing data-binding capability that allows you to generate web contents automatically by binding your data to html.

Package Management Sudoku, WJW. “As it happens, a little-known fact about the Debian packaging system is that you can, in fact, describe Sudoku puzzles in it!”

21

Rack 0.4, a modular Ruby webserver interface has been released.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), finally open. “Volume storage is charged by the amount you allocate until you release it, and is priced at a rate of $0.10 per allocated GB per month. Amazon EBS also charges $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests you make to your volume.” Fair!

I laid with you for hours
Staring at your face
I laid with you for hours
Remembering your taste
— The Glove, Mouth To Mouth

Unscrambling with Prolog, and Unscrambling without Prolog (but Coq), solving a little puzzle.

7 by Javier A

wbar is a OS X dock-like quick launch bar for X11 that only needs imlib2.

Henri Cartan 1904–2008, letztes noch lebendes Gründungsmitglied der Bourbaki-Gruppe, ist letzten Mittwoch im Alter von 104 Jahren gestorben.

Scheduling jobs based on filesystem activity with incron, nice tool.

Mormon Church Makes Bid To Acquire Facebook, WJW.

Here comes the sun by *marti*89

Thank you for the warning
But I still see inside
A little global warming
Never hurt no one
— Dresden Dolls, The Gardener

Coilhouse Magazine, Issue 01 is finally here! Get ready for 96 glossy, full-color pages of art, photography, music, fashion and literature.

The 500 Packages: Haskell, Distros and Maintainership, “Monday was something of a landmark for the Haskell community, as the 500th Haskell package was added to the Arch Linux distribution.”

Mayan Muons and Unmapped Rooms, “The first major experiment of the Maya Muon Group will bridge the disciplines of physics and archeology. The particle detectors and related systems are designed specifically to explore ruins of a Maya pyramid in collaboration with colleagues at the UT Mesoamerican Archaeological Laboratory.”

20

Grandma Emma Gatewood was an extreme hiker and ultra-light hiking pioneer who was the first woman to hike the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine solo.

Bear Creek Apartments, a comic by Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Water Play by jojodes

She will crush you, she’ll excite you
She’ll destroy you, she’ll ignite you
She’ll take you to a world of darkness
And death, and death!
— Inkubus Sukkubus, All Along The Crooked Way

sleep.fm, a sleep and wake social network, where your friends’ alarm messages wake you up! WJW.

on being a bit of an idiot, Danny O’Brien (who has been blogging regularly again): “I now, at some level, realise that having somebody else go over your code is both humiliating and the best way to learn.” Worth reading.

Concurrent Programming with Erlang/OTP, an alpha book with an emphasis on OTP, the platform/framework/library. That’s good.

the exit by jaein

People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
— Bob Dylan, Things Have Changed

iPhone SSH review: iSSH v. pTerm v. TouchTerm v. SSH, a comparison. (And ed(1) for the win! Or use C-c in vi instead of ESC.)

What Makes for a Good Blog?, Merlin Mann made a list.

RESTful JSON, a proposal by Joe Gregorio.

19

Instant origami is the contemporary interpretation of the traditional Japanese paper folding technique – focusing on speed and imagination rather than on the technically brilliant execution. Must see!

newsbeuter is an RSS feed reader for the text console. It is designed to run Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. Not bad.

DSC03072 by heon84

Not every pain hurts
Deep inside
When you learn to divide
Don’t fear the danger
Follow your heart to the light
Live your dream and learn to carry on
— Lacrimosa, Not Every Pain Hurts

Tunguska is a ternary computer emulator. It is loosely based on the excellent design of the (binary) 6502-processor by MOS Technology, but entirely ternary. So instead of having two memory cell states (0, 1), it has three (-1, 0, 1).

Category Theory Demonstrations, “I’ve been experimenting with category-theory algorithms written in Jan Wielemaker’s SWI-Prolog. Some are adapted from David Rydeheard and Rod Burstall’s book Computational Category Theory.”

p3rl.org is made for short URL redirects to Perl and CPAN documentation, a great idea. Who makes ru8y.org?

Telescopic Text, I love it!

Self-evolving system by Arenamontanus

Opis, a functional-reactive approach for developing distributed systems in Objective Caml. In Opis, a protocol description consists of a reactive function (called event function) describing the behavior of a distributed system node. The event functions in Opis are built from pure functions as building blocks, composed using the Arrow combinators.

I really don’t care and neither does he
If this hotel melts into the sea
Polished and so rare, this is the way that we see.
The coldness helps, it’s our favorite remedy.
— Rasputina, The New Zero

full(4): always full device, “Writes to the /dev/full device will fail with an ENOSPC error. This can be used to test how a program handles disk-full errors.” Hooray!

Original & Fälschung: eBoy-NYC-Poster, findet die Unterschiede!

18

Serving static files with Django and AWS, yay.

Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means, “basically it means removing the single coarse-grained lock around every incoming request and replacing it with finer-grained locks around only those resources that need to be shared across threads.”

Something_to_see_here_3 by shoebappa

And it’s been a long time
Which agrees with this watch of mine
And I know that I miss you
and I’m sorry if I dissed you
— Modest Mouse, Trailer Trash

Towers of Silence are circular raised structures used by Zoroastrians for exposure of the dead. “To preclude the pollution of earth or fire, the bodies of the dead are placed atop a tower—a tower of silence—and so exposed to the sun and to birds of prey.”

Dijkstra award 2008 goes to ‘Sparse Partitions’, by David Peleg and Baruch Awerbuch.

On the App Store, Steven Frank on how it rejects the principles of every software developer. Worth reading.

If it doesn’t kill you
It will shape you
If it doesn’t break you
It will make you
— Siouxsie Sioux, If It Doesn’t Kill You

Tokyo Dystopia is a full-text search system, based on Tokyo Cabinet.

I spend a lot of time here. by shanda.w

Rules To Follow When Cell Phones Drop Coverage, so obvious, so good.

GIT 1.6.0 has been released. No more path pollution, and more nice features!

It’s Magit!, a Emacs mode for Git, can do hunkwise operations.

17

War on Terror, the Boardgame, “It’s got suicide bombers, political kidnaps and intercontinental war. It’s got filthy propaganda, rampant paranoia and secret treaties and the Axis of Evil is a spinner in the middle of the board.”

Cratylus, by Plato. Translation by Benjamin Jowett.

DSC_018999 by Emmmmmm

Society of Control, by Gilles Deleuze. “Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.”

Now you are punished
For absolutely nothing
And I feel so good
Because once more
I don’t have to be honest
— The Gathering, Locked Away

Btail monitors a logfile for specific events. To do this it uses a bayesian filter to determine what events are worth passing through and which should be suppressed. So it filters out all of the routine stuff, but passes through anything important or out of the ordinary.

AmbientTalk, is a distributed programming language developed specifically for writing programs to be deployed on mobile ad hoc networks.

Maple Phone, I like.

It really does work, yes it does…

National Art Museum by themarmaladesky

Empty set meets Bob the Angry Flower.

Rails 2.2 will be thread safe thanks to the work that Josh has put into it. Only took four years!

All the sense you are capable of
does not seem to save you
You heed the glance of a smile
Was it impossible to float for a while?
— The Gathering, Amity

Phelps Frame-By-Frame, time to use fast motion cameras?

Untangling with Continued Fractions: Part 1, “We don’t need anything particularly clever to form our representation as there is a fairly commonplace way to represent connectons between components using monads.”

Die anderen Medaillenspiegel, Anzahl der gemeldeten Athleten im Verhältnis zu den errungenen Medaillen.

16

HOW TO WORK BETTER, must read.

Monads are Plug-ins, and fun in ML too.

belated happy birthday miss V! by chocolate monster mel

How to Design Worlds: Imaginative Programming in DrScheme, by Matthias Felleisen, Robby Findler, Kathi Fisler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi.

I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes I wish I was a mole in the ground
If I’s a mole in the ground I’d root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
— I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground

What Does Michael Phelps Eat for Breakfast? More Stuff Than You Eat All Day, eww.

Tilting at Windmills, Sam Ruby calls BS on the recent REST discussion. And Roy’s thesis (which is really readable) ought to be required reading for everyone speaking of REST.

Writing My Twitter Etiquette Article: 14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely, by Margaret Mason. Please read.

Heaven or what !? by 7oO7oO

I want four young ladies to bear up my coffin,
I want three young maidens to carry me on,
And each of them carry a bunch of wild roses,
To lay on my body as I pass along.
— Rally Wood, One Morning in May

Mini vMac, a miniature Macintosh emulator. “Mini vMac emulates a Macintosh Plus, one of the earliest of Macintosh computers, sold between 1986 and 1990. It can run old Macintosh software that otherwise couldn’t be used on recent computers, and so helps to preserve history, from the era when the modern user interface for computers was being defined.” This site has ROMs and working images.

Super Mario Bros. on the Theremin! (YouTube), one of the greatest instruments ever.

Set of TEN Burning Bridge cards, essential.

Multiprocessor streams for Plan 9, by David Leo Presotto. “This paper describes an implementation of Streams for the Plan 9 kernel, a multithreaded, multiprocessor kernel with a system call interface reminiscent of UNIX. Rather than port Dennis Ritchie’s Streams to Plan 9, we changed the abstraction to fit more natu- rally into the new environment. The result is a mechanism that has similar performance and is internally easier to program.”

Threaded XMLHttpRequest In Shoes

Threads can be tough and don’t suit beginners very well. And, well, Ruby threads can tie up the main app thread.

So, Shoes steals the underpinnings of Ajax to give you asynchronous downloads without needing to get into threading. Many of the young Sneakers are building Twitter and Flickr apps; it seemed the morally upright thing to do. In addition, I was able to use these HTTP threads to load remote images in the background. So, in Shoes, images loaded from the web will appear as they load.

Here’s the simple-downloader.rb from the samples that come with Shoes:

To achieve this, Shoes uses platform code for both threading and HTTP. On Windows, CreateThread and WinHTTP. On Linux, pthread and curl. And, on OS X, NSDownload and NSThread.

Downloading is reduced to a single line:

Shoes.app { download "http://shoooes.net/shoes.png", :save => "shoes.png" }

This happens asynchronously, so shoes.png won’t be there yet when this method ends. It might be huge. It might appear an hour later. You can attach a finish event to be notified when the download is complete.

Shoes.app do
  download "http://shoooes.net/shoes.png", :save => "shoes.png" do |dl|
    alert "Scuse me. Your shoes.png has arrived."
  end
end

Omit the :save option and you can get back the download as a string.

Shoes.app do
  download "http://hacketyhack.net/pkg/osx/shoes" do |dl|
    alert "The latest OS X download is: #{dl.response.body}"
  end
end

You can also attach :method, :headers and :body options to the download, if you want to customize the request beyond that. I studied XMLHttpRequest closely and tried to be sure the same things could be done with this.

As for events, you get four of them: start, progress, finish and error. You can either pass proc objects in as options:

Shoes.app do
  url = "http://shoooes.net/dist/shoes-0.r905.exe"
  status = para "Downloading #{url}"

  download url, :save => "shoes.exe",
    :start => proc { |dl| status.text = "Connecting..." },
    :progress => proc { |dl| status.text = "#{dl.percent}% complete" },
    :finish => proc { |dl| status.text = "Download finished" },
    :error => proc { |dl, err| status.text = "Error: #{err}" }
end

Or, use the method syntax:

Shoes.app do
  url = "http://shoooes.net/dist/shoes-0.r905.exe"
  status = para "Downloading #{url}"

  get = download url, :save => "shoes.exe"
  get.start { |dl| status.text = "Connecting..." }
  get.progress { |dl| status.text = "#{dl.percent}% complete" }
  get.finish { |dl| status.text = "Download finished" }
  get.error { |dl, err| status.text = "Error: #{err}" }
end

The last thing I will mention is that every queued download is attached to the window containing it. When you close the window, the download stops. So, if you’re queueing a download from a temporary popup, be sure to queue it on the main app window.

15

Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind, a TED talk really worth seeing.

Russian Mod Makes iPhone’s Rear-Side Apple Logo Glow, I like.

Mozilla SSL policy bad for the Web, I wholeheartedly support this.

Plastic Spider by scrubbles

Symbolics Lisp Machine Documents, big set of PDFs.

This is the hammer that killed John Henry
Won’t kill me, won’t kill me, won’t kill me
This is the hammer that killed John Henry
Won’t kill me, won’t kill me, won’t kill me
— Spike Driver Blues

Where do I begin? A problem solving approach to teaching functional programming, by Simon Thompson.

How many atoms of Jesus you eat every day, I love e2.

The Grelling-Nelson paradox is a semantic self-referential paradox formulated in 1908 by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson. “Is “Autological” autological?”

The Arecibo reply was the name given to a crop circle that appeared in farmland next to the Chilbolton radio telescope; home to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in Hampshire, UK, on tuesday 21 August 2001. The design is so named because it appears to be a response to the Arecibo message, which SETI transmitted into space in 1974. Cool prank.

An introduction to SHOES, code and graphical pairs.

NC Aquarium 58 by av3rnus

LaTeX Equation Editor, online and with real-time update, very nice!

Oh death, where thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?
You thought you had a hold on me but you were wrong, I’ve been set free
— Randy Travis, Oh Death

Suburban Ruins and The Ethics of House Flipping, “Although her home has been on the market for several years now, my aunt (by marriage) isn’t stalling because buyers are asking too low. She’s hesitating due to emotional attachment to the property – it’s the house her father designed and built, and the home she grew up in.”

Library of Dust, “In 1913, Maisel explained, an Oregon state psychiatric institution began to cremate the remains of its unclaimed patients. Their ashes were then stored inside individual copper canisters and moved into a small room, where they were stacked onto pine shelves.” Scaaary.

The First Poem Written for Computers, Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash…

14

ECMAScript Harmony, ES 3.1 and 4 join forces and try to get rid of bloat. “This means that classes will be a part of the new language but they will be defined as simply being syntactic sugar for a series of plain methods or conventions (such as using closures and Object.freeze to create a Class-like experience).” Yes!

Using Difference Lists in Prolog and Haskell.

Hammond-Mahler Camp by Nancy Thompson Mahler

Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool
Lovin’ both of you is breakin’ all the rules
Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool
Lovin’ you both is breakin’ all the rules
— Mary MacGregor, Torn Between Two Lovers

The Y Combinator, Mike Vanier derives several versions.

The Paxos Register, by Harry C. Li, Allen Clement, Amitanand S. Aiyer, and Lorenzo Alvisi. “The Paxos register is a write-once register that exposes two important abstractions for reaching consensus: (i) read and write operations that capture how processes in Paxos protocols propose and decide values and (ii) tokens that capture how these protocols guarantee agreement despite partial failures.”

littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.

MAC AND CHEESE, by j1mmy.

How to Participate in the Linux Community, a guide to the kernel development process.

burnt toast by solowoniuk

Intuitionistic mathematics for physics, by Andrej Bauer. “I have little, if anything, original to say, so this seems like an excellent opportunity for a blog post. So let me explain why I think intuitionistic mathematics is good for physics.”

Dolt provides a drop-in replacement for libtool that significantly decreases compile times on the platforms it supports. Rather than the libtool approach of running a large script for every compile that repeatedly figures out how to build libraries on the platform, dolt figures out those details at configure time and writes out a minimal doltcompile script containing only the commands needed to build a library on the current platform.

On a rainy day
and as the world will blow to bits
I’ll cradle you and hold you tight
— Eels, Something Is Sacred

Using Google App Engine With Amazon Web Services, THIS IS… CLOUD COMPUTING!!!

Patent Drawings for Geodesic Structures, Buckminster Fuller’s patent drawings for geodesic domes.

Downloaden bleibt verboten, wird aber nicht mehr verfolgt, hurra.