Anarchaia

Experimental, impressionistic sub-paragraph tumblin' (think obstsalat)

04apr2007

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface, by Bret Victor. Must read, it’s fantastic.

Introducing RDFa, Part Two, by Bob DuCharme.

C extension authors: use rb_scan_args(); don’t count argc, good tip by Daniel Berger.

Dyla 2007: 3rd Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications, takes place July 31 2007 in Berlin in conjunction with ECOOP 2007.

Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0, now a W3C Recommendation. Nice, but somehow overengineered.

I keep listenin’ for footsteps
But I ain’t hearing any
From the boat I fish for bullheads
I catch a lot, sometimes too many
— Bob Dylan, Floater

The Java Compiler API, a Conversation with Peter von der Ahé by Frank Sommers. One of the nice things of Java.

Lectures on the Curry-Howard Isomorphism (PDF), by Morten Heine and Paweł Urzyczyn.

Monocular Landscapes, Unmanned Drones, and the Orbital Future of Australian Archaeology, on the first issue of Monocle.

Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life, ETech 2007 talk by danah boyd.

The Narrow Road: Zen and the Art of Mathematics, an understandable math blog.

When I hear beautiful music it’s always from another time
Old friends I never visit, I remember what they’re like
Standing on a doorstep full of nervous butterflies
Waiting to be asked to come inside
Just come inside
— Bright Eyes, Lime Tree

Tracking time using shell scripts, couldn’t we also use Twitter for that?

IDEA in 448 bytes of 80x86, by Fauzan Mirza. Shorter than the patent. :-)

If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics…, “You would probably hate the subject.”

03apr2007

fxp is a validating XML parser written completely in the functional programming language SML. fxp can validate both XML 1.0 and XML 1.1 documents.

The Spirit of the 40s, by oldwinebottle. Rum and Coca-Cola!

So I have become the Middleman
The gray areas are mine
The in-between, the absentee
Is a beautiful disguise
— Bright Eyes, Middleman

PSgoblin.ps a proof of concept irc bot, written in PostScript. WJW.

International Lisp Conference 2007, the blog.

Using C++ template metaprogramming, “I’ll try to solve FizzBuzz by having the compiler output the solution as error messages.” Nasty.

The Museum of Nature, how sad we need a museum for it…

I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got
— Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Bulletproof, supersonic ‘bullets’ of gas.

Which XML technologies are beautiful?, Michael Day wonders. JSON! :-P

Kernel Mode Drivers for X11 on Linux. Lovely…

PyPy 1.0: JIT compiler generator, optimizations and more, how could I miss that?

02apr2007

The ThinkGeek 8-bit Tie, I’d wear it without forcing me to!

Run-Time Byte Code Compilation, Optimization, and Interpretation for Alice, thesis by Christian Müller. “A new run-time compiler compiles the Abstract Code to Alice byte code that is executed by a register-based interpreter.”

Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It’s knocking over fences, crossing property lines
Four winds, cry until it comes
— Bright Eyes, Four Winds

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store , yay!

Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. “It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source.”

MINIX: what is it, and why is it still relevant?, an interview with Andy Tanenbaum at the Free Software Magazine.

Slumming, I really liked this movie by Michael Glawogger.

Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
— James Rado & Gerome Ragni, Hair

Piss Christ is a controversial photograph by American photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix supporting the body of Jesus Christ submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine.

Muhammed Smileys/Frowneys, not really new, but I haven’t seen them yet.

01apr2007

Mutable variables eliminated from .NET, I so wish that was true. :-) Yay!

WebKit Shutting Down, “that’s why I am pleased to announce that WebKit will be discontinued in favor of Trident, the engine inside Windows Internet Explorer. Like OpenDarwin before us, we will be shutting down. You may wonder how we can use Trident in Mac OS X browsers like Safari. Fortunately, on Intel-based Macs, there is a solution: running IE under Parallels, and using Mozilla’s XPCOM to bridge the gap. This means we will discontinue the WebKit Objective-C API in favor of a COM API.” Yay!

Leave the ocean’s roar in the turquoise shell
Leave the widower in his private hell
Leave the liberty in that broken bell today
— Bright Eyes, I Must Belong Somewhere

Urgo’s 2007 list of April Fools’ Day Jokes on Websites, you should find everything else there. Yay!

Viewstamped Replication for Highly Available Systems, by Brian Masao Oki. “This dissertation presents viewstamped replication, a new algorithm for the implementation of highly available computer services that continue to be usable in spite of node crashes and network partitions.”

The Cloud, Hollywood burning.

The Curious Rotational Memory of the Electron, Part 1, “There’s a curious and bizarre fact about the universe that is introduced in physics courses without anyone stopping to point out just how curious and bizarre it is.”

Bundestrojaner in ELSTER-Software entdeckt, “Untersuchungen des Chaos Computer Clubs ergaben, dass der Bundestrojaner über die aktuelle Version der Elster-Software verbreitet wird.” Yay!

Little soldier, little insect, you know war it has no heart
It will kill you in the sunshine or happily in the dark
Where kindness is a card game or a bent-up cigarette
In the trenches, in the hard rain, with a bullet and
— Bright Eyes, No One Would Riot For Less

Plans for HTML6, it’s based on OOXML! Yay!

Gmail Paper will print all your mail and post it to you. Yay!

31mar2007

ZFS and OS X, growing closer all the time, great news. I guess I’ll have to start saving.

Post-It Sortable Cards, that stick to vertical surfaces, not each other. I wonder how that works.

Swiftcore Analogger implements a fast, flexible asynchronous logging system for Ruby programs as well as client library for sending logging messages to the Analogger process.

All this automatic writing I have tried to understand
From a psychedelic angel who was tugging on my hand
It’s an infinite coincidence but it doesn’t form a plan
So I’m headed for New England or the Paris of the South
Gonna find myself somewhere to level out
— Bright Eyes, If The Brakeman Turns My Way

The Democratic Cannibals, by harrystottle. How to be an anarchist and a democrat at the same time.

Nix is a purely functional package manager. It allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software, and has many other features.

The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. This is so totally awesome!

Windows Vista restricts GNU GCC apps to 32 MB, Thomas R. Nicely says. Who wants to use Vista anyway…

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. — Ted Nelson

My first HDR, by Joi Ito. Nice one, but is there a good open-source alternative to Photomatix?

Return to Cinemapolis, the use of video surveillance as a new form of urban analysis. Sick.

30mar2007

Talking to God…, “I met god the other day.” On the train. Great read.

HaMLet-S and Successor ML, “Andreas Rossberg has updated HaMLet, a reference implementation of SML in SML, to support many of the suggestions for Successor ML (sML).” Somehow I now like the syntax…

And I can change the world,
I will be the sunlight in your universe.
You would think my love was really something good,
Baby if I could change the world.
— Eric Clapton, Change The World

Deep Fryer PC, even better than the fish. WJW.

ICANN Board votes against .xxx, Joi Ito says. Great!

XInclude Processing in XSLT, by Erik Wilde. “The XInclude Processor (XIPr), written in XSLT 2.0, implements XInclude and thus may help to reduce the dependency on numerous software packages if XInclude is used in an environment where XSLT 2.0 is used anyway. XIPr is implemented as a single XSLT 2.0 stylesheet.”

Introducing Regular JSON Expressions, for matching null, true or false, integer, double and decimal, irregular and regular strings, numeric ranges around and from zero, collections, relations, dictionaries and namespaces.

…weil sich – glaub ich – durch Twitter tatsächlich unsere Wahrnehmungskompetenz von atomisierten Informationseinheiten verschoben hat. — Timing II

World’s hardest Sudoku puzzle: AL Escargot, nice one.

It’s late in the evening; she’s wondering what clothes to wear.
She puts on her make-up and brushes her long blonde hair.
And then she asks me, “Do I look all right?”
And I say, “Yes, you look wonderful tonight.”
— Eric Clapton, Wonderful Tonight

Fish hatcheries, barrier trees, and a new architectural Tokyo, sketches by Mark Goerner.

Why was Rails only possible with Ruby?, by Curt Hibbs. It is possible in every proper language. Of which there are not many.

29mar2007

The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient, explained by PragDave. “The browser is really not much better than a 3270 (except the resolution is better when displaying porn).”

Homeland Security Classifies TRON as “Sensitive” by ewhac. Classified as fiction.

Emulating Analytic (AKA Ranking) Functions with MySQL, by Stéphane Faroult.

Well, it’s sundown on the union
And what’s made in the U.S.A.
Sure was a good idea
‘Til greed got in the way.
— Bob Dylan, Union Sundown

C/C++ Programming 2: Course Pretest, by Ray Mitchell. Damn, I only got 27 of 35 right. Tricky.

Jesus Myth: The Case Against Historical Christ, by R. G. Price. Just because I like such stuff.

Deep-fry diving for goldfish in Japan, how mean!

Segfaulting own programs for fun and profit, cool tricks with virtual memory.

Rails dropped the use of ; as a separator of non-crud actions on resources and went back to the vanilla slash. This is very good, and actually more in the spirit of REST.

Eva’s such a lucky girl
She don t have a care in the world
She sets fire to the foot of her bed
Leaves the righteous shaking their head
— Dan Bern, Eva

die geschichte der kommunikation, Lydia contra T-Online. Helden.

Goodbye Document-class! (And other RDoc improvements) for the RDoc C parser, by Daniel Berger.

28mar2007

The secret White House comunication system, nice uncovering…

Jen Stark, paper sculptures. WJW.

Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator. Varnish is targeted primarily at the FreeBSD 6 and Linux 2.6 platforms, and will take full advantage of the virtual memory system and advanced I/O features offered by these operating systems. Looks very impressive.

CPAN Module Review: TAP::Parser, by chromatic. I’m still in search of a TAP parser from stdin, so I could just pipe TAP from other languages…

AFNIX is a multi-threaded functional programming language with dynamic symbol bindings that support the object oriented paradigm. The language features a state of the art runtime engine that supports both 32 and 64 bits platforms. Worth a look.

Me, I romp and stomp,
Thankful as I romp,
Without freedom of speech,
I might be in the swamp.
— Bob Dylan, Motorpsycho Nightmare

Hacking John McCain, lovely, lovely, lovely! Hack on.

Rails on 1.9: first benchmarks, YARV exposed to non-synthetic tests, by Mauricio Fernandez. The Rails source code is pretty un-YARV-ishly written, it could be lots faster, I think. (E.g. ERB is a total VM killer.)

“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”, by el fauno. “Not so long ago, after a night of heavy drinking during my self-destructive years, I climbed over a chain-link fence and cut both my hands while negotiating the difficult maneuver. Difficult for a drunk young idiot anyway. When my buddies berated me for doing something so dumb instead of just walking 20 feet around, I remember answering “I just wanted to know how it’s like for the illegal immigrants.” Last February, I got the chance to really learn what’s life like for an illegal in the US. And getting your hands cut is not the worst of it, by the way.”

The BinProlog Experience: Implementing a High-Performance Continuation Passing Prolog Engine, by Paul Tarau.

Why To Not Not Start a Startup, essay by Paul Graham.

Words have power
Words have meaning
Words become things
And words become actions
— Dan Bern, Hiroshima

Disturbed About Reactions to Kathy Sierra’s Post, by Stephanie Booth. “[O]ne quick look at most of the posts coming out of Technorati or Google Blogsearch shows (still now, over 15 hours after Kathy posted) a collection of knee-jerk reactions, side-taking, verbal lynching, and rising up to the defense of noble causes. […] I tend to despise the mainstream press increasingly for their use of manipulative headlines, but honestly, what I see some bloggers doing here is no better.”

My Type Design Philosophy, by Martin Majoor. We should mix more serif and sans-serif fonts.

Agitation, Power, Space: An Interview with Ole Bouman, co-founder of Volume, both a magazine and a “global idea platform… dedicated to experimentation and the production of new forms of architectural discourse.” Wonderful typography, too. (And a butt-ugly website.)

I hope you take Anarchaia out tonight and get it drunk. — Gavin McGovern on yesterday’s anniversary

Plopp, The Cool 3D Painting Tool is now available for download “Plopp is the first painting tool for kids where you can paint 3D objects very easily! Just paint in 2D and Plopp will transform your paintings into 3D objects!”

TumbleWalls are physical tumblelogs!

27mar2007

Celebrating Two Years of Anarchaia, this tumblelog is now two years old, but shows no sign of age. Tumble on!

For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
For he’s a jolly good fellow,
Which nobody can deny.
— For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow

Croquet SDK 1.0 released, “The Croquet Consortium has released version 1.0 of Croquet, the 3-D virtual environment based on Squeak.”

Semi-identical twins discovered, “They are the result of two sperm cells fertilising a single egg, which then divided to form two embryos – and each sperm contributed genes to each child.” They still teach here that this is impossible…

Teenage eyes were open wide
Don’t you think we know by now
How foul and plagued our future cries
From what you’ve handed down
— Dead Moon, 13 Going On 21

What makes a great photo?, with truly awesome examples. Must see.

DocBookWiki can display DocBook documents online. Different from the other applications, which convert a DocBook document into HTML first, in order to display it online, DocBookWiki converts it on the fly, so that the format for saving the document will still be XML (DocBook). DocBookWiki can also be used to edit a DocBook document online, from the web.

jQuery OSCMS presentation slides, by Steve Wittens.

Applied Web Heresies, Avi Bryant’s Etech 2007 slides. I’m rather skeptic, especially about the URIs.

How Naming Works At Microsoft, ehehehe.

No sex, please: we’re Japanese – and married, “The secret of Japan’s exceptionally low birth rate is out – more than a third of married couples do not have sex”. It’s more fun not to be married, anyway. :-P

Ruining the User Experience, by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart. Most don’t need a tutorial for that. ;-)

Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe, by Ruth Stalker-Firth at A List Apart. “Cultural probes are a “quick and dirty” way of looking into users’ thoughts.”

Cross-Browser Scripting with importNode(), by Anthony Holdener at A List Apart. “I ran into difficulty with the DOM-compliant approach I had envisioned. A two-day journey into the world of XML DOM support for web browsers lay between me and a satisfactory solution.”

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. — Isaac Asimov

Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech”, why Kathy Sierra cancelled her ETech presentations. This really really sucks. Shame. “Freedom of speech—however distasteful and rude the speech may be, is crucial. But when those words contain threats of harm or death, they can destroy a life.”

MasterView: Evolution of a WYSIWYG Template Engine, Jeff Barczewski’s talk at the Mountain West Ruby Conference.

26mar2007

Predicate Dispatching: A Unified theory of Dispatch (1998), by Michael Ernst, Craig Kaplan, and Craid Chambers. “The method selected to handle a message send can depend not just on the classes of the arguments, as in ordinary object-oriented dispatch, but also on the classes of subcomponents, on an argument’s state, and on relationshipsbetweenobjects.”

Metaprogramming JavaScript Presentation, by Adam McCrea.

Ubuntu 7.04, “Feisty Fawn” has been pre-released.

I drop things out of windows
I wrap things ‘round my head
And you would too
It’s what you’d have to do
You would–too
— Dan Bern, Comme Vous Le Faites Tous

Re-starting the HTML Engine, by Kurt Cagle. The code rots already. :-)

Barcamp LA 3, John Wiseman was there. Sounded good. I wish it was easier to find slides etc.

The PostRailsMonkey Manifesto, Mauricio seems to be bored. ;-)

It’s a hard life and no one’s to blame
When God’s not on the morning train.
If Cain don’t kill Abel, Abel kills Cain
And tears now shed are shed in vain
For Kennedy, and Jesse James
And Joan of Arc and Kurt Cobain.
— Dan Bern, Kurt Cobain

Amplifier House: Original Domestic Soundscapes, get a loud house.

Delegation and Inheritance, Patrick Logan on Pepsi and Coke. (I’ve been thinking about delegation-only object systems lately, and they are not trivial to design propely.)

25mar2007

How to Sketch a Polynomial, useful.

mod_line_edit is a general-purpose Apache filter for text documents. It operates as a simple on-the-fly line editor, applying search-and-replace rules defined in a configuration or .htaccess file. A bit like sed.

Distributed revision control with Mercurial, a book by Bryan O’Sullivan. Has made great progress since I’ve last looked at it.

Turning over upside down
Blowin round and round and round
Turning over wrong side up
Can barely fill my coffee cup
— Dan Bern, Turning Over

We just got xvid working on the Apple TV, yay!

The Mexican Goat Roast, “In the mountains of Mexico the villagers gather and celebrate together on births, on weddings and funerals, high days and happy days. They celebrate with blue corn tortillas, mashed beans, chicken. For the main meal, however, there is the goat, Mexican roast goat. Eating it might be half the battle, with its strong gamy taste. The other half, as GI Joe knew, is knowing how it got there.”

In retrospect, “Light Jazz” was not such a good choice., “It turns out an MRI is like a colonoscopy; Everyone’s had one, but no one talks about it.”

Silver Anniversary, Patrick Logan uses Emacs for over 25 years. Well, I’m not even that old, but of these, I have used: TECO EMACS on ITS (emulated), ZMACS (emulated), Micro Emacs, XEmacs and now for a long time only GNU Emacs.

Welcome to OS History, beyond Unix. (Nothing important other than ITS, I’d say. ;-P)

Python web development and frameworks in 2007, a good overview.

Roger and out good buddy
I feel you in the air today
I know you gave for your country
I feel you in the air today
— Neil Young, Roger And Out

20 things to keep in mind when visiting Germany, reasonable items.

Zsh lovers at grml.org. Lots of useful stuff.

xmonad is a lightweight X11 window manager, written in 400 lines of Haskell.

24mar2007

ZIRC is a 100% Zsh IRC client. Yikes.

Reasons to Live, by Sherman T. Biswick. SMUG classic.

Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a scale rating the relative pain caused by different Hymenopteran stings. “3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.” WJW.

Thoughts like a thread through a foam device
Liquid bread and rubber ice
Make a promise, grow teeth, go to bed
Wake up when you’re dead
— Meat Puppets, Station