BitC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BitC, abandoned in 2009, lives again.

Cross Bones Graveyard

I found this graveyard while wandering near Borough.

Clojure on blip.tv

"Screencasts, talks and tutorials on the Clojure programming language"

Mailinator(tm) Blog: On Java Visibility

On "visibility" as it applies to JIT compilation. This seems like an obvious example of where using a JIT provides more opportunities for optimisation -- but at the expense of rather severe and unintuitive programming restrictions (at the Java level, makes perfect sense at the hardware level) and in the presence of multiple threads... so, hmm, maybe not a clear JIT win...

CSS IS AWESOME COFFEE MUG from Zazzle.com

I want this mug.

Ned Batchelder: Mandelbox

Flythrough of a 3d fractal. Awesome!

Bill Gates - Playboy Interview - Microsoft Founder

An inspiring and personal interview. (hacker news)

Competition is overrated cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog

"Your #1 competitor starting out will always be the BACK button" -- article on startups

Google Code: jQuery Outages and a Fix | Sean Walther’s Blog

The argument for using Google to host jquery is that it's more reliable and faster than hosting it yourself. The argument against is that you inadvertently share some of your site's user data with Google. Now it seems as if the first half of the "for" argument isn't so convincing. (As an aside, I don't think browsers have been limited to two simultaneous requests for at least five years.)

TI makes a big bid for the hobby market - Hack a Day

Holy shit, $4.30 for a development board.

Quickies for gdb

Specifically, quickies for GDB with Cocoa apps.

This Mac devotee is moving to Linux - Dan Gillmor - Salon.com

Hilariously terrible article. The guy states in para one that "my strategy is to use what works best, period", and then in para 3 explains that he is switching to Linux for political (not practical) reasons: "I value some principles, perhaps almost religiously". Worse: the principle is walled gardens -- which Apple is doing with iOS, but not OS X, so his decision isn't supported by any evidence. Then he buys a new laptop to run Linux, but is unable to run Linux on it because the hardware is unsupported. He then reports, entirely without irony, that is is making do in the meantime by running Linux in a VM ... on his MacBook Pro.

Vacation rentals, private rooms, sublets by the night - Accommodations on Airbnb

Kind of like classy couch surfing. Except you pay. Seems really cool -- I would have saved several hundred euro on my Finland holiday (and probably stayed in nicer places) if I'd known about it earlier! (via liedra)

An Open Postcode Geocoding API – Jamie Thompson

Converts UK postcodes to latitude and longitude.

"Somewhere a dog barked"

This phrase is a novelistic cliché: "For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof." (Language Hat)

Dropping an Einstein thought experiment down an elevator shaft

A German research centre actually built a giant tower to test out a thought experiment by Einstein. These days experiments involving giant towers seem strangely old-fashioned. The tower actually looks quaint.

HTC Evo doing ninja-like creep on Nexus One's market share

Android distribution by handset from Chitika. Wow, the Nexus One sank like a stone.

ASIHTTPRequest Documentation - All-Seeing Interactive

Async/sync GET/POST HTTP library for OS X/iOS. BSD licensed. Looks good.

Cloud Computing, Cloud Hosting & Online Storage by Rackspace Hosting. Mosso is now the Rackspace Cloud.

Time to migrate from Linode? This is half the price baseline + 22c / gigabyte out.

OS OpenData Supply - Download or order Ordnance Survey OpenData

Ordnance Survey again

go on Vimeo

This is an amazing video about about climate change.

The Anatomy of Addictive Gameplay | Innesoft Blog

via hn via liedra

Figurine holds down Cup Noodle lid, tells you when your food is ready - TOKYOMANGO

Waiting for your instant noodles. Relax.

Moist Banana Bread Recipe - Vegan Banana Bread

This worked out nicely, especially considering 1) I measured everything by eye; 2) I can't work the oven; 3) I couldn't find a cake tin so had to improvise with a saucepan.

Become a morning person. How to end insomnia for $520.99 - humbledMBA

Solving what I consider really to be an attitude problem in the easiest way possible, i.e. with gadgets! Still, I installed f.lux and it does seem to be easier on the eyes.

Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf

It's the complete text of Mrs. Dalloway in ebook form!

Vegan London : Vegan and Vegetarian Restaurants in London

There are a lot of vegan restaurants in London, it turns out. (I'm not vegan, but 1: vegan is a subset of my diet; 2: vegan restaurant staff will have a good understanding of what "vegetarian" means; 3: vegan food can be quite delicious.)

Abandon the Web!: Is hi-tech timeless?

Argues that high tech will eventually become good enough such that advances in any particular direction won't matter. He uses an analogy to clocks, for which quartz (= good enough precision) revolutionised the industry and sent many companies bankrupt. I can't see this happening in high tech, because we have many constantly-shifting criteria for good enough. Right now processor speeds are good enough most of the time, but battery life is not. 20 years ago processor speeds weren't good enough and battery life wasn't even an issue. Via hacker news.

Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript

Many JavaScript tutorials are written by someone who can't actually write, doesn't know anything about JavaScript, or can't actually write and doesn't know anything about JavaScript. This seems to be an exception in that it is readable and the examples it gives are not insane.

Hacker News | Logarithmic calendar view

I'm writing a calendar. This idea, particularly the mockup by minus1, is what I'm after UI wise.

What to Know Before Debating Type Systems

Strong typing: A type system that I like and feel comfortable with; Weak typing: A type system that worries me, or makes me feel uncomfortable. (Hacker News)

A simple web application in Clojure using ring and enlive « LShift Ltd.

Also a quick lein tutorial and intro to Clojure. Ver' nice.

Using Prolog in Windows NT Network Configuration

Windows NT uses a Prolog interpreter to configure its network interfaces.

Pianola Museum

According to a guy on Hacker News there is a one-of-a-kinda pianola which plays Rachmaninov in such a perfectly-reproduced way that it sounds exactly like Rachmaninov.

Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science: A rare blend of monster raving egomania and batshit insanity

"[Wolfram claims his Universal Turing Machine equivalent] is as complex as anything in the universe, and all intelligent life, including, perhaps, the gods must have much in common. This, to put it mildly, does not follow. Wolfram even goes on to refute post-modernism on this basis; I won't touch that except to say that I'd have paid a lot to see Wolfram and Jacques Derrida go one-on-one."

Implementation of dynamic binary translation for NES code

Nice introduction. Covers the usual stuff but goes into interesting detail. (hacker news)

Ludic fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The false belief that your model is an accurate predictor of reality. It is a fallacy because the simplifications made to generate the model exclude important information that would change the results of the model, were they incorporated. Due to Taleb, who loves this kind of thing.

Open Day at Nunhead Cemetery at Nunhead Cemetery - Festivals - Time Out London

vigenerecypherposter.jpg (500×750)

I love everything about this -- indie movie poster stylings, Spy vs Spy reference, Babbage's delighted expression...

Joel Franusic / Online-REPs-and-REPLs

This is cute. A giant list of REPLs, i.e. programming language CLIs.

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

This is a really good idea. I learned BASIC from a book that took the same sort of approach, and (language aside [fuck you Dijkstra]) it was a great motivation.

Startup Trekking: Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

Country roads were created during the car era. But the iCar era is about a very comfortable user experience, reliability and durability, all areas where country roads fall short.

WikiAnswers - What is the difference between a duck

Surreal humor as exemplified by the "duck joke" is most frequently favored by college students, a particular subset of professional comedy writers, and voracious readers of Douglas Adams novels.

MS Paint Adventures

SunPlus: The biggest chip company you’ve never heard of

Dude reverse-engineered instruction set *and wrote an emulator* based on a ROM dump.

Volumetric heat diffusion skinning - Wolfire Games Blog

In a 3D model, assign vertex weights (= amount of influence a bone has on the model's vertices, for each bone, for each vertex) based on a "heat diffusion" model. Simple, looks nice.

The Trouble with the Segway

The article referenced in the previous bookmark.

The Electric Unicycle

Paul Graham comments that while people have a negative reaction to Segway riders, they don't have a negative reaction to this self-balancing unicycle. He thinks it's because the sitting-astride, feet-on-pedals aspect makes it look like the rider is actually doing more work. EDIT: Thinking about this some more, I suspect that part of the appeal of, say, motorcycles vs Segways is the fact that bikes are dangerous. Riding a motorcycle is courting death. Segways probably won't kill you. "Solution": Make Segways go ten times faster.

Making the Food Taste Like The Food « Tea Leaves

It's a long-winded article to make a single point, which is "pre-cook your aromatics", but it also includes a daal recipe.

iPhone/Touch Platform

Graham Nelson (author of Inform, lecturer in pure mathematics) on the importance of making a stand re Apple's no-translation-layers clause: "it matters because App Store-like cultures are here to stay, and we need to establish some community norms for them."