Christopher Smart

Lots of interesting material here, particularly his "paper war".

Amazon.com: How to Avoid Huge Ships (9780870334337): John W. Trimmer: Books

'This book was "written by an old captain who was tired of running over fools in their pleasure boats, and wanted to educate those same fools in a futile effort to save their lives".' (amazon.com review) (fark)

Why I’m Done Making Desktop Applications: MicroISV on a Shoestring

Very thorough article arguing that Web apps are easier to sell because they have fewer potential failure points than desktop software. But a lot of the points he makes against "desktop software" are really points against *Windows shareware*. There is no "looking for download" or "navigating a shopping cart" for downloadable iPhone applications, for example.

Parliament of Australia: Senate: Platypus and Parliament - The Australian Senate in Theory and Practice

Asked the Greens why they continually call for divisions in the Senate, got referred to this book as part of the answer. Not a bad response.

Snow Leopard Automatic Text Correction

Auto text correction on a qwerty keyboard is annoying. I usually know when I make a mistake (because the keyboard gives a lot of tactile feedback), so I start to correct it, only to find that it's been fixed, so I have to resync from however much I've already deleted. This breaks mental flow much more dramatically than just fixing the error. Anyway, the point of this bookmark is that TextEdit does its own corrections in addition to the system wide ones. Turn them off in TextEdit's preferences.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica

Linking to the middle of the Snow Leopard overview, but this is the best part. Grand Central Dispatch uses "queues" to allocate tasks to system-wide threads, where each task is a closure defined using LLVM's new C closure syntax. Don't need to worry about explicit multiprocessing. Really cool OS-wide solution to concurrency problems.

60ish literary euphemisms for masturbation

"9. Deconstructing The Fountainhead" (via meghano)

Dinosaur Comics - August 28th, 2009 - awesome fun times!

Dinosaur Comics vs the Sorites paradox. Bookmarked because I reckon you can apply the sorites paradox to "is X conscious?" type questions, so I am interested in it. (Via language log)

apophenia: Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?

This pov (Twitter as social grooming) makes a lot of sense to me. But I would also dispute the term "pointless babble" itself: the two examples of "phatic" (non-information-conveying) expressions given here, "hi", and "thank you", actually can convey quite a lot of information, depending on context.

LKML: Dianne Hackborn: Re: [PATCH 1/6] staging: android: binder: Remove some funny && usage

Android's Binder is a real tangle: capabilities, process lifecycle, namespaces, unforgeable object references, file descriptor passing over IPC, weak references. Its original implementation was "simplified" for Android, and even in Android it is sometimes bypassed (for example, the window manager implements its own security model based on uid checking instead of relying on Binder capabilities) (Via Michael Hills)

Stephen Fry — Happy birthday to GNU — The GNU Operating System

This is quite depressing, like watching your favourite sports star advertising Coke. The plumbing analogy is particularly inane.

nature-fight.gif 700×609 pixels

NATURE FIGHT! RIGHT NOW! (via Mimi Smartypants)

National Vulnerability Database (NVD) National Vulnerability Database (CVE-2009-2692)

I wrote earlier that Android's use of a Linux kernel made debugging and testing a lot easier -- this is the other side of that. (via Benno)

Pecunia non olet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Money does not smell. Now, urine -- that smells.

Bug 193917 – valgrind fails to run on Mac OS 10.5.7, gets a SIGTRAP

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think « Socialnomics – Social Media Blog

Terrible! "Biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution" -- er, shift of what? "Social media has more users than the population of Ireland, Norway, and Denmark" -- great, very helpful! "96% of Gen Y have joined a social network" -- okay, and how many still use it regularly? Seems appropriate that they picked a 10-year-old Gen X song to accompany their useless stats. Ptooey.

iPhone Sudoku Grab: How does it all work?

Developer explains how his automatic sudoku solver for the iPhone works. Simple techniques well applied. (daring fireball)

USBtiny

Interfacing to the USB in software from ATTiny / ATMega microcontrollers. Means you don't have to use a separate USB interface controller. Clever.

TOKYOMANGO: Super Mario chess set

It's a Super Mario chess set.

Netgear DG834G v3 Firmware

My new router firmware

Classic point and click adventure Simon the Sorcerer magically appears on iPhone | Simon the Sorcerer news | Pocket Gamer

Looks like this one actually has an iPhone-friendly UI. Wish Monkey Island was like this!

Red letter days of my life

Fascinating bio piece on Babbage. "No one could have turned the cat out of the most comfortable chair, as Chaucer's monk did, for no such chair was ever there." (via 2dgoggles)

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday - Google Books

Babbage on Ada: "that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it." (via 2dgoggles.com)

Stanislaw Lem: FAQ

Philip K. Dick became schizophrenic and petitioned the FBI regarding precious bodily fluids etc. "[Sci-fi writer Stanislaw] Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas."

Vibram Five Fingers: Discover the Barefooting Alternative

These look fun.

Issue 2454 - android - Cannot view html on sdcard because no file url - Project Hosting on Google Code

Android insanity -- how to load Webpages from the SD card, and how to trick the browser into not prepending "http://" to bookmarks (the latter trick is definitely a bug. The former trick is probably a bug)

Bobby McFerrin Plays the Pentatonic Scale Using the Audience at the World Science Festival (video) | The Stimulist

Very cool audience demonstration (via fark)

Klaus Havelund's homepage

Runtime verification work, for thesis

MergingUnrelatedRepositories - Mercurial

Merge unrelated repos. Didn't even know hg could do this. Cool!

THE 5LIGHTS PROJECT

"Halfway through my point, I realize it isn’t something you can say out loud, so I look out the window, bite the edge of my straw, wait." (via meaghano.com)

Traceview: A Graphical Log Viewer | Android Developers

Android's Traceview on-disk format

Android Tricks: Hello World C program using Android Toolchain

References Perl script which runs the compiler. Convenient. Also, perl. A blast from the past. :-)

Optimized DEX files

We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!

We never had a laser background option on our school portraits. My childhood was deprived, and I didn't even know. Fuck! (via wonderland)

FSR Sensor tutorial

Force-sensitive resistors

Mind Hacks: Unique like everyone else

The majority of people think they're above-average drivers, above-average workers ... and less susceptible than most to cognitive bias. Teehee

Al Gore prescribes more cowbell

Delphi method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Should be "Cttee members sit on a fume of poisonous gas and hallucinate the end of the Cold War" but sadly isn't

LEEKS

Lovers live by love, as larks by leeks -- anonymous; His eyes were green as leeks -- Thisbe

Command line Java on DalvikVM « Show me the code! – By Davanum Srinivas

.java, to .class, to .jar, to .dex.

rdar://7044974: UIViewController private method doesn't behave as undocumented

"The method attentionClassDumpUser:yesItsUsAgain:althoughSwizzlingAndOverridingPrivateMethodsIsFun:itWasntMuchFunWhenYourAppStoppedWorking:pleaseRefrainFromDoingSoInTheFutureOkayThanksBye: doesn't do anything." (via daring fireball)

In the Pipeline: Things I Won't Work With

A chemist talks about his least favourite compounds, such as thioacetone: "Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. " (via dadhacker.com)

"No Gods, No Masters": Margaret Sanger on Birth Control

"Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception? Everybody is aware that the old, stupid fallacy that such knowledge will cause a girl to enter into prostitution has long been shattered." Margaret Sanger, "The Woman Rebel", March 1914. (Via Bryn)

S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) - comp.lang.lisp | Google Groups

"If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." Erik Naggum brings the class. (Via Jason Grossman)

Fog-like Sensations

"At this point a philosopher might want to say: "He sees the fog but does not perceive its fogginess." Ask yourself what could possibly be the object of saying this." (via http://xeny.net/.Quotations)

Mind Hacks: 80% genetic, 20% polyester

Interesting article on why "disease X is Y% genetic" statements are misleading. "Imagine that we could study a population where everybody lived in an identical environment. They did the same things everyday; they ate identical foods, had identical relationships and were stressed by identical events."

Experiments in Sims 3 « Emily Short’s Interactive Fiction

Emily Short explores emergent narrative in Sims 3 by pairing a hopeless romantic with commitment-phobe. "She hit on one of her housekeepers and managed to get him to kiss her, but then he left and a few days later the maid service had to be canceled"

Red Sweater Blog – Getting Pretty Lonely

Daniel Jalkut sums up my attitude towards the GPL, i.e. that a more liberal license (LGPL, BSD) is more likely to encourage collaboration. Seems to be a pretty common stance among Mac developers, perhaps because (as Daniel hints) liberal licensing enabled OS X.

Building Android 1.5 – Getting the source — Johan de Koning

Updated "building for Dream" instructions as the Google ones are pretty outdated now

Dawkins funds atheist summer camp « Derren Brown Blog

"In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note". Okay -- unicorns, if you exist, show up for a free £5. *taps fingers* (via wonderland)