Anarchaia

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

22jul2008

Anaximandrake, a blog that makes me wish I really had learned Greek, continued French, and not forgotten Latin.

DragonFly July 2008 Release 2.0, featuring the HAMMER file system. Should check that out.

Mike Tyson Mansion, now abandoned.

Japanese onomatopoeia, chi–n!

Als sie ertrunken war und hinunterschwamm Von den Bächen in die größeren Flüsse Schien der Opal des Himmels sehr wundersam Als ob er die Leiche begütigen müsse. — Bertolt Brecht, Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen

Calendar, a nice interface.

The A-Z of Programming Languages: Modula-3, “Luca Cardelli on why Modula-3 played a major role in popularizing the notion of type-safe programming and why Modula-3 is still vastly superior to programs such as Java.”

“Fools” thought I, “You do not know
Deja like a cancer grows.
Your words may yet come back to haunt you,
Ten years from now they may still taunt you”
But my thoughts just spiralled into space,
And echoed
Off the face of keystrokes
— Sound Of Silence Revisited

Rutgers Graduate Student Finds New Prime-Generating Formula, nice and pretty simple.

Pablo Picasso: Animals in Art, eleven developments of a lithograph.

Gist, which looks like a cheap Pastie clone at first glance, quickly unfolds its Gitty magic when you notice you are able to fork pastes! An Emacs snippet for pasting.

21jul2008

Jason Kottke solves Twitter’s scaling issues, and I’m not kidding. Who builds the first fetch-updates.txt-of-all-my-friends client?

Java Is Too Academic, pretty much.

snoozemail, by Toby Segaran. “Send or forward email to x@snoozemail.com, e.g. 3@snoozemail.com and the email will come back to you x days later.”

Clue is an ANSI C compiler (C89, some C99) that targets high-level languages such as Lua, Javascript or Perl. It supports the entire C language, including pointer arithmetic, and can be used to run arbitrary pure-C programs. Cool!

Seasons may change
and they hold wild flowers,
raising their face to the sun.
All that are born from our soft rainshowers
are wild flowers.
— All About Eve, Wild Flowers

Itching my programming nerve, Joe Armstrong on Scalaris and reimplementing Wikipedia.

Baby’s First Internet, by Kevin Fanning and Kean Soo. Essential reading!

The Berlin Requiem at Everything2.

And buddha sits on my shelf shooting up Edgar Allan Poe
And I’ll dream in forbidden colours just like Vincent van Gogh
I don’t need no suit of armour
I don’t need no sword and shield
I don’t need no immortality
I don’t need no elysian fields
— The Mission, From One Jesus To Another

Nginx Upload Module, does all the multipart stuff before you hit the app. (Lacks file size limitation, though.)

Jazzers and Programmers, by Nick Sieger. A summary of his RubyFringe talk.

Partial vectorisation of Haskell programs, by Manuel M. T. Chakravarty, Roman Leshchinskiy, Simon Peyton Jones, and Gabriele Keller. “In this paper, we present an approach to partial vectorisation that selectively vectorises sub-expressions and data types, and also, enables linking vectorised with unvectorised modules.”

sadtrombone.com, as a counterpart to instantrimshot.com.

20jul2008

DIY iPhone, WJW.

Japanese Design #7: A How-to-Reduce-Packaging Journal, insightful.

Serpents kiss and the children play
Serpents kiss for the words you pray
Serpents kiss and the witching hour
Serpents kiss for my untouched flower
— The Mission, Serpents Kiss

The Free Content License They Used 1800 Years Ago, very nice.

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund, by Paul Graham.

Day after day I will lead the way
Hello sailor how are you?
Into the abyss
Into the abyss
— Sex Gang Children, Abyss

First-class Macros Have Types, by Alan Bawden. “In modern Scheme, a macro captures the lexical environment where it is defined. This creates an opportunity for extending Scheme so that macros are first-class values. The key to achieving this goal, while preserving the ability to compile programs into reasonable code, is the addition of a type system. Many interesting things can be done with first-class macros, including the construction of a useful module system in which modules are also first-class.”

Logic File System, the filesystem of discriminating hackers. Wow.

19jul2008

China As An Island, “China has land borders with 14 other countries – a world record. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours.”

rascal-haskell is a mini Haskell like language in Haskell.

Soldier lies bleeding where
a church once stood
Ignore the machine
Ignore the machine.
— Alien Sex Fiend, Ignore The Machine

Domino Domino Logic (YouTube). Create OR, AND and XOR gates out of dominoes. Replacement for TTL and CMOS. XOR is pretty complex.

So give me a drink and dry, dry my eyes
It’s all I ever wished for
And all I ever wanted
All I ever wished for
All I ever wanted
— Virgin Prunes Lyrics, Sons Find Devils

Datamob highlights the connection between public data sources and the interfaces people are building for them.

Hi’ya Bunny!, waving bunnies are the best kind. Yeech.

Fourteen Passive-Aggressive Appetizers, by Yoni Brenner. “Have you ever noticed how sun-dried tomatoes and top-grade peyote look exactly the same? Not a suggestion, really. Just saying.”

18jul2008

C’était un Rendez-Vous, one of the most classic/controversial short films. Its a fast pace film seen through the eyes of the driver, cruising through Paris streets at 140mph with his 275GTB Ferrari early in the morning.

SIMCITY, essay by Neil Gaiman. “Cities are not people.”

So much confusion, dealing with inside
The feelings that I hate, the feelings that I hide
We are pulling our lives into reverse
Tearing our lies, we are casting a curse
— All Gone Dead, Within But Not Before

x86 Disassembly, from Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection.

How Lisp Systems Look Different (PDF), by Adrian Dozsa, Tudor Gîrba, and Radu Marinescu. “In this paper we propose a suite of new visualizations that reveal the special traits of the Lisp language and thus help in understanding complex Lisp sys- tems. To validate our approach we apply them on several large Lisp case studies, and summarize our experience in terms of a series of recurring visual patterns that we have detected.”

They can take away his freedom, they can beat him into the dust
They can burn his home, run him from his land, and leave him out to gather rust
But they can’t take away his faith and his honesty and pride and the knowledge he holds inside
One day they’ll reap the harvest
The grapes of wrath
— The Mission, Grapes Of Wrath

Han Solo in Carbonite in Lego.

Wondermark #426, “In which a Tree gets the Talk”. Yay.

17jul2008

The Development of Intuitionistic Logic, at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Muphry’s Law and typoes in the bible.

I don’t believe in miracles
I don’t believe in forgiving
I don’t believe in I can go on
I won’t remember why
I don’t believe in long goodbyes
Never look back for me
— Gary Numan, Miracles

The most beautiful suicide, stunning.

Book Covers, an excellent blog.

Scrap your type applications (PDF), by Barry Jay and Simon Peyton Jones. “We introduce System IF, for implicit System F, in which many type applications can be made implicit. It supports decidable type checking and strong normalisation.” Highly useful.

A relational calculus for the design of distributed algorithms, by Frans Johan Rietman.

Constructing a fair 3 sided coin, tricky.

Warten auf den Regen,
der den ganzen Dreck wegspritzt,
der in meiner Strasse und meiner Wohnung
und in meiner Seele sitzt.
— Die Toten Hosen, Regen

ICFP Contest 2008 in TeX, WJW. More than WJW. Most badass I saw lately. (And the code is less evil than you may imagine.)

dtwitzen is a compact twitter client using dzen.

Flexibin, it’s probably the most elegant and functional waste bin in the world. Gotta get wire.

16jul2008

Pomosexual is a neologism used to describe a person who shuns sexual orientation labels (such as heterosexual and homosexual) that define individuals, and in turn chooses not to label oneself with a sexual orientation.

Lebowskitheory.com, WJW. You must read the conclusion.

Oh My Science!, replacing god with reason… one tweet at a time.

Hold me
Hold me up so high
And never let me down
— The Cure, One More Time

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, the big picture. What a mess.

Keeping Tabs: The history of an Information Age metaphor, by Ed Tenner. “The modern tab was an improvement on a momentous 19th-century innovation, the index card.”

How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut. Please read.

Pentago Strategy Guide, interesting game.

Peoples Archive is dedicated to collecting for posterity the stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you see on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world. Has great, detailed navigation.

CRUSH (Custom Reporting Utilities for SHell) is a collection of tools for processing delimited-text data from the command line or in shell scripts.

You’ll see them asleep in the rain tonight
These are saddened times today
This sickened place we live
We walk right through the wrecking yard
— Switchblade Symphony, Wrecking Yard

Random Recipe Generator, yum yum.

Software & Drama, “Sanya Weathers is annoyed that game studios can’t deliver well-written MMORPG games on time. After all, people do produce plays.”

SandstoneDb is a lightweight Prevayler style embedded object database with an ActiveRecord API that doesn’t require a command pattern and works for small apps that a single Squeak image can handle. The idea is to make a Squeak image durable and crash proof and suitable for use in small office applications.

Grouping in XQuery, I’d have use for that lately.

15jul2008

Deploying a Rack-based Ruby application with Phusion Passenger. Very easy!

Defender of the favicon is a JavaScript remake of Eugene Jarvis’ brilliant arcade game Defender written by Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri and inspired by Scott Schiller’s experiment with generated favicons VU meter. The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons further and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels using JavaScript, canvas and data: URIs.

I see all around me
I didn’t know him for I didn’t see
To live once again, to live in dreams
To live once again, to live once again
— Virgin Prunes, Walls Of Jericho

IFCP 2008 Team home pages, often with sources and writeups.

How Fair is Monopoly?, by Ian Stewart. “Everyone has played Monopoly. But few, I’d imagine, have ever thought about the math involved. In fact, the probability of winning at Monopoly can be described by interesting constructions known as Markov chains.”

The Life Of Riley, the worlds oldest blogger died two days ago at age 108.

Quicksort erratum, by Mauricio Fernandez. Lazy quicksort is nice.

Bubble Calendar, a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day. WANT HAVE.

PB & J, thank you, Patrick Logan, for writing the first non-bullshit post on Protocol Buffers.

I would tell you
That I loved you
If I thought that you would stay
But I know that it’s no use
That you’ve already
Gone away
— The Cure, Boys Don’t Cry

Walking the Line When You Work from Home, by Natalie Jost at A List Apart. “Every work environment offers distractions, but those who work from home with their families face a unique set of issues—and need equally unique ways of dealing with them.”

radiohead, Data used to produce the House of Cards music video is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Souce code is made available under the Apache License 2.0.

14jul2008

Fast, Inexpensive Content-Addressed Storage in Foundation, by Sean Rhea, Russ Cox, and Alex Pesterev. “Foundation preserves all of a user’s data and its dependencies—fonts, programs, plugins, kernel, and configuration state—by archiving nightly snapshots of the user’s entire hard disk. Users can browse through these images to view old data or recover accidentally deleted files.”

The urban ninja: a synergetic low wind kite project, cool.

Video: Jeff Dean’s Google I/O Presentation, an hour of video. First eight minutes are the architecture of Google’s former datacenters. Worth watching.

Oh until I don’t know where you end and, I begin
Until I just, carry it in me
Carry it in me, carry it in me
I wanna get lost, wanna get lost
Wanna get lost, lost
— Cocteau Twins, Tishbite

Nick Veasey uses x-ray technology to create mesmerizing and intriguing art. In a world obsessed with superficial appearance it is a refreshing change to be able to look beyond the surface. Check out the portfolio.

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth, impressive.

Do you wanna party? It’s partytime
We gotta party! It’s partytime
Oh, she never had a chance
— 45 Grave, Partytime

A Language for Generic Programming in the Large, by Jeremy G. Siek and Andrew Lumsdaine. “Many programming languages provide generics and have features for describing interfaces, but none completely support the idioms used in generic programming. To address this need we developed the language G.”

Idea: Paintings of descriptions of the paintings, excellent.

The Akwizgran Discrepancy at BLDG BLOG.

13jul2008

MSFP 2008, Dan Piponi put up his slides on “Algebra, Calculus and Antidiagonal Types”. Highly recommended.

Terry Rodgers, what a painter! PNSFW.

D’you get scared to feel so much?
To let somebody touch you?
So hot, so cold, so far, so out of control
Hard to come by, and harder to hold
— The Sisters of Mercy, More

Hyphenation as a Noisy Channel, neat idea.

EXTERMINUS, ah, life.

The Cocaine Auction Protocol: On the Power of Anonymous Broadcast, by Frank Stajano and Ross Anderson. “This paper builds on a case study, of an anonymous auction between mistrustful principals with no trusted arbitrator, to introduce “anonymous broadcast” as a new protocol building block.”

Stay with me, lay with me, lay down by my side
Stay with me, lay with me, take me deep inside
Lay with me, stay with me, lay with me stay…
With me…
Stay…With me
— The Mission, Stay With Me

HTML 5 data- Attributes, Microformats done right.

iPhone App Store and 2.0 OS Initial Miscellany, a random post full of detail.

12jul2008

Amua is a status bar application for Mac OS X that allows you to play Last.fm web-radio streams. Uses iTunes infrastructure.

How to make a Sawed-off USB Key, WJW.

Otl Aicher on Flickr. Excellent as ever.

Oh I miss the kiss of treachery
The aching kiss before I feed
The stench of a love for a younger meat
And the sound that it makes
When it cuts in deep
The holding up on bended knees
The addiction of duplicities
As bit by bit it starts the need
To just let go
My party piece
— The Cure, Disintegration

Rechenaufgaben zur Tour de France.

Period three and chaos, Mark Dominus: “In the copious spare time I have around my other major project, I am tinkering with various stuff related to Möbius functions.”

ICFP 2008 Programming Contest Task Description, control a mars rover.

Motel Project, awesome shots.

And on my neck
The bite you left has started bruising
So go ahead is it my fear or you I’m losing
Enough’s enough don’t know that past tonight I’ll be your one
— The Dollyrots, Love You Most

Radiohead Use Fancy Technology in Camera-Free Video, “Radiohead don’t have time for your petty, archaic devices, such as, um, the camera. Indeed, they’ve gone and made a new music video for In Rainbows’ woozy “House of Cards” that doesn’t make use of a camera at all!” Cool stuff.

iPhone 3G Disassembly, the iFixit guys are passionate…

11jul2008

iPhone OS 2.0 Unlocked, in less than a day. Great job!

Catch me if you can: Towards type-safe, hierarchical, lightweight, polymorphic and efficient error management in OCaml, by David Teller, Arnaud Spiwack, Till Varoquaux.

Look out the window can you see the sky
What color is it can you see the light
And is it raining yet down in the street
And do you talk to everyone you meet
— Sad Lovers And Giants, Alice Isn’t Playing

Dead-listing while on vacation, “Dead-listing is analyzing the raw disassembly of some target software and figuring it out using only pen and paper. This is great for vacations because your laptop won’t get sand in it. You usually have a long period of time to muse about the code in question without interruptions, something hard to find at home these days. And I’ve gotten some of my best ideas after setting aside my papers for a while and going for a long swim.”

OpenVZ Bug 719, too awesome to spoil.

Enterprise Rails Tapping, the downloadable “iPhone Configuration Web Utility” is written in Rails and JavaScript. WTF?

Looking so long at these pictures of you
But I never hold on to your heart
Looking so long for the words to be true
But always just breaking apart
My pictures of you
— The Cure, Pictures Of You

Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras, wow.

Building Users Union, a great idea.

10jul2008

Dress For Dinner Napkins, essential.

The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design, by Jon Tan. An excellent post on an excellent blog, both in design and content.

Bacon is dead! Long live bacon!, BAAACON.

urxvt mouseless url yanking, very useful.

We found you hiding – we found you lying
Choking on the dirt and sand
Your former glories and all the stories
Dragged and washed with eager hands
But oh your city lies in dust, my friend
— Siouxsie And The Banshees, Cities In Dust

AfterStep is a window manager for the Unix X Window System. It still exists!

UBF and VM opcode design, insights by Joe Armstrong. I love using ASCII for opcodes, really.

Thsrs, the shorter thesauruswordbook. Very usefulutile, reallytruly. (The opposite would be nice to have as well.)

OCRopus is a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. Used by Google, Apache License 2.0.

I think the message of Fight Club is not so much liberating violence but that liberation hurts. What may falsely appear as my celebration of violence, I think, is a much more tragic awareness. — Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek

How a page gets created, “Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine.” Amazing how much editing takes place during layout.

In the temple of love
Shine like thunder
In the temple of love
Cry like rain
— The Sisters Of Mercy, Temple Of Love

Functional Netlists, by Sungwoo Park, Jinha Kim, and Hyeonseung Im. “We develop a variant of the lambda calculus, called l-lambda (linear lambda), which may serve as a high-level substitute for netlists. […] The translation of l-lambda into structural descriptions of hardware circuits is sound and complete in the sense that it maps expressions only to realizable hardware circuits and that every realizable hardware circuit has a corresponding expression in l-lambda.”

The War Prayer, by Mark Twain. “The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism…”

09jul2008

ARG_MAX, maximum length of arguments for a new process, fun.

Zoology, “That is, zoos are decoy environments, referring to absent landscapes elsewhere. If this act of reference is read, or interpreted correctly, by the non-human species for whom the landscape has been constructed, then you have a successful zoo.”

Boredom hills you are dear to me now
The ultimate shot of random procedure
— The Moonbabies, Fieldtrip Usa

K as a Prototyping Language, good, practical overview by Dennis Shasha.

New Otto malloc helps spot ancient bugs, Otto Moerbeek (otto@) recently found and fixed an ancient bug (some 33 years old) in yacc(1). Yay.

Handwritten Typographers, Cameron Adams asked ten typographers to send in a handwritten piece.

We’re the Angels and the Darlas,
and in time we’ll be syndicated too.
But for now,
there’s not a door that you can close and we,
we can’t creep through.
— Say Hi To Your Mom, Angels And Darlas

Differentiating regions, cool.

Automating Functional Program Transformation, MSc thesis by Markus Mottl. “We present a framework for automatic program transformation of a strict and pure functional language with a well-defined semantics. It will be shown that such a framework can be implemented most declaratively and concisely in a recently developed higher-order logic programming language called LambdaProlog.” Awesome stuff.

08jul2008

The Slow Death of a City Block: 1900 Montgomery Street, St. Louis.

Higher-Order Logic Programming (PDF), by Gopalan Nadathur and Dale Miller. Includes an introduction to Lambda Prolog.

Let’s die in the arms
of the girls we love
let’s sell our souls
to the man above
— Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, Apollo

The Teyjus system is an efficient implementation of the higher-order logic programming language Lambda Prolog. Version 2 has been released recently.

A rewriting system for Joy, by Manfred von Thun. “This paper describes a conditional term rewriting system for Joy based on the two constructors concatenation and quotation.”

Protocol buffers are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python.

I think I’m a little bit
Little bit
A little bit in love with you
But only if you’re a little bit
Little bit
Little bit
In lalalala love with me
— Lykke Li, Little Bit

Anti-paparazzi sunglasses, “They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. the wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.”

Watch a Movie at a Glance, “Take snapshots of a movie at one-second intervals. Stitch them into one image. What can you see? Pacing. Color palate. Maybe story.” I used to do that with mplayer/mencoder.

xmlroff is a fast, free, high-quality, multi-platform XSL formatter that aims to excel at DocBook formatting and that integrates easily with other programs and with scripting languages. Now BSD licensed and features an Cairo backend.

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