Threading through the Tangle

A nice summary in slideshow format of cross domain issues on the...

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:38:03 -0400

A nice summary in slideshow format of cross domain issues on the interwebs. Interesting stuff.

Breaking The Cross Domain Barrier

I… wat? Is that a swimming pool on the edge of a...

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:31:53 -0400

I… wat? Is that a swimming pool on the edge of a building?

Marina Bay Sands Hotel | News | Gear

This is some hardcore crochet-bombing. Found it off of the...

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:33:23 -0400

This is some hardcore crochet-bombing. Found it off of the following blog:

szymon:

Janet Morton

oughto: Via: TodaysBigThing

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:44:29 -0400

oughto:

Via: TodaysBigThing

InfoQ: Towards a Universal VM

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:09:00 -0400

InfoQ: Towards a Universal VM:

This InfoQ talk by Alex Buckley is a good description of why the JVM is quite a cool and interesting space to watch. One of the sort of pipe dreams i’ve had with JRuby is the day when i can use it to access Python’s NLP libraries (like NLTK) through Jython. Buckley’s talk indicates that this is very much an idea that they’d like to make possible if they can.

Grinding on Vim, from a Textmate user's perspective.

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:51:36 -0400

I’m spending some time trying to learn Vim. I’m finally so fed up with Textmate hogging memory and beachballing (particularly when searching) that i’m just looking for something else. So here are some things i’ve learned.

Learning Vim is like joining an MMO

Like in an MMO, when you start using VIM, everyone is higher level than you, everyone has cooler gear, and knows more about the environment. You have to grind to level and craft gear to make your experience as enjoyable as everyone else’s.

Textmate definitely got a lot of things right

I haven’t fully abandoned Textmate, because i’m such a VIM n00b. Textmate has a lot of handy stuff that it gets right straight out of the box. A lot of the text manipulation shortcuts to do things like justifying assigned values (cmd+opt+]) or modifying multiple columns are intuitive to any mac user. I’m sure that Vim can do all of this stuff too, but at least in the latter case, the behavior for modifying multiple lines at once is a lot clunkier.

Textmate color schemes are also a lot more comprehensible when trying to do any editing. I quite like the Sunburst theme from Textmate, and there are a couple vim clones of the theme here and there, but none of them are quite right by my tastes. Unfortunately there is no previewing mechanism for vim color schemes, so it’s very much a disconnected, alter then refresh process. One would imagine that it’d be possible to hack up a previewer within Vim given that it’s a fully scriptable environment, but i haven’t seen one yet!

What’s so cool about Vim anyway?

Well, the reason i picked Vim, was that memorizing key combos (a la Emacs) has never been a strong suit of mine, especially when the mnemonics are weak. On top of that Vim is multi-environment so if i build up a solid set of tools i can lug them around with me to whatever platform i happen to be working on at the time.

Incidentally, Vim also happens to have scripting bindings for Ruby, Python and Perl, so given the correct installation, you can write your behaviors in any of those languages, which is pretty freakin’ sweet.

Miscellaneous

There will be more posts on Vim!

Anyway, the main reason i wrote this was to get my thoughts down on paper, and also to dump a bunch of links. So here’s a list:

Color Schemes

Some random cheat sheets and tutorials

Nexus One Users, Get Your Froyo Download And Install Guide Here! UPDATE: It’s Been Rooted! | Android News, Reviews, Applications, Games, Phones, Devices, Tips, Hacks, Videos, Podcasts - Android Police

Sun, 30 May 2010 06:07:37 -0400

Nexus One Users, Get Your Froyo Download And Install Guide Here! UPDATE: It’s Been Rooted! | Android News, Reviews, Applications, Games, Phones, Devices, Tips, Hacks, Videos, Podcasts - Android Police

Never seen one of these before last thursday. Thankfully i...

Fri, 14 May 2010 15:36:07 -0400

Never seen one of these before last thursday. Thankfully i wasn’t on the receiving side of the royal flush.

yowch: (via kapowaz)

Fri, 14 May 2010 15:13:09 -0400

yowch: (via kapowaz)

(via teapartyjesus)

Sun, 09 May 2010 03:17:28 -0400

(via teapartyjesus)

Are You Colorblind?

Sat, 08 May 2010 23:28:36 -0400

fakescience:

ha ha, now that’s just mean.

Koichiro Tsujikawa - “Eyes” (by Passion Paris)

Fri, 07 May 2010 23:33:35 -0400

Koichiro Tsujikawa - “Eyes” (by Passion Paris)

Cleaning out macruby (if you have to)

Mon, 03 May 2010 22:36:00 -0400

Macruby 0.6 is out, and with it a lot of new enhancements, but unfortunately i’ve been having some difficulties with rubygems.

Thankfully Matt Aimonetti is not only an awesome guy but also willing to help out if you’ve got a problem! I asked him what i could do to get my system back to a pristine state (since running the installer again over my borked install didn’t help).

Matt pointed out that all macruby really does to your system is drop some executables into /usr/local/bin/, and a framework in /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework/.

So, if you do this:

ls /usr/local/bin/mac* | xargs rm
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/MacRuby.framework

(you may have to sudo for the last one), you should be back to square one from which you can reinstall macruby.

Happy hacking!

Best sentence involving Paris Hilton ever

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:34:00 -0400

Thus, e.g. if Paris Hilton knows that Paris Hilton is Paris Hilton, then she must also know that every nontrivial zero of the zeta-function has real part 1/2, if that is indeed the case, or else she must know that this is not the case, if indeed it is not.

The abstract for Hyperintensional Questions, authored by Carl Pollard, a professor at my alma mater

RE: SEC proposal to require asset backed securities described in python.

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:42:00 -0400

Ben Larrimer: i just don't know enough to assume that python doesn't have some amazingly important reason for using
Ted Han: your opinion would be interesting as a lawyer :)
Ted Han: it doesn't
Ted Han: i think what they're going for with Python
Ted Han: is that they want something that is Open Source (so anybody can download the tools needed to run the code)
Ted Han: and that is interpreted code, so that the code has to be transmitted across the wire, and inspected
Ted Han: as opposed to compiled code
Ted Han: which is in an opaque binary format, and not portable from platform to platform
Ted Han: python is a fairly human readable programming language.
Ted Han: there are problems and pitfalls which i need to see if this proposal addresses
Ted Han: things like what happens when programming langauges change/update
Ted Han: what about embedded code? You can write compiled C code and stick it inside of a python program
Ted Han: and it'll run on the python interpreter, but you won't be able to inspect the C code.
Ben Larrimer: honestly.... i think it depends upon the court
Ted Han: exactly :P
Ted Han: and i don't trust the courts on tech matters
Ted Han: i really really don't
Ted Han: they've screwed the tech community too many times
Ben Larrimer: you shouldn't. the way even liberal courts have shackled technology isn't shameful, its just stupid
Ted Han: yeah

Indexes and auto migration in DataMapper

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:29:00 -0400

< snusnu> JamesHarrison, knowtheory: you *can* specfiy indexes
<@dkubb> yeah
<@dkubb> you can go: property :name, String, :index => true
<@dkubb> that'll create an index for just that property
<@dkubb> you can also go: property :name, String, :index => :something
< snusnu> JamesHarrison: :index => true or :unique_index => true, or :unique_index => :some_index_name (for compound indices)
<@dkubb> where :something is a label that multiple properties share

Formative Experiences: Intro to Chapter 5 of Larry Wall's Programming Perl

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:31:00 -0400

Reading Larry Wall’s Programming Perl book was a formative experience for me in a variety of ways. Discovering that writing about programming could be funny was amazing. But more importantly, that writing about programming could be fundamentally insightful while being funny was the true delight. The introduction to Chapter 5 on “Packages, Modules and Object Classes” is the distillation of what makes this book great. Wall’s awareness of the sociology of programming and addressing/accommodating/reining developers and their base instincts is something that’s stuck with me far beyond my dalliances with perl. If you’re a programmer, these paragraphs are worth a read

This chapter, more than any other in this book, is about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris – because this chapter is about good software design.

We’ve all fallen into the trap of using cut-and-paste when we should have chosen to define a higher-level abstraction, if only just a loop or subroutine.[1] To be sure, some folks have gone to the opposite extreme of defining ever-growing mounds of higher-level abstractions when they should have used cut-and-paste.[2] Generally, though, most of us need to think about using more abstraction rather than less.

(Caught somewhere in the middle are the people who have a balanced view of how much abstraction is good, but who jump the gun on writing their own abstractions when they should be reusing existing code.)[3]

Whenever you’re tempted to do any of these things, you need to sit back and think about what will do the most good for you and your neighbor over the long haul. If you’re going to pour your creative energies into a lump of code, why not make the world a better place while you’re at it? (Even if you’re only aiming for the program to succeed, you need to make sure it fits it’s ecological niche.)

[1] This is a form of False Laziness.

[2] This is a form of False Hubris

[3] You guessed it, this is False Impatience. But if you’re determined to reinvent the wheel, at least try to invent a better one.

Content Aware Fill Fail via Reddit

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:10:18 -0400

Content Aware Fill Fail via Reddit

Datamapper paranoid delete quirks - Hez's Bloggity Blog

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:34:10 -0400

Datamapper paranoid delete quirks - Hez's Bloggity Blog:

I’d never bothered learning about how DataMapper does paranoid properties and how to work w/ paranoid models. Out of a discussion today in #datamapper on freenode, i learned how! I suggested to Hez, who was the impetus for the discussion, that he write up what we learned, and he did! Check it out at the link.

The most hyperbolic NYT piece ever

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:24:49 -0500

The most hyperbolic NYT piece ever:

After all, nothing is more demoralizing and damaging to a nation than being beaten at your national sport. Even having been dragged into an 8 year long war, where your country men are losing life and limb, with no end in sight, pales by comparison!

For Canada, anything other than victory after Sunday’s humiliating 5-3 defeat by the United States would have been a catastrophe that scarred the nation’s psyche.

Thank you NYT, for your startling clarity and insight. Your vivid description of what is vital to the collective Canadian subconscious.