2060, one in three will be 65 or older - I don't really believe in predictions with a 50-year timeframe. Look back 50 years and consider whether any statistician could have made even minimally relevant statements about our current time based on the situation back then. 50-year forecasts are merely trend extrapolations that can serve at best as statistical self-satisfaction.
Linkblog - 29.10.2009 - 18.11.2009
Hudson CI - since I am increasingly dealing with JVM languages, something like this would be quite interesting. A Continuous Integration platform in and for Java (and also usable for other purposes). Interesting, especially the easy installation - just a .war file that you start or throw into a container and then configure via the web interface. Continuous Integration greatly helps with deployment, especially when you build your projects cleanly with unit tests. Manual execution of the test suite is then largely eliminated, as the CI server takes over and can, for example, automatically deploy cleanly running builds as beta or provide working snapshots (in the sense of the test cases working) as downloads.
PyGoWave Server - I don't know if I already had this, but I just searched for it again on this occasion: an implementation of the Google Wave idea in Python. And the funny thing: the website underneath is built with Django!
Python moratorium and the future of 2.x [LWN.net] - a good summary of the current discussions around Python releases, specifically the discussion of whether 2.6 is the last 2.x Python, or whether the already existing 2.7 will still be released, whether there will be a 2.8 or more after that, or whether the switch to 3.x should be forced.
Steinbach accused Westerwelle of self-promotion - well, maybe it's true that Westerwelle wants to profile himself (certainly it is so, he is after all a very new Foreign Minister and has to get a profile that says more than "can't speak English"). But in this case, he is simply right. Because a Mrs. Steinbach, who has spoken out against the recognition of the Polish state territory, would be completely the wrong signal as a figurehead of a displaced persons center. Someone so outdated is completely out of place there. We are not talking about a vote in the 50s or something, where the mood was even more heated - we are talking about a vote in 1991 ...
Distributed Wikipedias instead of a central monster with deletion fanatics - interesting proposal. A decentralized Wikipedia based on a distributed version system like Git. Exactly the direction in which my thoughts for my blog have been going lately. I tried something similar in my Second Life-oriented blog and found it very pleasant - I created blog posts on one of my computers and then simply pushed them as raw Markdown files via Mercurial (which I prefer over Git in terms of handling) to the server, where everything was then processed by a blog engine and static HTML was generated. Clean traceability of changes, clean conflict handling, proper backup of old versions - and the transfer via Mercurial (git is comparable) is also quite fast, as only differences are sent. At the moment, I'm still pondering how to efficiently apply something like this to a blog monster with several thousand entries. And how something like this can be used in the company, for example, instead of wikis, as these do not necessarily represent the optimal situation there.
in which things are mapped, but also reduced - a really nice example of Agents in Clojure using a log analyzer. Calculations are distributed across parallel processes, a central process reads and distributes, and at the end everything is merged. So classic map/reduce technique. It would have been nice if the reading had also been parallelized, because on flat systems with many spindles, parallel reading can indeed be faster than sequential reading (especially with gigantic file sizes as postulated by Tim Bray in the original problem). But still, it's nice to see a compact, meaningful example of map/reduce in Clojure. I like the language more and more.
Fefe's Criticism of SPDY - I'm not exactly a die-hard Fefe fan, but his criticism of Google's new protocol is, in my opinion, quite valid. My opinion on SPDY is also rather negative - the points of criticism that Google has with HTTP could be easily resolved within HTTP. Multi-Request? We already have keep-alive to minimize connection setups, expanding this to multi-request where you send multiple requests at once and then immediately get all the data would not be an unsolvable problem. SSL has been available for HTTP for a long time. Compressed headers? Sorry, but the headers really don't make up the large part of the data, compressing them doesn't really bring anything.
More Freedom Necessary as Top Developers Abandon iPhone - if Apple doesn't get this under control soon, it could have a pretty negative impact. Because if die-hard Apple shops like Rogue Amoeba are already showing Apple the red card, others will follow in the long run. And if only silly flashlights are left burning in the App Store, Apple might realize that their approach was rarely stupid. But then it will be too late ... (just look at how Palm more or less led the Palm Pre platform ad absurdum through all the fuss around their variant of the App Store).
nothing new - someone compares Go (Google's new system language) with Algol 68 - and the old lady Algol 68 comes out quite well.
Why Common Lisp will never really become mainstream - the linked source is only used to use a binary-ascii decoding/encoding library in various Common Lisps via an automatically decoding and encoding stream. What's inside? Mountains of #+ markers with various Common Lisp implementations. That's not portability, that's just a mess.
Play framework - a rather interesting framework for Java in the style of Django or Rails. In the dev version 1.1, it also supports Scala for the view functions, which is quite interesting, because no matter how nice the framework is, I won't subject myself to raw Java.
Google Closure: How not to write JavaScript - sounds like the great library at Google was written by the intern ...
Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal - Mathematics can simply be beautiful.
NetBeans support for Google App Engine - the title says it all. I quite like NetBeans, by the way. It looks quite bare (not particularly well integrated into Cocoa - Eclipse makes a much better visual impression), but unlike the alternatives, the plugins seem to work quite well (Eclipse produces strange errors, IntelliJ requires you to find the right version of the plugin for the right version of the IDE). And the Clojure plugin for NetBeans seems to be the nicest so far - the REPL is really good.
The Enclojure REPLs (Not just for Netbeans!) - how to use the REPL from the Netbeans plugin also standalone. And this is a quite usable REPL, with nice features.
Joe Strummer darf alles (1999) | Spreeblick - is like that. Joe Strummer can do anything.
The Go Programming Language - interesting language that comes from the Google Labs. Many ideas in it that can make programming pleasant - and many pragmatic approaches. For me, it is in a similar category as D - so a system language that can be used as an alternative to C or C++. It is interesting that this rather neglected segment of languages is getting fresh wind again.
Ricoh GXR Hands on Preview - interesting, albeit strange concept: a camera body without camera function, but with lens modules with integrated chip. This way, chip and lens can be perfectly adjusted to each other, but the user always has the same body operation. Actually quite clever, let's see how the results are in reality - I am very satisfied with my Ricoh GRD II. And compact chip cameras are of course potentially a good deal smaller than even my Micro 4/3 equipment. The price is of course exorbitant.
State Secretary Hanning retired - then August might have more time again to play chess in Nordwalde ...
:: Clojure and Markdown (and Javascript and Java and...) - interesting post, because here the advantage of mixed languages on the JVM is fully utilized. Instead of writing a Markdown parser for Clojure, one in JavaScript is simply used via Rhino (JS in Java). Which also ensures that both the web client and the blog server can use the same implementation of Markdown.
for post in leo.blog():: Django-Jython 1.0.0 released! - not unimportant for a project at work: Django-Jython is finished. And included is the Oracle client, which we would also urgently need for the project. Nice.
What DNS Is Not - ACM Queue - about the bad habit of intercepting DNS queries and redirecting them to ad servers. T-Online has been doing the same for some time. Yes, you can turn it off if you jump through various hoops. I still consider it an audacity to introduce such nonsense only as an opt-out. IMO, this is an abuse of market position.
Acme::Don't - Perl people are weird!
Automated News Portal: Netzeitung Loses Editorial Team - what happens now if the quality of the compilations and content by the news gathering algorithms is suddenly better than the previously editorially compiled content? Just throwing this out there. (Yes, yes, I'll be quiet now. But it would be funny.)
Eva Redselig - cute.
avodonosov's abcl-idea - as I'm currently playing around with IntelliJ (and the plugins for Scala and Clojure for it), there's also a plugin for integrating Common Lisp into Idea. Even with the possibility of writing extensions for Idea in Common Lisp (and having your own REPL for it). I should definitely try it out.
Cluster SSH - Cluster Admin Via SSH - another interesting tool, allows commands to run in parallel via ssh on multiple machines. Good for administering many similar machines where essentially the same command should run.
FAI - Fully Automatic Installation - since we have a lot of chroots and virtual machines at the company, maybe quite interesting.
flogr - Fotoblogging with Flickr as the backend for the images. Looks quite interesting.
iWebKit - Make a quality iPhone Website or Webapp - yet another iPhone web framework.
JQTouch — jQuery plugin for mobile web development - for future use, iUI is a bit rough and native applications demand the toll of 79 euros per year for the Developer program. For the few things I do, web applications are probably often sufficient.
Lazy Pythonista: Diving into Unladen Swallow's Optimizations - Unladen Swallow is the Python variant for LLVM. It's looking more and more interesting.
OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs - export & import to Google Docs, Zoho, WebDAV - sounds cool. With a suitable application on the iPhone, you can then quickly view documents that you normally edit at home in a desktop application.
Electric Alchemy: Cracking Passwords in the Cloud: Breaking PGP on EC2 with EDPR - interesting article about brute-force cracking of passwords using dynamic instances on Amazon EC2. Particularly interesting is the second part with the analysis of the costs of this solution depending on password complexity and length. 8-character passwords (even with special characters and numbers) are definitely no longer up-to-date for really sensitive data.
Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search - interesting project: Haystack. An extension of Django to add full-text search with an interface very similar to the normal Django database interface.
Parsing JSON in Arc - nothing world-shattering new, just parser combinators, but you don't see Arc code very often, the Lisp dialect by Paul Graham.
Why do we have an IMG element? - Mark Pilgrim buddelt in HTML-Geschichte.
Thousands of Blue Letters from the Youth Welfare Office - "Doctors and youth welfare offices in NRW are now checking which children do not attend voluntary check-ups. Several thousand reminder letters have already been sent. Those who do not respond may expect a visit from the youth welfare office." - sounds all incredibly voluntary.
alandipert's step - a Pico-Framework for website tinkering with Scala. Looks quite funny for simple REST web services in Scala.
GRDIII vs. GRDII vs. GRD - B&W side by side photos - interesting for pixel peepers, how contrast, sharpening, and noise reduction have different effects on the image in the three GRD models.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in Langenfeld - until January 24th. I should add this to my to-do list.
hlship's cascade - and a somewhat more expanded framework with some nice features but still very compact code.
macourtney's Conjure - oh dear, yet another framework for Clojure. This time one that is similar to Rails. Nice detail: comes with H2 as a pre-configured and included database - H2 is a database in Java, similar to SQLite, small, fast, lean. But can also use other databases.
weavejester's compojure - Pico web framework for Clojure. Comparable to Step for Scala or web.py for Python. Just the absolutely minimal necessary to put together a small web application.
RWPluginMarkup - Markdown plugin for RapidWeaver.
Bill Clementson's Blog: Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP - interesting comparison between Erlang and Clojure regarding multithreading.
(Field) - found at Schockwellenreiter and wow, this thing looks very interesting. Processing on steroids? In any case, much more open when it comes to programming languages. I definitely have to take a closer look, because simple graphical interfaces like Processing are what I'm missing for Processing or Abcl, for example.
Underscore.js - functional utilities for JavaScript.
UNITY: Game Development Tool - is now free as in free beer.