UNITY: Game Development Tool - is now free as in free beer.
Linkblog - 4.10.2009 - 29.10.2009
Scientists discover gene that 'cancer-proofs' rodent's cells - presumably p16 not only makes you safe from cancer, but also causes hair loss and ugly long front teeth ...
[Python-Dev] Reworking the GIL - sounds good! No, the GIL will not be removed - but the scheduling will be revised and thus some of the threading problems under Python could be fixed.
Apple cancels ZFS project - why Apple dropped ZFS.
Exploring the Mandelbrot set with your GPU - quite a cool Clojure library that enables GPU usage with Clojure.
The Self Handbook - since Self has now been revived, this is certainly interesting. It is also historically interesting, as Self more or less invented prototype-based OO systems and is still highly modern in many respects.
Klaus Staeck on the danger of "blogorrhea" - and where, pray tell, is the quality journalism in times of regional dominance of the Springer press in areas above 90%? I can't find even a whiff of quality in any product from the house. Should the few other editorial teams be expected to do it all? Seems more than doubtful when I consider that most alternatives to the Springer press are either just as terribly bad, or write from a rather conservative worldview. Either you trust the media consumers with media competence - then you must accept blogs at least as much as the Springer press - or you don't trust them with media competence. Then you must also consistently argue against the Blödzeitung and similar waste of paper. Bad journalism doesn't suddenly become better just because you print it. And good journalism remains good, even if it has never been through a rotary press.
bamboo-language - "Bamboo is intended to provide an implementation of Smalltalk and Strongtalk for both the iPhone and Mac OS X, leveraging Apple's Objective-C runtime, LLVM, and Clang.". There is not much content there yet, so it should rather be considered a statement of intent.
DeliciousSafari - sync Safari bookmarks with delicious. Alternative to bookmark sync via MobileMe? There are also iPhone apps for Delicious. And calendar, contacts, etc. can also be done as push sync via Google.
Enterprise scala actors: introducing the Akka framework - sounds a bit like OTP (the server platform for Erlang) for Scala. Could be very interesting, let's see.
Mozilla Labs Raindrop - reminds me somehow of Radio Userland (not just because of the desktop web server, but also because of the objective).
pier - anyone who wants to play around with Seaside and applications for it on the Mac, here is a project that has built a Mac application around a Squeak with Seaside and a CMS. It makes quite an interesting impression (and yes, today is once again dig-into-google-code-projects day ...)
Snow project - a GUI library for abcl (armed bear common lisp) based on Swing.
xmlisp - and yet another MCL descendant (or perhaps rather a CCL descendant). So a Common Lisp on Mac, this one with specific extensions for 2D and 3D graphics and game programming. Reminds a bit of Processing at first glance.
MCL - the old Digitool MCL (originally Apple's Macintosh Common Lisp and before that Coral Common Lisp I think) lives on not only in Clozure Common Lisp, but also as a direct descendant of the formerly commercial package. At least interesting for Lisp nostalgics. Unfortunately only runnable with Rosetta, not direct Intel code. But maybe that will come yet?
Panasonic Leica 45mm F2.8 Macro OIS Lens Review - not exactly cheap. The specs read quite nicely.
Machinarium - super cute Flash game demo.
The Wikipedia is irrelevant - about the problems with the deletion procedure especially in the German corner of Wikipedia.
rosado's clj-processing - how to marry Processing and Clojure. With this, you should actually be able to rebuild the Processing GUI on the Mac so that Clojure is used instead of Java. Perhaps not entirely uninteresting to play around with.
ScalaCL: Reap OpenCL’s benefits without learning its syntax (Scala DSL for transparently parallel computations) - and anyone who wants to play around with OpenCL will find what they're looking for here, without having to delve into the hardware depths.
Spde - and then there's also a combination of Scala and Processing. Also quite interesting to play around with.
macwidgets - As I'm currently playing with Scala, Clojure, Jython and other JVM-based languages, these Java widgets are quite interesting as they bring a bit of Mac look (unfortunately not necessarily feel) to the rather visually sparse Swing.
rlwrap - nice little tool that brings readline support to any command line application. With this, you can also edit lines in Clojure in a somewhat reasonable way (though it can of course only support line editing, not editing of logically related expressions).
Living with the Hopeless: Wallraff's New Undercover Mission - I just think the guy is great. Sure, sometimes polemical - but the others do the same. And unlike some quiet ones, he names names.
toolmantim's bananajour - funny idea, simple way to announce git repositories in local networks via Bonjour. For networks where several programmers sit, a fine thing, as you can quickly find out who is currently hacking on what and what state the repositories are in.
Takeover of the SPD leadership was a mistake - maybe so, but Münte's other conclusions are bullshit. Be proud of 11 years of government debacle with unprecedented dismantling of the social system? As a Social Democrat? Really? And of course, the blame is once again only on the other (the evil Oskar!), and in no way on the aimlessness and lack of program of an SPD that presents itself as a "better Union". Hey, Münte, understand finally: if the only program of the SPD consists of imitating the CDU, people will certainly rather vote for those who still write social democratic topics on their program - or simply the Union or its offshoots, because they can do corruption better.
Spiders that don't like meat - the spiders, the vegetarians. Or so.
Let it crash (the right way…) - about "happy case programming" and why it is often nonsense to try to catch every error in the code (because the programmer often cannot know how to handle the error).
Dutch DSB-Bank bankrupt - the outrage of the bank owner is almost cute, as he gets upset about the cheeky savers who actually wanted their money back! And then the financial supervision, which dares to keep an eye on him!
Tom Waits - Free Glitter and Doom Live Album Preview - ok, you have to enter a valid email address to download the songs, but hey, it's Tom Waits!
Using Erlang to Build Reliable, Fault Tolerant, Scalable Systems | October 12, 2009 - interesting case study on using Erlang for fault-tolerant systems.
Cloud Data Blown Away for Sidekick Users - "T-Mobile advises its customers that have cached data not to run out of power, restart, or shut down their Sidekicks, lest the last chance of recovery would be lost." - reality provides the best parodies!
JAD Java Decompiler Download Mirror - because I was looking for it recently.
Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data - ok, I don't use the guest account, but maybe someone out there does. If so, better read here first, before the data is gone.
Claude Monet's Masterpieces in Wuppertal - I really wouldn't have thought that I would put Wuppertal on my must-see list for the next few months. But with an exhibition like this, it's probably unavoidable. Respect!
Useless Factor: Bitfields in Factor structs and the special style - and again a Factor link. I am always amazed. In this case, an implementation of efficient bit structures. Yes, memory is cheap, but there are enough situations where you still need this today - and if you already implement something like this, why not do it right like here?
WizBang - probably completely nonsensical for anything beyond the simplest toys, but well, I'm just a fan of graphical programming languages. And one or the other has even worked quite well (like ProGraph, for example).
Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize - Yes, he can!
Simpler long polling with Django and gevent - interesting use of Greenlets (Python Microthreads).
City ranking: Munich in the lead, Herne at the bottom - and Münster in second place ...
Thawte revokes personal email certificates - oh yes, I still remember the silly discussions that Verisign and Thawte as central signature authorities were much more trustworthy than the grassroots web-of-trust with PGP at that time. Funny, PGP (and now gpg) keys still work and will continue to work. And since a real web-of-trust was established there, it doesn't matter if a server in the gpg signature chain is shut down. But of course, the commercial certificates are much better ...
MacRuby » MacRuby 0.5 beta 1 - the project is getting more and more interesting. The LLVM-based VM is one of the most exciting topics lately. I wish someone would do something similar for Python as well.
Amazon goes global with new Kindle - well, I think I'll rather continue to be a user of an e-reader with cracked DRM and without remote deletion of books. In some cases, offline is better than online.
Finding Similar Items with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Python, and Hadoop Streaming - worth a look, sounds quite interesting.
I like Unicorn because it's Unix - good overview of a pre-forking web server in Ruby. Something like this based on the existing tools for Python would be nice. Maybe I should tackle my toolserver again and switch to multiprocessing and rebuild the whole communication stuff around processes.
shedskin - hmm, I think I haven't seen that one yet. Compile Python code to C++. That could be interesting for one project or another.
Lawyer Günther convicted of aiding and abetting fraud - is this the beginning of the end for extortionate cease-and-desist letters?
EC2 and Ubuntu - Alestic.com - ready-made AMIs for setting up Ubuntu-based EC2 instances.
Clamato: A Smalltalk Dialect for JavaScript - I have no idea if I already had this and I'm too lazy to check, but it's interesting enough for a repost.
Dynamic Web Development with Seaside - and since I just came across it, an open book about Seaside. So you can start hacking right away. Everyone should check out Seaside, even if they come from Ruby or Python or PHP corners, it's just one of the most exciting web frameworks out there.