Mandelbulb: The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal - Mathematics can simply be beautiful.
Archive 23.10.2009 - 12.11.2009
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.
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.