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?
Archive 29.9.2009 - 22.10.2009
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.
Münsterland Giro
Münsterland Giro
Just because I still find the picture of racing cyclists on the Prinzipalmarkt quite strange. I really should be used to it by now, it's been happening for several years.
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.
GNU Smalltalk - as an old Smalltalker (Methodworks anyone??) I always take a look at what's happening there. GNU Smalltalk was long the stepchild of Smalltalks, but meanwhile it has really gained a lot. Especially the support for Cairo and LibSDL brings some possibilities for graphics and Seaside is the part for web applications par excellence (with Swazoo as the web server underneath). And a native web framework of its own is already available with Iliad. And with SandstoneDB there is a persistence layer for objects. And the biggest disadvantage of GNU Smalltalk - the lack of a graphical environment - becomes a real advantage for web applications, because headless GNU Smalltalk is trivial. The next version 3.2 will be really exciting.
Winclone - because I've been wondering all the time how I can properly back up my Bootcamp partition - this makes it simple and easy from OS X (which is where I spend most of my time).
Roman Polanski - since Johnny has closed the comments, my comment here. Polanski admitted to committing the rape and knowing how old she was. No, having sexual intercourse and anal sex with a 13-year-old girl whom you previously made compliant with drugs is not "seduction". It is absurd that so many people from the film industry are now taking to the barricades and thinking something like this should simply be forgotten. No, the fact that the victim has now forgiven him does not change anything. He did it. He admitted it himself. There is no discussion about the "if", but only about the "how much" - years in prison. Damn it, he raped a minor. Why do you want to defend someone like that? This advocacy for Polanski is a slap in the face of every raped and abused girl.
Chicago Boss - the no-nonsense MVC framework for Erlang - no idea what will come of it, but the beginning already looks quite interesting.
Log-structured file systems: There's one in every SSD - interesting article about SSDs and their performance behavior. Particularly interesting from the perspective that SSDs are increasingly being tried as an alternative to high-performance disk systems.
My final Ricoh GR Digital III impressions - interesting, as Wouter just takes photos and doesn't look at pixels. If he says he was a bit disappointed with the image quality, then you can take it seriously in the sense of "it would also affect me if I used it". But in any case, it will be the 20mm for the GH1 first, which is compact enough for starters.
Gabriel should become SPD party leader - Gabriel and Nahles would certainly not be the worst choice for the positions. If they are allowed to do their job and not break out again in internal party disputes and tear themselves apart, they might be able to organize something similar to opposition. At least both of them open their mouths and it's not just nonsense that comes out.
Pick up a penguin - penguins are freaks!
Plumber Jack: Python Logging 101 - this is occasionally asked in the company and I keep wondering myself. The link explains the most important things about Python Logging on an HTML page.
sink - nice little tool for comparing directories (even more than two) and synchronizing.
Dropbox iPhone App is out - and the application seems pretty well suited to what I would like to do with the Dropbox on the go. Pretty cool.