Time loop

Funding Clojure 2010

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:13:27 +0100

Funding Clojure 2010

World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:00:36 +0100

World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem

Mario World

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:33:03 +0100

Mario World

error-kit, described nicely in “When Things Go...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:47:57 +0100

error-kit, described nicely in “When Things Go Wrong” by Stuart Halloway (in the first issue of PragPub magazine).

"I learned to type on a key-punch. The keystrokes were long and slow and noisy. For a while I had an..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:05:33 +0100

“

I learned to type on a key-punch. The keystrokes were long and slow and noisy. For a while I had an IBM Electric typewriter. The touch was superb: soft and quiet with real tactile feedback. When I tried an IBM keyboard, I was bitterly disappointed. It clattered. Keystrokes were vague and noisy. Feedback was a joke. Didn’t cost much, though. Technology seems to be a random walk. Some things get better, some worse. It’s like evolution, not goal-directed. Cell phones get smaller, ‘till you can’t use them; then they get bigger.

An example is USB, the Universal Serial Bus. It’s a success that people must cope with. It’s also a disaster. The universal protocols it dictates require a huge amount of software to support. To develop such software requires reading thousands of pages of specs. Which are neither complete nor accurate. So what happens? Someone develops an interface chip that encapsulates the complexity. And then you must learn to use that chip, which is at least as complex.

Complexity is the problem. Moving it from hardware to software, or vice versa, doesn’t help. Simplicity is the only answer.

”

- Chuck Moore

1 to 25, interesting puzzle

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:21:53 +0100

1 to 25, interesting puzzle

"With web transaction processing, there’s only one event processed during the lifetime of the..."

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:40:37 +0100

“

With web transaction processing, there’s only one event processed during the lifetime of the View: the Request. Sessions, Requests, Responses and Containers are just as important as models and views for web transaction processing, so why don’t they call it the “Model/View/Session/Request/Response/Container” paradigm, to be more accurate? Why try to lump everything that’s not a model or a view into the Controller, just to make it seem like Smalltalk? Using a vague ambiguous word like “Controller” to classify everything that doesn’t look like a model or view is just Fuzzy Logic Design, and to compare it with SmallTalk’s MVC is Cargo Cult Design.

(…)

Java Swing (which is an interactive gui, not a web server framework) merges the view and the controller into one class, because they recognized the problems with brittle Smalltalk controllers: “traditional MVC architecture makes it very hard to create a generic controller that doesn’t know at design time what kind of view will eventually be used to display it.”

”

- Don Hopkins

"// sometimes I believe compiler ignores all my comments"

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:58:11 +0100

“// sometimes I believe compiler ignores all my comments”

- Sergey Kornilov

Burroughs B5000: The Descriptor and The Information Brochure

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:24:00 +0100

Burroughs B5000: The Descriptor and The Information Brochure

"Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan..."

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:16:01 +0100

“

Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

(…)

Like I said, it’s a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn’t have to have any particular musical merits. I think a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditious gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

”

- Alan Kay

No More Iterations

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:37:14 +0100

No More Iterations:

Also worth reading: 5 Right Reasons and 5 Wrong Reasons to Apply Kanban.

"If you pray for something and nothing happens like a million times, but then something close enough..."

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:31:53 +0100

“If you pray for something and nothing happens like a million times, but then something close enough does, it wasn’t coincidence — your prayers were actually heard, and now you can pray for other things, and they’ll eventually come true, too, if you pray sincerely enough or do whatever you can be duped into doing by some manipulative, evil person who exploits your lack of understanding of statistics.”

- Erik Naggum

Installing Mongrel under Ruby 1.9

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:11:07 +0100

Installing Mongrel under Ruby 1.9

invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:32:08 +0100

In Ruby 1.9 files with non-ASCII characters need a comment specifying an encoding, e.g.:

# coding: utf-8

much like it works in Python.

When 2Gb of RAM is not enough

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:39:51 +0100

Number of Google Chrome and tinyproxy processes is killing me. Adjusting tinyproxy.conf helped a bit:

MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10

"Is it possible to use this nascent web, and the emerging social media trends to reach our target..."

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:50:17 +0100

“Is it possible to use this nascent web, and the emerging social media trends to reach our target market more effectively and inexpensively than paid search? This was the question we sought to answer with this 12 month research study. What we found was that, by understanding and applying a set of new principles and steps, we were able to generate over 1400% better ROI using SMO to drive over 90,000 targeted clicks to our websites.”

- Social Media Optimization

The 8 hour journey to a single character

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:24:55 +0100

The 8 hour journey to a single character

Standish CHAOS Report Methods Questioned

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:24:55 +0100

Standish CHAOS Report Methods Questioned

Ponyo

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Ponyo

"Those modules with a low number of assertions per KLOC had much higher post-release bug rates than..."

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:33:41 +0100

“Those modules with a low number of assertions per KLOC had much higher post-release bug rates than those seeded with many assertions. (…) systems with less than about ten to 25 asserts per KLOC experience much higher post-release bugs than those using more assertions. The benefit seems to taper off around 50 to 100 asserts per KLOC.”

- The Use Of Assertions