smart stuff
Why Smalltalk Didn't Take Over the World
Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form
appscript
appscript - Use Python as a replacement for AppleScript - full AppleEvent and OSA integration
Corgis let Queen down gently
While a sack of rice fell over in China, the Queen sat on a couple of dogs...
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Easy-to-Remember PINs
And speaking of stupid: the British are currently introducing smart cards - credit cards with chips. And the credit card companies seem to be publicly recommending changing the PIN for the chip card. That is, changing the randomly generated PIN to a different one - and specifically an easier to remember one. Like nice things such as birthdays or lucky numbers.
I really only have one question about this: how high must be the beef consumption among the people who came up with this stupid campaign?
At Schneier on Security you can find the original article.
Life sentence for terror suspects?
The US government apparently is considering indefinitely detaining terror suspects without sufficient evidence. - words fail me
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Security Risks in 2005
Oh man, so flat and uninteresting and devoid of any information that even Wolfgang from the WDR Computer Club didn't present topics like that...
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Springer incites (yet again)
Oh man, Wagner really has a screw loose. Actually, he's even too stupid for the Bild newspaper. Well, it's just their online garbage dump anyway.
No, I'm not linking to that rag. You have to draw the line somewhere. And there's the nice Bildblog, where you can find fitting comments on the latest nonsense right away.
At Der Schockwellenreiter I found the original article.
CincomSmalltalkWiki: Seaside Tutorial
CincomSmalltalkWiki: Seaside Tutorial - Seaside is a continuation-based web framework
Lisa turns Twenty-Two
Happy Birthday!
At Industrial Technology & Witchcraft you can find the original article.
Revision 8033: /user/arigo/greenlet
Revision 8033: /user/arigo/greenlet - Minimalistic threads (tasklets as in Stackless Python) as a normal Python C module
VisualWorks: StORE for PostgreSQL Documentation
VisualWorks: StORE for PostgreSQL Documentation - PostgreSQL as a versioning repository for VisualWorks Smalltalk
ASPN : Python Cookbook : A meta-class that provides class behavior like Ruby
ASPN : Python Cookbook : A meta-class that provides class behavior like Ruby - Class overloading (definition of new methods) with Python in Ruby style
Gus Mueller's Website
Gus Mueller's Website - Writing VooDooPad Plugins with Python and PyOBJC
recondite: You don't tug on Superman's cape... - Python zur virtuellen Maschine von VisualWorks Smalltalk compilieren
Ukraine: Yanukovych gives up
He no longer wanted to hold any office in the current state government, Yanukovych said on state television. - I could imagine that this is mutual.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there is the original article.
Who owns the Bundestag?
Well, everything's bought and corrupted. We're living in a banana republic.
At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.
Hartz IV: Disaster in Unemployment Benefit II Payment [Update]
Botch. Total botch. With such monster projects, you always do a test run with real data in advance - to avoid exactly these kinds of catastrophes. But these federal bunglers have already shown with other major projects that they might know a thing or two, but they have no clue about IT.
The problem at hand is a banal interface issue that shouldn't have come up at this stage of the project - unless the people implementing it are completely incompetent and stupid.
The original article can be found at heise online news as the original article.
Aid measures: Dispute looms between UN and USA
First class, quickly exploit the flood disaster politically. Here opposition politicians are attacking the government because it allegedly isn't being cooperative enough with the relatives of vacationers in the disaster area (as if the government knew more than anyone else - in the disaster area, sometimes those present on site don't even know exactly what's going on) and now the USA is hacking against the UN. As if we didn't have more important things to do
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD there is the original article.
Earthquakes shifted the Earth's axis
Wow!
At NETZEITUNG.DE Science you can find the original article.
Kyocera Discontinues Some 35mm Film Products
The dismantling is beginning. Kyocera is phasing out the analog line - something that had been expected for quite a while and was already in the works. But now even the bestselling Aria and the RX2, which was launched only relatively recently, are being discontinued. And a whole range of lenses. It's a shame - one of the most fascinating SLR systems is slowly disappearing from the market. And sorry, but the N1 and its lens lineup are nice, but definitely not comparable to the MM System. That one had grown over many years and was therefore nearly perfect in its equipment by the end. It will take quite a while before the N1 reaches that point.
I found the original article on PhotographyBLOG.
Logilab.org - Aspects documentation
Logilab.org - Aspects documentation - AOP for Python
TVO: The Vim Outliner
TVO: The Vim Outliner - an outliner in VIM macro language
Alice - functional language and environment
Alice is a very exciting new language from the ML family. It offers many interesting approaches to well-known problems and extends ML with meaningful features such as a functional model for multithreading. What particularly fascinates me is the discussion of lazy evaluation, futures and promises in the Alice tour - that hit exactly the nerve, as I had just finished building my own package for Python (lazypy). I immediately extended it with futures. An OS X version of Alice is also planned - I'm really curious, as the screenshots of the environment suggest quite a lot of promise. Previous ML implementations have tended to be rather austere in their user interface.
Codewalker for Python
Codewalker for Python - A code walker that can make various modifications to code from lambda expressions (specifically early binding etc.)
dirtSimple.org: More forward-chaining twists
Phillip J. Eby is thinking about how to implement a forward-chaining factbase (a fundamental mechanism of AI systems that enable rule- and fact-based programming) in Python. Very fascinating to read - he actually comes from the OO corner of Python (as one of the PEAK programmers - PEAK is basically the J2EE of the Python world) and here has his first hard encounters with functional programming. The whole thing also has practical implications: in PyProtocols (another project by Phillip), there is now already quite an advanced extension of Python's OO system towards a more CLOS-like environment with generic functions and multi-parameter dispatch for methods. Very interesting, as it opens up completely new possibilities. Here's the original article.
South Asia
Wow, the Wikipedia page on the Indian Ocean earthquake is really impressive. Lots of information and well-presented too.
I found the original article at Wortfeld.
Xoltar Python Page
Xoltar Python Page - diverse functional extensions to Python - curry, lazy expressions, partial evaluation etc.
Python is a weakly typed language, which as any experienced Python programmer knows has both good and bad points - Traits - optionale Typdeklarationen für Attribute in Python
Submarine earthquake kills thousands in Southeast Asia
Oh shit.
At WDR.de you can find the original article.
Snurf: a Python-based Blogging System
Snurf: a Python-based Blogging System - a nice little blogging system that doesn't require a database
Delayed Execution with Python
The original text has moved to the PyDS weblog. The reason is that I cannot manage the text properly with the new software because the necessary tools are not available here (specifically, source code formatting doesn't work here, and besides the text is too huge - at least when it is saved as XHTML).
Delayed Execution with Python
Delayed execution - delayed execution or lazy evaluation - is a very practical tool in programming. Unfortunately, not all programming languages support this tool directly. Languages that support closures and objects, however, can be extended quite easily to support delayed execution. I describe one approach for Python in this text. The text contains a series of Python code examples that show how a whole range of powerful Python language features can be used. The text could also be interesting for those who have less interest in lazy evaluation. Here's the original article.
Brian Mastenbrook: Forth porn
Memories come flooding back. PowerMops - an integrated Forth environment for the Macintosh - is now also available for OS X. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but the description still sounds as cool as it did back then. Direct native code compilation and integration with the various toolboxes and nowadays also with the Cocoa frameworks. And all of this in an object-oriented Forth.
I found the original article at Planet Lisp.
Successful Separation of Cassini and Huygens
They gave me a Saturn moon probe for my birthday, isn't that nice?
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Charming Python: Implementing "weightless threads" with Python generators
Charming Python: Implementing "weightless threads" with Python generators - Very interesting concept on how to build extremely resource-efficient threads in Python using generators - cooperative multitasking in 100% Python
Contracts for Python
Contracts for Python - Programming by Contract in Python based on descriptive metaclasses
Photos confirm abuse in the Bundeswehr
Digital cameras and camera phones will probably now be banned at the German armed forces.
At tagesschau.de - Die Nachrichten der ARD you can find the original article.
Microsoft attempts to patent object persistence
Toll - simple and banal object serialization. That sort of thing has existed for years, nonsense for decades. And Microsoft wants to patent it...
At kasia in a nutshell there's the original article.
Adding Optional Static Typing to Python
Guido van Rossum is thinking about optional static typing for Python. Very interesting, because optional static typing on one hand preserves the highly dynamic nature of Python, while on the other hand offering type declaration as an option for optimization. You can get a great sense of what something like this could accomplish by trying out PyRex - which already offers something like statically typed Python today. Here's the original article.
Asteroid discovered in immediate Earth proximity
Darn, missed it again.
At NETZEITUNG.DE Wissenschaft you can find the original article.
The "Thank you Poland!" Letter
Hey folks, thank you!
I found the original article at Industrial Technology & Witchcraft.
eBay could not prevent password theft
We take this problem very seriously. - sure, and pigs can fly.
At heise online news there is the original article.
Siemens CEO announces painful cuts in communications division
With only an operating profit of 1.3 billion euros and a surplus of still 650 million euros, one has to do that too. Rip-off artists and liars.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
Ok, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff. But this Ruby introduction is really completely insane. Definitely worth checking out. Even if you have zero interest in Ruby or programming languages. The author must be completely out of his mind - I don't know what he's taking to produce books like this, but I'd like two kilos of it.
Everything new for OS/2
OS/2 - yes, there was such a sad system back then, long long ago
At heise online news there's the original article.