FrontPage - Conkeror. Well blogged as a curiosity and because such projects simply fascinate me - a browser in JavaScript with an architecture inspired by Emacs (only JavaScript instead of ELisp).
Archive 17.11.2010 - 29.11.2010
Komodo Edit is a Free Open Source Editor for Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, Ruby & Javascript. I should check it out, as TextWrangler doesn't have folding, BBEdit is too expensive in my opinion, and TextMate has too modest Python folding support. And if this thing runs well across different systems, I would finally have a uniform GUI editor again (yes, I know, vim is available everywhere, but the GUI version just doesn't appeal to me).
Update: uh, hello, ActiveState? I understand that you want to sell your "cheap" IDE (special offer! Only $330), but at least Komodo Edit deserved the source outline, right?
Python Package Index : lupa 0.18. Brings LuaJIT2 and Python together, so that you can access Lua scripts from Python, which are then compiled by LuaJIT.
Because I just wrote about Lua: probablycorey's wax provides an Objective-C bridge to Lua, specifically for iOS devices. So you can write iPhone or iPad apps with Lua.
Have tracing JIT compilers won? | Lambda the Ultimate. Interesting discussion in which Mike Pall (LUAJit), Brendan Eich (Mozilla JägerMonkey) also participate (and specifically LUAJit is currently the King of the Mountains in terms of performance). PyPy is also mentioned, though still at a much older stage - the new 1.4 already shows much better what is possible with PyPy.
PyPy Status Blog: PyPy 1.4: Ouroboros in practice. And with that, PyPy has now also arrived at the JIT in 64bit. In addition, VirtualEnv now works smoothly if you install a current version. And it's still fast.
Build a Bootable Rescue SD Card For Your Mac | Mac|Life. I didn't know that Macs can also boot from SD cards.
IKVM.NET Home Page provides a Java VM in .NET - you should even be able to do crazy things like running Scala 2.8 on .NET with it.
Those who prefer to work with the keyboard rather than the mouse (or other pointing devices) can use gleeBox plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. This makes it quite efficient to operate a browser - and for my tortured right hand, it is sometimes better than reaching for the trackball.
MacRuby » An Introduction to GCD with MacRuby. Grand Central Dispatch is one of the cooler techniques that Apple has introduced at the OS level in recent times. And MacRuby has direct support for it. Very interesting (even if it of course only works in the OSX world).
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress is a very nice plugin that adds Captcha to comment forms. The special feature: it only does this if Akismet thinks a comment is spam. Captcha failure is then punished with the deletion of the comment - this keeps the spam queue manageable.
As a reminder: Zach's Journal - Making a small Lisp project with quickproject and Quicklisp. Just because I otherwise quickproject and similar things will forget again. With Clozure CL 1.6 Quicklisp also works quite completely (specifically cl-fad is functional and therefore you can get a larger stack of packages to fly finally). Zach is slowly putting together a stack of tools for Common Lisp with which it is fun to play around again. Even if I will probably never become a big Emacs fan, no matter how much others swear by the part for Lisp.
Marke: Facebook will Face - classic facepalm.
Higher Order Javascript provides many ideas about JavaScript programming (and CoffeeScript) and how to use functional programming sensibly in JavaScript. After all, JavaScript is a powerful language with interesting abstractions that you can certainly use.
Backbone.js is an interesting project that provides a real backbone structure for more complex JavaScript projects. It implements the Model/View/Controller structure for JavaScript and provides a number of Collection classes with corresponding APIs. What it does not provide is a thick stack of UI stuff or the 1001st implementation of DOM navigation or similar - it should therefore work well with things like jQuery, as it actually only provides the basic structure on which one can build when one no longer wants to store everything in the DOM. However, there are already some overlaps, for example with events - these are also provided by jQuery, but here they are not bound to DOM nodes, but to arbitrary objects.
Installing and using F# in MonoDevelop - a bit further down under "Installation Instructions" and look for the description for installing the F# MonoDevelop Plugin. Unfortunately, there are currently only templates for console projects with F# in the plugin.
F# cross-platform packages and samples - just look for the Mac Installer packages there (as of November 2010 Update) or above under "Download" (the link probably changes often when new releases come out). It's a simple Mac Installer, after which you have F# (OCaml for .Net) installed.
MonoMac - Mono. Ha ha, devil's tool and sell my soul and all that, but since I need C# for work anyway, I might as well take a look at MonoDevelop and its OSX integration - if I build small tools with it, I practice C# and can use it directly at the same time.
Datejs - An open-source JavaScript Date Library - makes a good impression, for the various format parsing and calendar-related stuff.
Kasseler Documentary and Video Festival » Reality Shock. Since I'm always looking for it, I might as well bookmark it here. (and so I have a chance to get there: this is the film through which I got to know the music of Billy's Band)
Printopia turns printers connected to a Mac into a virtual AirPrint-compatible printer. Does Apple actually realize how ridiculous the restriction to just a few HP printers with AirPrint is? They act as if printing is incredibly complicated. Why do you need third-party software if you don't want to be forced by HP to buy another disposable printer?
Zirkeltraining™ ★ The Range - Take A Look At Our Bag Collection. Bags of all kinds. Made from sports equipment leather, gym mats, and truck tarps. Used, of course. I refrain from public musings on whether sports equipment leather comes from old gym teachers ... (that would be in poor taste, after all)
Pixie Scheme III. For the iPad. Perhaps not entirely uninteresting for doodling (provided it also has usable integration with the iOS API).
Blogofile - I stumbled upon this while considering what to do. One of the many static blog engines in Python with Git integration. Could potentially be interesting for smaller sites (or e.g. for a metablog).
From the "pimp my Vim" department: UltimateVimPythonSetup. I am indeed a Vim fan, and some of the tips in there sound quite interesting. However, some things also go a bit too far for me, my reason for using Vim is precisely that I don't want an IDE, but an editor that mainly does one thing - source editing. But for the one or other out there maybe still (or precisely) interesting.
"A bomb on a plane heading to Germany? Admittedly, I'm just a science journalist, deal with physical phenomena, but frankly, I don't believe this news. It all fits too well. Here in my hotel are the interior ministers, and precisely now it is announced that Germany will soon be the target of a terrorist attack. This smells like a staged event."
via With de Maizière at the breakfast table: The terror is here, the muesli is gone - taz.de.
How I build-in Tumblr in my Drupal install is already very close to what I want to do with Tumblr on my homepage. Now I just need to write a minimal widget and stuff the code in there and instead of the regular posts, only go to the photos. And I'll have Tumblr photos on the homepage again.
Update: those who look to the right can see the Tumblr photos again. So on the homepage. It works quite well and doesn't take up any more time. Someday I'll put together the plugin that I built there, at the moment it's still a bit raw.
Sunday reading: Google Streetview - linked because I'm fed up with all the pro-Streetview talk and the "who pixelates doesn't understand the net" faction. The net is a medium for the whole society and not just a playground for some tech enthusiasts. And whoever ties their net freedom to the permission for unrestricted data collection for a large corporation has a significant understanding deficit. Especially when the sole purpose of this corporation is the systematic evaluation of these data mountains for the optimization of advertising.
API | Tumblr - maybe I want to do more with it than was used in the previous PHP example.
Display photos from Tumblr (using JSON method) is PHP, but I should be able to easily rebuild this in JavaScript and then run it only client-side.
hyphenator I could take a look at, because then the hyphenation simply runs with JavaScript in the browser. It's only interesting for the websites themselves anyway, feed readers have to render themselves.
Update: yeah, looks good. Now I can look at my homepage again without getting pimples, and the integration was very simple with their custom package builder - go through a few checkboxes, build an optimized download version of the library and include it in the head of the blog. As a class, I simply used entry-content, which means that all posts (and only those) are provided with hyphenation. And since it's client-side, it doesn't affect the feed or any other internal paths.
Performance hog ...
... one should not necessarily operate. The Tumblr widget needs about 300ms due to its synchronous access to Tumblr, and the typography plugin needs another 300ms. Ouch. Ok, my text just looks typographically crappy, I don't care.
With the cache, I'm currently at xcache - let's see if it produces strange messages like apc. I suspect conflicts between apc and WP Super Cache for my problems, because every time the problem occurred, I also had these strange GC messages from apc in the log. And no messages from PHP, which indicates that nothing was executed by PHP (which also explains the empty output).
There is support for the object cache of xcache in WordPress. Great, you can activate it with a small plugin. I'll save the link, because without this module the blog is faster (and 27 vs 29 DB queries is not exactly a wildly successful operation of the object cache). With the object cache activated, the blog was immediately back in the 700ms+ zone - quite without time-consuming plugins.
For Tumblr, I will now build a JavaScript-Ajax solution that uses the Tumblr API to find my images and push them into the HTML of the page. It's only for the look and then a Tumblr-Connect problem won't be accidentally cached.
But it's a shame about the quite remarkably well-functioning hyphenation from the typography plugin. You can't have everything. Render times in the range of above half a second I find silly. Maybe I'll change my mind again when I've stared at my blog for a while longer.
WordPress › Support » WP Super Cache sometimes ignites a blank Home Page! Need to restart Apache - sounds exactly like my problem, but it's already a year old. Seems to be some combination of many parts. For now, I've turned off APC, as it also produces strange messages in the error log, for which there are no really satisfying comments on the net to find. Somehow, the whole PHP stuff is really shitty. Too many parts coming from too many different places and all somehow but not quite working together. Basically, everything runs, but as soon as you want to get a grip on the performance problems, there are all sorts of strange and inexplicable effects. All just wild hacks.
Is the NATO strategy the problem or the solution? An examination of NATO, its composition and position in the world, and an assessment of its position paper and strategy - especially considering the dominance of the USA in this alliance. Surprisingly critical for a contribution from the public broadcasting sector.
Logisim could have saved me a lot of DM in my youth, which I spent on TTL chips (after I had previously and in between burned the same TTL chips).
Pure CSS GUI icons (experimental) are an excellent example of what you shouldn't do with CSS. Painting with box models is rather unproductive. But somehow it's still fascinating what some people do with their time ...
Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?. At first, I thought here comes another fringe physicist with crazy ideas or unproven claims. And then I read Roger Penrose in the article. Ooops.
BBC - Earth News - Attack of the rats. Why every 50 years in India giant hordes of rats destroy the harvest. All because of the biological clock of bamboo. Fascinating.
[WordPress › Support » [[Plugin: WP Super Cache]] Blank Pages - 500 Error - in Dashboard (sometimes the site too)](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wp-super-cache-blank-pages-500-errror-in-dashboard-sometimes-the-site-too). Describes my current problem since I have SuperCache - maybe this is also my solution. Otherwise, SuperCache will just be removed, because before that it actually ran well, just slowly. If it's dark (uh, white) in between, it might be due to my problem and I'm still analyzing.
Long Live the Web: Scientific American by Tim Berners-Lee. Why the web is so important to us and why and what we must protect it. Because more and more interest groups are trying to reduce the openness of the web for their purposes, ostensibly often to protect users or rights or other great and positively sounding reasons - but behind it all is simply the grab for power that one wants or fears to lose.
pyfpdf provides PDF generation without dependencies on other packages. However, it says "ported from PHP" up front. But if that doesn't deter you and you want to produce simple PDF outputs, you might not be so badly served with it.
Processing.js v1.0 Released and it is still a really nice toy. Now it is almost on par with the big Processing in terms of features.
Is My Blog Working? This is a question you ask yourself quite often. And the answer is not always as simple as just looking at it - for example, what about caching? This tool provides some information, but there is even more at RedBot and Cacheability. Especially for cache information, the last two are better than the first link.
Owl Content in new home
The Owl Content is now also running on the new box. It wasn't particularly complicated, the hairiest part was a silly bug in the Feedparser used (a terribly old version, it's quite possible that newer versions have already fixed this) and an incompatibility of the PHP gettext implementation, which is still used by Wordpress 1.5. Otherwise, it actually did pretty much everything needed right away. It may be that some hits are still running on the old system until the nameserver changes have spread around, but that should grow out in the next few days. And quite incidentally, the owl now has much stronger wings. It should be enough for the next 8000 posts.
With certainty: Calls for stricter laws | tagesschau.de - already absurd that federal ministers from the Union and FDP clearly oppose state ministers and their populist saber-rattling. Even more absurd that even SPD ministers are calling for something that has been rejected by the Federal Constitutional Court. And as the basis for all this, only claims without evidence and without verifiability. With this, the terrorists have already won, and these prole feeders are making themselves into errand boys. Can we please have them monitored by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution now? Their anti-constitutional stance is clearly documented ...
WP Super Cache is highly recommended if you use several plugins like I do (and possibly access external services like the Tumblr plugin). Okay, there is a risk that a broken status from Tumblr might be cached in the sidebar, but this will resolve itself after a while. However, the runtime of a fully loaded WordPress is indeed a bit sluggish.
offline_messages for OpenSim here in a PHP version. I should take a look at it, actually I should be able to build something in Python from it that I can then use.
I've now activated the wp-Typography plugin on my blog for testing. While I haven't seen many good hyphenation algorithms for German before, this one might work reasonably well. It certainly makes sense to prevent widows and orphans. And in the first test, the text already looks very pleasant.