Erik Naggum, 1965-2009 RIP - it's strange to read an obituary for a Usenet poster and be touched by it - even if you never met the person yourself, only occasionally exchanged emails or news postings with them, and often shook your head at a thread in which he was involved. He was always uncomfortable. Nevertheless (or perhaps precisely because of that), he often and strongly shaped comp.lang.lisp. And sometimes he provoked thought.
programmierung - 5.1.2009 - 21.6.2009
software - xml - s-exp vs XML - and since it fits so well, one of his master postings about markup languages and their comparison to lisp S-Exprs. "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape."
httplib2 - a much more complete implementation of an HTTP client in Python. Also supports modern features (i.e., the things that have been developed in the last 10 years ...)
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages - a fascinating analysis of various programming languages based on statistical evaluations of their characteristics and metrics in a benchmark competition. So not a direct analysis of the benchmark and individual performance, but a much more meaningful analysis of the characteristics of the languages derived from the benchmarks.
Reading and Writing to Excel Spreadsheets in Python - if you ever have to interface with the devil's tools.
Geeking out with Lisp Flavoured Erlang - I really need to finally deal with Lisp Flavoured Erlang.
Nanojit - compact library for native code generation. Used in Tamarin and SpiderMonkey.
pickled-object-database - a simple small object database based on the Pickle API and SQLite. Looks quite interesting, reminds me quite a bit of Wood, a similar object database for Common Lisp.
Lamson: Lamson The Python SMTP Server - interesting project, especially if you plan to build on email as an interface.
Nimrod Programming Language - interesting Python variant with explicit support for parse trees (and thus macro capabilities at the level of Lisp) but native code compilation.
MonoDevelop on MacOS X - is though Microsoft junk, and the executable programs are called .exe, but at least there are a few interesting programming languages under Mono that you can now also meaningfully try out under OS X.
Hg-Git Mercurial Plugin - interesting for various reasons, not least the fact that Mercurial runs significantly better on Windows than Git.
Tropo - a hosted telephony system (e.g. for voicemail systems or similar) with API for programming plugins in various scripting languages. There are some things ...
Discount — a C implementation of the Markdown markup language - the title says it all. Looks good, and should be many times faster than the other markdown implementations - which would also make it interesting for live use. And Markdown is many times simpler than Docutils (Restructured Text).
Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - interesting article about scaling with Amazon's Elastic Cloud.
jgm's peg-markdown - and another C-based markdown version.
Python MQI Interface - pymqi. Version 0.5d - MQSeries and Python. (not that I'm a MQSeries fan, I just might need it for work)
Sup dawg, we heard you like Smalltalk so we put Smalltalk in your Factor so you can send messages while you roll - an implementation of Smalltalk in Factor. Quite extensible and could also bring this nice environment to people who don't know Factor yet (sometimes starting with a known language is easier).
An Experimental MacRuby - MacRuby will switch to LLVM as a virtual machine, moving away from the standard Ruby VM. Very interesting, as it promises significantly higher performance.
Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone - interesting overview of available game engines for the iPhone.
Somethings to rejoice about - about the changes in Erlang 13A. Especially very nice: finally real Unicode support in Erlang.
.epub eBooks Tutorial - how to produce ePub files with free software.
OpenDocument, diff, and revision-control - a few ideas on how to work with .odt and versioning. I might be able to use this for VoodooPad as well. However, I not only want to diff, but also merge - in order to sync cleanly between multiple machines. But as it looks, my best chances might be in git - my Mercurial integration works, but I have to limit VoodooPad quite a bit in features (all pages must be plain text at the moment). Or I build even more tools around Mercurial to automatically convert the RTF pages. None of this is really optimal - actually, it would suffice if I could sync cleanly with a lighttpd-based webdav, because MobileMe is just incredibly slow.
What happened to Hot Standby? - real native synchronization is coming with PostgreSQL 8.5! There are already existing solutions, but native is of course easier for administration. And should finally shorten the silly discussions with the MySQL disciples.
wmd - The Wysiwym Markdown Editor - brilliant. Markdown preview with JavaScript. A great thing for browser interfaces, as Markdown allows for much better reuse of text content than if it were direct HTML.
git installer für OS X - so you don't have to go through the MacPorts installation ordeal, it's not so impractical.
And now a physics engine for JavaScript... - Holy Cow!
A high-level cross-protocol url-grabber - nett. urllib is quite ok for http, but also rather low-level. This, on the other hand, looks quite useful for typical batch programs.
py-amqplib - AMQP Library for Python, seems promising.
Rabbits and warrens - RabbitMQ and Python - a report from reality.
txAMQP: Twisted AMQP in Launchpad - hmm. AMQP and Twisted - this could make the workers even more efficiently attached to a queue.
Using RabbitMQ Beyond Queueing - interesting article that deals with multiple consumers, persistent queues, and similar topics.
zeromq: Fastest. Messaging. Ever. - another AMQP server (besides RabbitMQ, which I already had, and QPID from the Apache project, which tends to lose messages), sounds quite interesting, especially the very low resources it requires. However, there is no persistence in queues.
FragStore - A Fragmenting Asset Store at Adam Frisby - those who want to know what technical problems are behind something like Second Life, here is a blog post about the problems with the asset server of osgrid.org, an experimental grid based on OpenLife (open source reimplementation of the Second Life protocols on the server side).
Demo scripts for gnuplot CVS version - gnuplot can now output to HTML Canvas! And thus super-simple embedding of plots in web pages!
Moving Forth: Part 1 - makes one nostalgic when reading the descriptions of old CPUs and still knowing the registers by name.
Wolfram Mathematica Home Edition - woooohooooo!! Wolfram finally sees the light! Ok, after clicking on the store, not available for your region. WTF?
NodeBox 2 - mean. Pictures and movies, but no test download! They can't do that to me, something like that!
LÖVE - Free 2D Game Engine - in Lua. And it's available for Mac as a Universal Binary. Screenshots look quite nice.
Online Backup: Multi-Platform, Multi-Computer | SpiderOak, Inc. - sounds like DropBox. Funny enough, also in Python (though only the server, with DropBox it's also the client). Also interesting: they publish a number of OpenSource components that they have written. Particularly the transaction-secured file system based on SQLite looks interesting.
Patterns in Python - and why many patterns are trivial with Python.
New in JavaScript 1.7 - because one often forgets that JavaScript can be a quite nice language. Especially the newer versions have learned interesting features.
Data Mining with R: learning by case studies - I should check this out, I have a few data sources that could use more intensive mining.
Bubble, bubble toil and trouble: Juice Analytics - Bubble Charts with Nodebox (which means Python). Very nice - and I am an absolute Nodebox fan. For me a very nice prototyping environment. With very useful libraries.
iUI Introduction Wiki Page. - great if you want to quickly visualize simple data so that it is practically accessible on the iPhone. The overhead for simple pages is very low and due to the strong JavaScript orientation, the data volumes are also very compact - which gives very good response times on the iPhone.
PyCha - no idea if I already had this, but used it for the first time today, a small and fine Python library that builds on Cairo and generates simple charts. Many annoying standard items are handled very nicely automatically and the results also look good!
pure-lang - not that we need more programming languages, but this one builds on LLVM as a backend, which opens up very interesting possibilities (especially in terms of performance).
Vx32: Lightweight, User-level Sandboxing on the x86 - interesting concept based on processor virtualization.