Archive for June, 2006

The Semi-Colon Wars

Friday, June 16th, 2006

Brian Hayes' latest article for American Scientist, "The Semi-Colon Wars", is a readable little survey of pointless holy wars in computing: semi-colons vs. parentheses, big-endian vs. little-endian, and more besides. It's fun, and his programming language genealogy chart is very pretty.

I Am So Far Behind The Times

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

I found this color-based shopping aide today; I guess I kind of know in theory how it works, but I have no idea where I'd start if I had to reproduce it...

Animator vs. Animation

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

Warning: this is not for people who already have a weak grasp of reality ;-)

Let the Mocking Begin

Monday, June 5th, 2006

I bought an Acer Aspire 3620 three and a half weeks ago, primarily because it was light (under four pounds) and cheap (nine hundred dollars).  It's been nothing but trouble; most recently, I've been wrestling with the fact that when it puts itself to sleep, there's no way to wake ...

PowerShell for Linux?

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

I've been excited by Windows PowerShell (formerly Monad) ever since I first heard about it, as it promises to bring the world's first great component architecture --- the Unix shell --- into the 21st Century.  There's no doubt Microsoft is going to push it: its official home page and team ...

Summer of Code on One Page

Friday, June 2nd, 2006

This year's Summer of Code recipients were announced last week. I wanted to browse the list off-line, but doing it on the SoC site would have meant clicking through 102 separate pages (one per sponsoring organization). No problem: Python's urllib lets me download pages as easily as I'd ...