Programming Languages

Just for fun

Programming Languages.

Kieran Healy provides a pointer to how to understand different programming languages, and warns against upgrading:

Crooked Timber: Don’t Upgrade : APL is a pithy language…. A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C ( A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language ), C++ ( an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog ) and FORTRAN ( Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice ).

[Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]

No posting for a bit

I won’t have access to the net over the next week, so I won’t be posting. Scarier, I won’t be staying on top of the incoming information flow. As it is I’ve still got 150 items backed up in my aggregator that I want to think about and possibly comment on. More when I get back.

SpaceShipOne blog

I’ll be following this closely. In the long run this may be the most important news of 2004.

SpaceShipOne blog, part 4. Ground crew member Alan Radecki says:

Hi All, The FAA spaceport license came through today, and almost immediately, signs went up at the airport. Pics are now up on the Mojave Airport Weblog as well as a couple aerials showing the parking & RV areas that I shot this morning from our helo. For those who’ll be in the RV park, sounds like the NASA interns will be throwing a big party with a band and all.

Link to part 3, Link to part 2, Link to part 1. Handy overview photo that shows the Mojave Airport scene where the ship will launch on Monday: Link. (Thanks, Todd Lappin) [Boing Boing]

Faith and Mathematics

I sure do miss Calvin and Hobbes. Always full of deep wisdom.

Calvin and Hobbes Struck Long Ago.

Anatol tells us that the Los Angeles Times’s op-ed page is way behind the curve in its attacks on “secular thought” as a religion. The definitive such attack was made by Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin: “Math is not a science. It’s a religion. Here is a bunch of numbers, and by some magic they become another bunch of numbers. You either believe it, or you don’t. As a math atheist, I demand being freed of this”.

Hobbes: “In public school, no less. Call a lawyer”

[Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal (2004)]

My two cents on Winer

I suppose I’d feel a bit paranoid if every action I took elicited the response that “Dave” gets. For all I know, I might well have one of those supposed 3,000 weblogs that momentarily have gone away. I chose to move on to my own site once I had developed a better sense of what I wanted to do.

I haven’t been a programmer for a long time and I was never as talented at it as many. But I do create things and I know that it takes real emotional energy to create. Far more than it does to throw stones.

I’ve used products from “Userland” as a major component of the creative work I’ve done over the last several years and I’ve paid for them, because that’s what you do to ensure that you have and will have the tools you need to do your work. I have never had anything but cordial and helpful interactions with “Dave” over that time.

I also agree with AKMA’s observations this morning.

The world is full of creators and critics. Spend your time with the creators.

What’s Wrong With Winer? / Pointless Battles.

I wish people would just get a hold of themselves on the Winer / weblogs.com thing… I mean all this ranting is just a waste of energy… it was a free service – it ended – stop complaining and using this as a bashing opportunity.

It also pisses me off when people write about Winer and, so-bloody-often, put in this ‘but if you know what he’s like’ type comment. Why do people think he’s so bad? I’ve been in this sphere for ’bout a year and a half now… reading widely… and I just don’t get it…

Pershunally I agree with a lot of what he says today. I wish people would expend their energy on more worthy issues!

[incorporated subversion]

RSS Feed to dasBlog Content Converter

RSS Feed to dasBlog Content Converter.

Greg Hughes once had a LiveJournal Blog and the only remnant of his blog was an RSS Feed/Archive.  Now that he runs dasBlog he wanted to move his old content foward into dasBlog.  So, we googled a bit and couldn’t find a tool that would take an RSS (2.0) feed as input and put the entries into dasBlog.

So we made one over lunch, and here it is: RSStoDasBlog.zip (219.29 KB)

Greg Hughes once had a LiveJournal Blog and the only remnant of his blog was an RSS Feed/Archive.  Now that he runs dasBlog he wanted to move his old content foward into dasBlog.  So, we googled a bit and couldn’t find a tool that would take an RSS (2.0) feed as input and put the entries into dasBlog.

So we made one over lunch, and here it is: RSStoDasBlog.zip (219.29 KB)

Use it like this by pointing it to the RSS file and your (local) dasBlog content folder.  It will create all the needed dayentry.xml files for you to upload to your remote blog.  It will also (I think) take an http:// url to an RSS file and could be used to (possible as a service?) steal RSS and mirror them in dasBlog.  Thanks to Jerry (Chris) Maguire’s RSS Framework that showed up first in Google and saved me the time of running XSD.exe on an RSS XML schema. Apparently he has even newer stuff on his site.  It’s got a few more moving parts than I think it needs to, but it did the job with a few changes that I marked with my initials; SDH.

RSStoDasBlog.exe MyRssFile.xml “C:\documents and settings\whatever\dasblog\content”

Use it like this by pointing it to the RSS file and your (local) dasBlog content folder.  It will create all the needed dayentry.xml files for you to upload to your remote blog.  It will also (I think) take an http:// url to an RSS file and could be used to (possible as a service?) steal RSS and mirror them in dasBlog.  Thanks to Jerry (Chris) Maguire’s RSS Framework that showed up first in Google and saved me the time of running XSD.exe on an RSS XML schema. Apparently he has even newer stuff on his site.  It’s got a few more moving parts than I think it needs to, but it did the job with a few changes that I marked with my initials; SDH.

[ComputerZen.com – Scott Hanselman’s Weblog]

Snap those Meeting Notes

A lot cheaper and a lot more portable than those big electronic whiteboard. Another way to get some value out of my Sony DSC-T1

Snap those Meeting Notes.

Passed along from David, a pointer to ClearBoard. It cleans up pix you’ve snapped of whiteboards or flipcharts, turning them into relatively clean graphic images reasonable for putting on a team website to augment meeting notes.

Looks like a nice application of edge-finding and contrast-enhancing. Nothing that probably couldn’t be done in PhotoShop or whatever, but this does it automatically and quickly. Simple. Smart.

[Steven’s [Mostly] Tech Notebook]

Google Globe..

If you’ve got the data, flaunt it.

Google Globe….

Mmm, humansOver on Dan Gilmor s eJournal there s a video of the Google Globe , an Earth rotating which shows the relative numbers of queries to the Google site in various parts of the world . Apparently Google showed this off at the D Conference earlier this week. We re not sure if it s really cool or downright creepy. If we were an alien invasion team sent to take over earth, we d first index all the human knowledge with a search engine then we d eventually eat them.

[Engadget]