Computer languages and facial hair
posted on Apr 30, 2008 - View this thread

From the Infocom treasure trove: Milliway's, the unreleased sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
posted on Apr 18, 2008 - View this thread

101 Great Mostly Pretty Good and Hopefully Correctly Attributed Quotes About Computers and Programming. But Wait There's More! Yep, 101 More Quotes plus an extra extra added bonus for a limited time, the second list as originally published in Spanish, because it's fun to read Isaac Asimov and Emo Philips in another language, and Lou Dobbs will get so pissed off.
posted on Apr 18, 2008 - View this thread

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally. Or: You weren't meant to have a boss. On the other hand, maybe you are.
posted on Mar 21, 2008 - View this thread

Extensible applications such as Firefox appear to be banned by Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement: No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)… An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. An Application may write data on a device only to the Application's designated container area, except as otherwise specified by Apple. Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.
posted on Mar 7, 2008 - View this thread

A 3d graphics engine written in Excel. Money shot on page 4. Blatantly stolen from seanyboy.
posted on Mar 6, 2008 - View this thread

If you could use a great big free handbook of discrete math and algorithms, Jörg Arndt's fxtbook wants to be your friend. Plain text table of contents to whet your appetite.
posted on Mar 5, 2008 - View this thread

Riding the Waves of interest in MVC web frameworks such as Rails, Django, TurboGears, and Cake, comes the latest entrant: Ruby Waves. Interesting features include request lambdas, hot patchable, nestable templates, app reusability, and decoupled controller/view. Is the proliferation of MVC projects helping to push innovation forward? Or pointlessly reinventing the wheel? (via RubyInside)
posted on Feb 29, 2008 - View this thread

Getting to the source of 5 beautiful lines of Quake 3. Rys Sommefeldt traces the history of a very quick (and now infamous) inverse square-root function used in Quake 3. (via)
posted on Feb 8, 2008 - View this thread

"This is the story of when I re-wrote the Lotus Notes Formula Engine.... So here was I was, offered this position that I clearly wasn't qualified for. I had no experience with language runtimes or compilers, I knew very little about C and didn't know anything about C++, I had never dealt with platform byte ordering and packing and all the other issues associated with writing something for eight different operating systems, I had never even used proper version control. But none of that mattered to me. It seemed to me like an amazing opportunity and I would be doing exactly the kind of stuff I enjoy most..."
posted on Nov 24, 2007 - View this thread

You can't tell a hero by his size
I'm just a Teeny Little Super Guy!
Oh yeah!"

Writer for Roger Ramjet, Dirk Niblick, and voice of the Glitch.
Jim Thurman, one Teeny Little Super Guy I miss.
posted on Nov 3, 2007 - View this thread

StupidFilter is a work in progress which aims to recognize online stupidity programmatically. Keep in mind we grade stupidity on a scale of 1 to 5. Someone might get a 1 or 2 for a comment that used no punctuation, whereas a comment consisting of nothing but text message abbreviations with a dash of LOLLLLL thrown in for good measure would probably rate a solid 4 or 5. There is a certain amount of subjectivity, and our software is aware of that; scoring will be normalized to eliminate excessively generous or harsh estimations of stupidity. Read some examples of "the tyranny of idiocy" in their collection of Random Stupidity .
posted on Oct 18, 2007 - View this thread

It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (1, 2), download her thesis, and download the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work here (predominantly in German). via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted on Aug 31, 2007 - View this thread

Ever read a blog post, and think, "I wish I wrote that"? For all the Mefites with the many AskMe questions about "can I/should I/how should I learn to/ be a computer programmer", here's a pretty good explication of how good programing is done: Holding a Program in One's Head.
posted on Aug 24, 2007 - View this thread

"How I Became A Programmer" veers between linear biography and brain dump. The piece meanders through its theme, stopping along the way to flirt with word origins, family politics, the senior prom, Japan, airlines and military recruitment. Reading it, I felt trapped inside inside an extremely quirky -- yet recognizable (in a too-close-for-comfort way) -- mind. About half the time I yearned to tell him that he needs an editor; the other half, I was grateful that he didn't have one. Mostly, I'm amazed he HAD a date to the senior prom!
posted on Aug 18, 2007 - View this thread

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills. "Obsolescence is a relative -- not absolute -- term in the world of technology."
posted on Jun 25, 2007 - View this thread

lolcats are great but now they can code!
posted on May 29, 2007 - View this thread

Douglas Crockford, leading JavaScript Architect for Yahoo!, has been teaching a series of classes on JavaScript programming for other Yahoo! employees.
The JavaScript Programming Language [4 video clips: 1 (31 min) 2 (31 min) 3 (29min) 4 (20 min), presentation slides: zipped PPT]
An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM [3 video clips: 1 (31 min) 2 (21 min) 3 (26 min), presentation slides: zipped PPT]
Advanced JavaScript [3 video clips: 1 (31 min) 2 (25 min) 3 (11 min), presentation slides: zipped PPT]
posted on May 10, 2007 - View this thread

In this century, you may have dozens of programming languages lurking on your machine. But how to use them?? A fundamental secret! Well, no more. We cannot stand for that. Hackety Hack will not stand to have you in the dark! Now with 100% more MeFi.
posted on Apr 26, 2007 - View this thread

“I wanted to try to capture the intelligence of the design, not just the outcome of the design.” “In 1977, [Donald] Knuth halted research on his books for what he expected to be a one-year hiatus. Instead, it took 10. Accompanied by [his wife] Jill, Knuth took design classes from Stanford art professor Matthew Kahn. Knuth, trying to train his programmer’s brain to think like an artist’s, wanted to create a program [TeX] that would understand why each stroke in a typeface would be pleasing to the eye.”—from a profile of Knuth in the Stanford Magazine (May '06). Salon calls him “computing’s philosopher king” (Sep '99). NPR’s Morning Edition interviews Knuth as “the founding artist of computer science” (Mar '05). Perhaps a MeFite somewhere has one of these? (Previously)
posted on Apr 23, 2007 - View this thread

Gary Stasiuk's beautiful Digital Creatures pulls the curtains on the kinematics of geometric objects, after which he plays with the mathematics and user interactivity of generative art and shows how to build the appearance of AI behaviors into Flash objects.
posted on Apr 11, 2007 - View this thread

How to write a spelling corrector in twenty lines of Python.
posted on Apr 10, 2007 - View this thread

Magic Ink - Information Software and the Graphical Interface
posted on Apr 7, 2007 - View this thread

Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Palm and Handspring, has started a new company, called Numenta, to test his controversial theory of intelligence. Whether you find his theory plausible or not, his book, "On Intelligence" is fascinating. Numenta is attempting to build A.I.s using Hawkins' theory as a backbone. They've developed a software engine and a Python-based API, which they've made public (as free downloads), so that hackers can start playing. They've also released manuals, a whitepaper (pdf) and videos [1] [2]. (At about 30:18 into the first video, Hawkins demonstrates, with screenshots, the first app which uses his system.)
posted on Apr 4, 2007 - View this thread

Do you want to learn Lisp? The complete text of Harold Abelson's and Gerald Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd ed. 1996) is online with a bunch of additional resources. There is also a complete series of lectures based on the first edition given in 1986.
posted on Apr 4, 2007 - View this thread

John W. Backus, creator of Fortran, RIP
posted on Mar 19, 2007 - View this thread

India's Outsourcing Problems One of the most controversial aspects of the global economy has been the newfound freedom of companies from physical location and the subsequent spread of outsourcing jobs. No country had embraced tech outsourcing with the passion of India. Of late, problems there are beginning to rise: engineers start a project, get a few months' experience, and then bolt for greener pastures, bringing a level of attrition that replaces entire staffs within the course of a year. Combine that with salaries in Bangalore that are rising at 12% to 14% per year and it is no surprise that companies are leaving India for a slew of emerging hot spots for IT outsourcing such as the old Soviet Bloc, China, and Vietnam. This comes as companies such as Microsoft continue to laud outsourcing and proudly proclaim that it is here to stay, and it looks as if Ho Chi Minh City will be the next Bangalore.
posted on Dec 11, 2006 - View this thread

Fractran. A Turing complete programming language expressed in prime numbers from John Conway. (Interpreter here.) More pathological programming. Via Good Math, Bad Math.
posted on Oct 30, 2006 - View this thread

And God said
"C:\>RUN HEAVEN AND EARTH"

Oops.
posted on Sep 24, 2006 - View this thread

A look at an algorithm Google uses to run large-scale computations in parallel on thousands of cheap PCs: MapReduce. Via Joel on Software.
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread

Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. You can view some sample programs, or if you just like Mondrian, why not make your own with the Mondrian Machine? Or maybe you don't like Mondrian but you do like programming, in which case you can check out other strange languages, such as Petrovich, where you can punish or reward your PC. Finally, if you don't like programming OR Mondrian, have a look at a silly gif of a kitten.
posted on Aug 14, 2006 - View this thread

Will Wright & Brian Eno, Playing with Time. (MP3, Vorbis) Will Wright, creator of the video games "Sim City," "The Sims," and the forthcoming "Spore," spoke with Brian Eno on many subjects, including time, and generative programming, on June 26, 2006, in seminar put on by the Long Now Foundation. (Summary).
posted on Jul 8, 2006 - View this thread

Get A-Life - an interesting read on artificial life and evolutionary computation, from the game of life (playable applet), through core wars, tierra and on to genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming pioneer and inventor of the scratchcard, John Koza, who last year patented his invention machine, actually a 1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several inventions which have been granted patents. [See also: BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another odd BBC evolution game, Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted on May 3, 2006 - View this thread

Somewhere between theoretical constructs like finite automata and Turing machines and feature-rich programming languages like Perl and C++ lives a world of misfits. These so-called esoteric languages frequently employ obfuscation and fustian as central design goals; but that doesn't mean you can't do some neat (useless) things with them.
posted on Apr 20, 2006 - View this thread

Thinking in C. A flash based C tutorial by Bruce Eckel intended as a foundation for C++ and Java.
posted on Apr 9, 2006 - View this thread

Ruby on Rails 1.1 is out and you can pretend you know what Ruby on Rails is after reading the overview on the homepage or checking out the screencasts if you have some time. Some might recognize this from prior posts (perhaps, undeservedly) or from some of the web applications that were developed with it.
posted on Mar 27, 2006 - View this thread

The Terrain Engine Project is a nicely documented series of posts about writing a terrain engine from scratch. The author doesn't detail the actual code, instead covering some general problems involved in rendering decent-looking terrain that doesn't require mega-1337 hardware. It's pretty interesting, even for non-coders.
posted on Feb 23, 2006 - View this thread

2 4 8 16 32 64... Storybytes, an ordered archive of nanofiction. It's been done before, by syllables (17), by the masters (Classic Short Stories), and by comedians (Book-a-Minute). But in a dense natural language, with a high meaning-per-word, perhaps bytes would value infodensity more objectively: 256b, 1k, 4Kb. But then again, isn't a spec as much of a cop out as a rigged dictionary? Perhaps the highest infodensities are achieved by works which will have no human readers.
posted on Feb 14, 2006 - View this thread

Dreamlines
posted on Nov 23, 2005 - View this thread

Should programmers refuse to write malicious programs? Doctors take an oath to do no harm. We'd all like our computers to do what we want, and would be quite upset if they didn't. Should Sony's programmers have refused to write the malware?
posted on Nov 14, 2005 - View this thread

Free Visual Studio Express Is Microsoft suddenly feeling generous, or are they just trying to further improve market share? (It's the latter).
posted on Nov 9, 2005 - View this thread

Level editor for Super Mario World.
You'll need a SNES emulator and a Super Mario World ROM.
(Ctrl+right-click to insert objects.)
posted on Oct 20, 2005 - View this thread

Warning: Geek Hype Alert! Artima.com has just launched a new on-line magazine, Ruby Code & Style. They already host Web `zines for two long-time, corporate powerhouse languages, C++ and Java. For their next subject one might have expected them to go with Python or perhaps Perl, but instead they picked Ruby.

Need more proof Ruby's time has come? The Fifth International Ruby Conference, to be held this week in San Diego, CA, is sold out. The attendance is triple what is was last year. Any readers of Slashdot here likely do not need yet another mention of Ruby on Rails, which has spread like wildfire. But Agile Web Development with Rails is currently in the top 500 over-all sales rank on Amazon, and currently #2 in the Computers and Internet Programming section.

While MeFi tends to focus on more socially-broad topics, I know there is a cadre of geeks here. So, tell me: Is this it for Perl, Python, and PHP? Are the P* languages to be sent packing? Or is this swell of Rubymania just a passing fad, the results of overblown blog hype? And what other programming languuages might be lurking to become The Next Big Geek Thing? (I'm still waiting for Lisp to assume return triumphant.)
posted on Oct 10, 2005 - View this thread

You've heard of Greasemonkey (which allows you to remix web pages in firefox), you might also remember the Ruby Programming Language that all of the cool kids are talking about these days. Mix the two together, make it useable through any modern browser (using a proxy), and voila MouseHole!
posted on Sep 3, 2005 - View this thread

Tagging bbc radio songs via mobile phone
posted on Aug 30, 2005 - View this thread

Project Euler is a running contest of programming challenges to hone your algorithm skills. "Each problem is designed according to a 'one-minute rule', which means that although it may take several hours to design a successful algorithm with more difficult problems, an efficient implementation will allow a solution to be obtained on a modestly powered computer in less than one minute."
posted on Aug 20, 2005 - View this thread

Open Source Flash
posted on Aug 15, 2005 - View this thread

Looking to learn that awesome programming language but lack the drive? Take the challange!
posted on Aug 11, 2005 - View this thread

Is Mac OS X Becoming Crufty? I definitely think so.
posted on Aug 2, 2005 - View this thread

Time commenting could be time coding. Day in, day out, you pull off star moves: gnarly algorithms, wicked refactorings, stunning optimizations. Why should you stop and explain? Yes, you've got plodders on your team, but hey — youAreAStar and yourTimeIsExpensive. Time spent explaining, documenting, commenting — dude! — that's time you could be using to crank out yet more mind-altering code. Welcome The Commentator.
posted on Aug 2, 2005 - View this thread