Programming ErlangProgramming Erlang Beta Book version B1.6 is out, well, a few days ago. I read the first beta and thought it was pretty good. In this draft is the chapter on ets and dets (basically in-memory and on-disk hashes). Worth reading. Leading up to Mnesia.
Mellel is the leading word processor for Mac OS X, designed to serve scholars, creative and technical writing, multilingual word processing and anyone who needs an agile, feature-rich and reliable word processor.
RedleX — The 2.2 release just happened. This word processor is very very good. It is designed for large documents, it doesn’t crash, you can understand where it got its feature set from, it works, and it is so it is quite unconventional – where conventional is defined by Word. When you try it out, make sure you read the 228 page!! tutorial (download from this page) or you will likely not appreciate the thing. (The tutorial, all 228 pages of it, was prepared in Mellel itself… in one Mellel file… with 450 embedded images… try that in Word.)
(The Only) Ten Things To Know About CSS
But The Art of CSS is quickly and easily referring to the right objects in your page from your CSS rules. The act of matching CSS rules to HTML tags is like a conversation: both sides need to be clear and in sync with each other, or they’ll talk over each other and you’ll get a headache from all the yelling.
John Manoogian III — Good ideas.
the first public alpha version of Apollo is now available for developers on Adobe Labs. Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system application runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills in HTML, JavaScript and Ajax, as well as Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex™ software to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop.
Adobe — We’ll see. It’d be good if it worked… I suppose I should give it a shot.
Apart from the fact that it’s always worth thinking about alternatives, it’s also the case that transactionlessness is more common than many people think. … But eBay’s example suggests that living without transactions is far less impossible than many people think.
Martin Fowler — I’ve been going transactionless for a long time now.
Linked list - US Patent 7028023
A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes.
Patent Storm — Certainly looks like link-lists are patented. Maybe any pointer based list. Wow! What a patent to own. Now they can sue anybody who has ever written any program, all the way back to the first machine coded programs.
Is this a hoax?
RestWiki: Opacity Myths Debunked
The Axiom of Opacity (of URI) is an onion in the varnish of REST / the Web. That is, it’s something that was once suggested that has taken on a life of its own. Nobody really understands it or knows why it exists, but it’s aquired the force of law. It’s prima facie false; it should at best be called The Conceit of Opacity and at worst The Delusion of Opacity. There are a number of common misconceptions, myths, apocrypha, and so forth that are used to support the idea, and this document examines and debunks some of these.
Jeff Bone on the RestWiki — I don’t know how I came to see this but I enjoyed it (it’s a few years old). The onion reference is mentioned here too.
How great would it be if there was an app like iTunes, but for papers? The answer is “insanely great!” … That app is called Papers, and it’s the work of a pair of talented scientists from the Netherlands
arstechnica — A review of Papers. There is an API coming that will allow integration with other databases of papers, right it works with PubMed.
VIDEO: The GT2 finish at Sebring
watch the unbelievably exciting last-lap GT2 showdown between Flying Lizard’s Jorg Bergmeister, driving one of the team’s new Porsche 911 GT3 RSRs, and Risi Competizione’s Jaime Melo in his team’s Ferrari 430GT. The video starts as the final lap begins, with Bergmeister trailing Melo byjust half a second after twelve full hours of racing. Both cars were equipped with on-board cameras, so the coverage is simply fantastic.
Autoblog — Wow!
False confessions: Even judges are biased by camera perspective
“The phenomenon (camera-perspective bias) is rooted in a naturally occurring perceptual bias that affects everyone and which cannot be readily overcome regardless of people’s expertise or the amount of professional training they have received,” Lassiter said.
Lassiter recommends a side-view or even a detective-view perspective to eliminate this bias.
Cognitive Daily
Ira Glass on StorytellingYour Daily Awesome — Links to this all over the place… actually these are pretty good, though I’ve not had a chance to listen to all of them yet.
rainy days (never say goodbye)by surrendo on Flikr (via OkDork) — An unbelievable Moscow traffic jam.
the average Brit relies on four staple dishes
This means that we [British] eat on average 2,960 portions of spaghetti bolognese in a lifetime, which is the equivalent of eating it every day for eight years. Other British staples that loom large are sausage and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne.
by Zoe Williams in The Guardian — What can I add to that?
NFL Continues To Help Professor Demonstrate How Copyright Owners Abuse The DMCA
This is the same sort of thing that got Barney the dinosaur in serious trouble with Seltzer’s former employer, the EFF. Perhaps someone should remind the NFL how that case turned out. I never thought I’d be discussing what the NFL can learn from Barney the dinosaur, but perhaps the big annoying stuffed purple dinosaur actually does have some educational value after all.
Techdirt
Another Study 'Proves' Racing Games Cause Wrecks, Only Again, It Doesn't
“reported more thoughts and feelings associated with risk-taking than the others”. You think that maybe that’s because they were playing a game that requires that sort of in-game behavior to succeed?
Techdirt — Just in case it ever crossed your mind to take those studies linking games to anything else seriously.
XML and the document format mind bender
Slightly technical senior manager person who reads a lot of trade press: “We should move all our documents to XML because all sorts of great things will become possible…If you have time, I can walk you through the benefits…”
Non technical senior decision maker: “That sounds great but according to the blurb I read, our new word processor/DTP/Web Editing tool stores all its information in XML and/or seamlessly imports/exports to XML. So we get all these good things you mention for free as part of our next application upgrade? Excellent!”
by Sean McGrath at itworld.com — You’ve heard something like that before. Right?
Leaving aside the rhetoric, what is particularly remarkable about these comments is the claim that Canadian copyright law is costing the economy between $10 to $30 billion per year. Obviously any estimate that varies by up to $20 billion is not particularly credible. Further, even the low end figure looks ridiculous as it is four times the losses claimed by the MPAA in China and is more than three times the total amount of cultural goods that Canada imports from the U.S. every year. Or considered another way, the $10 billion figure is more than the Finance Minister committed yesterday to new health care initiatives, the environment, education, and special services for armed forces veterans combined. And that is the low end - the $30 billion figure represents nearly 13 percent of total government revenues and nearly equals the total amount of provincial transfers and subsidies. All of this from “a lot of counterfeiting of movies and songs and whatnot?”
Michael Geist
Bob Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, continues to, well, kick butt.
How to Change the World — An idea spreading fast.
Sofa ConceptsCore77 — Interesting couch designs.
’somebody’ thought it best to cut down all the beautiful trees on and next to the parking lot
Dethroner — Hoax? Well the trees aren’t – follow the google map link. The after picture might be… but that isn’t how you’d expect a hoax to go.
