Category: stuff

The planetary air conditioner

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If a free energy device (like this one) were really possible, simple economics would dictate that (as soon as patents expired, etc.) one or several would be found in every cell phone, iPod, notebook computer, desktop computer, appliance, automobile, airplane, house, building, and factory. That’s a lot of waste heat that would get dumped onto…

Prototypical inheritance in Python

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Based on Doug Crockford’s chapter in Beautiful Code, I wanted to take a crack at implementing Top Down Operator Precedence in Python. After all, Python and JavaScript are quite similar, right? Not really. As you can imagine, Doug’s code makes great use of JavaScript’s strengths, in this case the ability to assign new methods to…

Beautiful Code

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If it’s been quiet on this front it’s because I’ve been engrossed in my continuing education. Andy Oram sent me a copy of Beautiful Code, a thoroughly enjoyable work from O’Reilly. If you like stretching your brain by reading code-intense essays from top-tier coders, I recommend this volume. In particular, I’m been digging into Douglas…

What does ‘continuing education’ mean to you?

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I just finished an online version of SICP, the famous computer science text Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (link to full and official text online). What do I mean by “finished”? Well, there are online video lectures (link to iTunes-ready RSS video feed), expertly delivered by SICP authors Sussman and Abelson themselves in 1986….

I hardly knew ya

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The big buzz today is news that Terry Semel has stepped down as CEO of Yahoo, and Jerry Yang has stepped up. Believe it or not, Y is the first place I’ve worked at that’s large enough that I’m not on a first name basis with the CEO, so this kind of thing is much…

Email meltdown in progress

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Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just after installing Thunderbird 2, deleting emails started taking 5 seconds, then 15, then 30, then a full minute. Then it quit working alltogether. Also 14,000 old mailing list messages materialized in my Junk folder. My inbox has hundreds of unread, and drastic measures might be needed to get things…

HTTPoetry

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I can’t talk on the phone right now. Can you follow up on email? Consider it placed on my todo list. Let me give you my new address. Hmm, I don’t have it. What are you talking about? (If you get the pattern, post below…) -m

m.flickr.com

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The new Flickr Mobile site is up, joining the recently-launched m.upcoming.org. Notice a trend in mobile URL design here? Expect to see more of this from Yahoo! and other places. The interesting thing about these URLs is that they don’t end in .mobi. There are technical advantages (cookies) to staying with an established domain name….

How PHP can be annoying

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On a PHP 4 project, I need to use XSLT, but the interfaces seem far more complicated than they should be. Check out this declaration for the function to run an XSLT: mixed xslt_process ( resource xh, string xmlcontainer, string xslcontainer [, string resultcontainer [, array arguments [, array parameters]]] ) Wow, it returns a…

Mobile data at risk?

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The little one just turned a month old. Since I have a spare moment, time for some blog catch-up. A C|Net puff piece survey reports More than two-thirds of respondents said that their data was most vulnerable on laptop PCs, while 40% chose “other mobile devices” (i.e. PDAs, mobile phones, wireless devices) Mind you, this…

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