Inklings: a tumblelog

Now, here’s a good idea. It’s similar to the crime map at ChicagoCrime.org and the RoadDeaths.ie map.

How cool! A music festival for chip tunes!

In a nutshell, stick to one project at a time because if you split your attention between several, you’ll just end up doing all of them worse.

One of the most elegant bits of code I’ve seen in a while. Go read Ned’s explaination while you’re at it, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I fired up IDLE and started playing with it.

Covers a lot of stuff people ought to know about Representational State Transfer.

On how a good idea or methodology can become reviled as it spreads from its original source and gets watered down through misunderstanding and half-hearted implementation by neophytes.

Very, very cool. I was talking to John about this at BarCamp. Unfortunately, with everything that happened when I got back up home, I wasn’t able to contact him like I’d intended to see about how this would work as part of Vocal Voter.

This is for people like me who install the bare minimum of stuff. I do all my administration in XTerm.

Reasons for producing unit tests and integration tests even if you think you don’t need them.

Putting your republic in the hands of strongmen is not exactly the best way to preserve it.

It’s Jupiter-sized and orbiting Epsilon Eridani.

Twenty on how statutary closing times only make the problems we have with alcohol worse. As you might guess, I agree with him.

Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour.

The level of ignorance when it comes to something like this is shocking.

As I said before, WSGI is well cool.

And the universe is pretty awesome too.

On US Republican’s scare-America-first strategy for the elections for the elections there.

On the lost art of effective use of HTTP caching:

HTTP has a very thorough and well supported caching mechanism, but in this age of the dynamic Web page, it often goes unused when it is needed the most. So what do we, as Web programmers, need to do to make sure our pages are cached correctly? Let’s have a look.

Didn’t realise that. He developed some really excellent programming languages. My first exposure to his work was when I downloaded a port of the Icon interpreter for RISC OS. I remember being impressed by how it did a few simple things that no other language at the time (or even now) did to improve readability, such as being able to write things like 3 < x < 9 rather than x > 3 and x < 9, its scanning facilities, its support for generators (something Python has only just caught up with), and so on.

Something of a classic, this. I’m surprised I haven’t linked to it before.

Depressing really, and why people should make an effort to get to know people who aren’t like them.

Think XUUL or XAML, but simpler. Looks pretty good, but I’d a poke about and there doesn’t seem to be any source code lying around. Pity, this seems like a platform that might be worth porting to other systems.

Nice to see people getting it. :-)

Eww! No, I’m talking about what you have to go through to do it rather than actually doing it.

Evil doesn’t come like Darth Vader dressed in black, hissing. Evil comes as a little bird whispering in your ear. “Think about your career. I’m not sure what’s going on. We’ll muddle through.”

All too true.

Old WG’s being disbanded in favour of a new one.

A quote to put this in perspective:

In 1947, the United States prosecuted a Japanese soldier for war crimes and sentenced him to 15 years hard labor for using the technique on a U.S. prisoner.

So, if the technique’s used by people who aren’t American, it’s bad, but if it’s used by Americans, it’s good? Riiight…

Excellent! The world’s needed a proper mainstream english-language programming book on OCaml for a while now, and this one looks good.

A fine intro to the topic by Ned Batchelder.

Guy gives the book a positive review, excepts a list showing how to recognise an asshole, and offers some methods for dealing with them.