Random list of interesting stuff this month:
- The Lyft bus announcement led to some hand-wringing.
- I knew there were rivers that flow under the land; apparently some flow under the sea too.
- I thought this was a joke, but no, there really is a “Third Thumb Project”
- I’m appreciating insightful posts about the tech industry more and more as time goes on (stop, don’t say it).
- And then I don’t know how to characterize this post, but I liked it: ”The language of programming”
- Ethereal for dummies
- This one tickles a very old itch of mine: a lot of natural processes can really be seen as computation
- This one is just … I don’t know what to say. Trekking across the desert and finding an abandoned space shuttle is like some indie video game, not real life. And yet, and yet …
- This one is a blast from the past (about twenty two years ago), when Java was launched. But what to make of the following little paragraph?
Sun and Netscape are announcing a new version of Java that is intended to make programming more accessible to non-computer experts. The version is known as a scripting language, Javascript, and is based on a simple programming language already developed by Netscape. The idea is to make program development possible by people who are experienced computer users but not programmers.
- Title says it: “Exotic Data Structures”
- This story is just bizarre: a font (a font!) managed to become politically controversial.
- The Internet of Things is found wanting
- Quanta Magazine has made it to my top five. Both of these articles are amazing: the geometry of viruses, and the (amazing!) patterns in bacterial colony growth (an image of the latter features at the top of this post).
- OpenMoko was a laudable dream, but as Mickey points out at the end,
… there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security.
- I had always heard about the “hammer and feather” experiment on the moon; now, thanks to Youtube, I can see it.
- Yep, Datomic is awesome and I wish I had more time or reason to play around with it. One day, one day.
- Evan Miller seems to think Perl 6 is worth learning.
- Herb Sutter put out a real teaser about upcoming metaprogramming abilities in C++
- Finally, a short but important article reminds us that regardless of the machine underneath, we program in metaphors, and there’s no point trying to deny that.
You must master the art of metaphor selection, of meaning amplification. You must know when to add and when to subtract. You will learn to revise and rewrite code as a writer does. Once there’s nothing else to add or remove, you have finished your work. The problem you started with is now the solution. Is that the meaning you intended to convey in the first place?
Abacus Noir 