A great man passed last night. Ted Kennedy, a man who made sweeping concrete improvements to civil rights, health care, education, immigration – probably the most effective senator of his time – fell to brain cancer, at the age of 77. We have all lost a pinion who kept our lives safe and our rights secure.
America is diminished with his loss.
As some of us remember from digging through trapper keepers while ignoring second grade teachers, there are several units of measurement with comedic value.
For example, three hogsheads (approx. 160 gallons) of beer constitute a butt of beer, which is how one gets to that George, the Duke of Clarence, died drowning in a butt.
Similarly, a bundle of sticks is a faggot (which is what those fundies are misreading in the bible – they’re talking about burning bundles of sticks). Indeed, there are even long faggots – two foot girth by four foot length, which qualifies for some awards, I suspect.
As such, Wolfram Alpha is entirely happy to calculate the number of faggots that fit in a butt.
It’s more than I expected. 
But this one’s funny.
Those of you know know me personally know that I am extremely picky about music: whereas I enjoy nearly every genre, I am very particular about stylistic elements, quality, and skill of execution.
My friend Poffy turned me on to Kutiman Mixes YouTube about an hour ago; I’ve watched it several times before realizing I needed to spread it around. It appears that some guy got a bunch of YouTube videos and mixed them into a video album, compositing the video elements into a barely explicable thing which vascillates between montage, pastiche and 60s-style disoriented spook video.
It’s honestly mindblowing. Speaking as someone thoroughly inured to things like the McRoll and the Windows song by being double oldbear enough to remember the various versions of .MOD, this really still tweaks all my knobs. This isn’t just weird. This is genuine music. It’s good.
This is one an mazing.
It turns out that time() is going to report 1234567890 on Valentine’s Day this year for about 1/3 of the planet. Anyone on the wrong side of Greenwich Mean Time gets the joke.
THIS IS ONLY HALF WRITTEN. I have been sitting on this post, waiting for the mood to finish it, for months; because EEP18 is now being treated as a likely implement, I am immediately publishing the half-written version, because it exposes many (though not all) of the serious, irreconcilable problems with EEP18.
On the mailing list, people are actively trying to bring Erlang up to snuff with regards to web standards. One of the more unfortunate choices being discussed is JSON as a data notation. JSON, unfortunately, does not actually map to Erlang in a useful way. Joe Armstrong has gone as far as to suggest BIFs, which are decidedly unrealistic as well as unnecessary. My goal is to create a JSON handling library. However, the mailing list is beginning to put momentum behind an alternative proposal which is currently presented in BIF form.
This post explains why my approach is different. Many of the issues herein are discussed by the tabled EEP (EEP 18, “JSON BIFs” by Rickard O’Keefe), but some are not, and some of these issues are accepted when I believe they should not be. It is my position that EEP 18 is unacceptably dangerous. I will explain why.
[digg-reddit-me]My good friend Jeff happened to mention offhand his knowledge of a document I’ve been looking for for quite some time now. I’m sharing it with my readers in case they’re looking for something similar.
Let me be forward: I cannot stand the various Objective C books I’ve tried. They all want to teach me to be a programmer. I’m already there. I just want a book like Stroustrup. The PragProg book is awful: the first several chapters are about Mac development tools, like I give a damn. Everything’s through interface wizards. It’s nauseating.
Jeff heard mein painz0rz, and turned me on to From C++ to Objective-C. It isn’t perfect: it’s not super comprehensive, and it’s translated from a different native language (French), which leaves a few passages cumbersome. However, as one can tell from reading the intro, the author of the document, much like me, found little to love in the state of Objective C documentation, and wanted to write something for people who were already well established.
Kudos to Pierre Chatelier for writing the book that Apple and Alan Kay could not.
My boss’ boss, Varun, is letting me open source some of the work I’m doing at Kayako. I’m not supposed to talk about the interesting three until they’re ready for release, but I can tell you that a JavaScript ISO8601 implementation is among them, and that they’re all going to be MIT licensed, no GPL contamination.
More news as I get my butt in gear and finish the libraries in question. But, yay Varun!
It’s finally done! And, thank god, “concepts” are officially in.
[digg-reddit-me]One of the things I was most looking forward to about my new iPhone, knowing there were SSH clients, was the ability to use it as a genuinely remote terminal, no matter where I was, to do little shell tasks and write simple code and so on.
Ha! The problem is, the iPhone has an autocorrecting keyboard which corrects if you don’t tell it not to (the obnoxious kind like Outlook has), and it makes completely asinine replacements (its becomes it’s, as if the word its doesn’t exist). This is bad enough if you just speak above the level of an eighth grader, but it makes using unix shells and writing code genuinely impossible.
Classic apple zealot response from IRC: “don’t be stupid, just teach the iPhone every word you want to use when programming.” Like they don’t even think before they answer.
Apple: why can’t I turn this off? It’d be simple enough: there’s bound to be some function somwhere get_best_replacement(char* current), which signals no reasonable match (as you get for, say, ‘zzzzz’) by way of an empty string, or something similar. That’s the hack point. Add if (customer_isnt_retarded()) { return “”; } else { previous_logic(); } and it’s fixed.
Seriously, who locks people into an autocorrecting keyboard? Ugh. This ruins the iPhone for any kind of technical use. What a mess.
If you hate this too, vote this up on digg and reddit, so that an Apple employee will see it.