• Why I still program – "I believe that the rejection of programming as a lower activity can be explained by the Theory of the leisure class. In effect, we do not seek utility but prestige. There is no prestige in tool-making, cooking or farming. To maximize your prestige, you must rise up to the leisure class: you work must not be immediately useful."
• From counting citations to measuring usage (help needed!) – Building a Better Citation Index
• workhacks.com: Top 3 Gmail Management Apps for Mac – Mailplane Blog – includes a list of gmail plugins that look useful
• Melopy –

  """
  >>> from melopy import Melopy
  >>> m = Melopy('mysong')
  >>> m.add_quarter_note('A4')
  >>> m.add_quarter_note('C#5')
  >>> m.add_quarter_note('E5')
  >>> m.render()
  [==================================================] 100%
  Done
  """

• Rust Language Tutorial: Expression Syntax – Starts out good, but the "leave out a semicolon to return a value" leaves a bad taste. Why overload semicolons like that? Why not just use 'ret'?
• Forget Self-Improvement –
• The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review – A few good points on avoiding multitasking burnout. Nothing too new, but maybe if people keep repeating it in places like HBR, then it'll start to become conventional business wisdom?

• Stuart’s “Law of Networkdynamics” –
• Flattr – Social micropayments – An interesting model that I hadn't heard of. You set a monthly amount to spend and when you see a flattr button, you click on it. They then divide your monthly amount among the people you clicked on that month. Sounds great but I have never seen a button, unless it's been hidden among many other warts.
• Haskell: Functional Programming, Solid Code, Big Data (1) – Bryan O'Sullivan's Haskell tutorial from Strange Loop 2011
• QuickCheck | YELLOSOFT – Lots of ports of QuickCheck
• Simple Quickcheck implementation for Python – Random test generation that is not as nice as Haskell's quickcheck but will do the job.

• Magic Maps: Now You See It. – Very cool app for working with maps and time series data
• How Not To Sort By Average Rating – Shows the best way to sort by positive/negative rankings that is robust to small sample sizes
• terrorism hardly existential threat. 2010 –
• workhacks.com: Top 3 Gmail Management Apps for Mac includes a list of gmail plugins that look useful
• Yesod Web Framework for Haskell –
• beets: the music geek’s media organizer – The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. (It also downloads cover art for albums it imports.) Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music. Because beets is designed as a library, it can do almost anything you can imagine for your music collection. Via plugins, beets becomes a panacea: Embed and extract album art from files’ tags. Listen to your library with a music player that speaks the MPD protocol and works with a staggering variety of interfaces. Fetch lyrics for all your songs from databases on the Web. Manage your MusicBrainz music collection. Analyze music files’ metadata from the command line. Clean up crufty tags left behind by other, less-awesome tools. Browse your music library graphically through a Web browser and play it in any browser that supports HTML5 Audio.

• 7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 Minutes – Notes from a PyCon talk about the very pragmatic design philosophy at YouTube.
• bkad/discoball · GitHub – shell tool to match and colorize lines of text
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | The Developer's Code –
• How to see around corners : Nature News & Comment – And we thought the future was flying cars.
• ARM's ultra-low-power fridge-puter chips: Just what the CIA ordered • The Register – Out of context interesting quote: "The spy boss was chiefly concerned with the huge amounts of data that can be collected from American citizens who intend to become CIA agents – in an age when parents set up Twitter and Tumblr accounts for their newborns, managing the identities of future operatives suddenly becomes non-trivial."
• Who needs access? You need access! – new site about open access to research aimed at lay people (I think)

• CodeMirror – "CodeMirror is a JavaScript library that can be used to create a relatively pleasant editor interface for code-like content ― computer programs, HTML markup, and similar. If a mode has been written for the language you are editing, the code will be coloured, and the editor will optionally help you with indentation."
• Latexian: A LaTeX Editor for Mac OS X – Nice looking latex editor with live preview. 10.6 or higher so I can’t try it just now.
• Core Graphics live – YouTube – Demo of live-preview graphics drawing tool
• DRC: Digital Room Correction – “RC is a program used to generate correction filters for acoustic compensation of HiFi and audio systems in general, including listening room compensation. DRC generates just the FIR correction filters, which can be used with a real time or offline convolver to provide real time or offline correction. DRC doesn’t provide convolution features, and provides only some simplified, although really accurate, measuring tools.”
• ASP: A SEJITS Implementation for Python · shoaibkamil/asp Wiki · GitHub –

• python – Does PyPY translate itself? – Stack Overflow – An informative answer about how PyPy works
• On reviewing research papers « Lars Bergstrom – So, PL has a culture of really useful reviews, huh?
• How to Do What You Love – "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school." Boom!
• The Millions : Ban This Book: An Uncensored Look At The Lorax And Other Dangerous Books –
• A Neighborhood of Infinity: You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.) – A practical way of thinking about monads.

• Pretty Lisp | Hacker News I don’t like this. Great comment thread though – lots of people agree with me. I think maybe enthusiasm for structure editors is a sign of youthful optimism and inexperience.
• 2004 Rob Pike Q&A Interview – Slashdot – "(And speaking of Doug, he's the unsung hero of Unix. He was manager of the group that produced it and a huge creative force in the group, but he's almost unknown in the Unix community. He invented a couple of things you might have heard of: pipes and – get this – macros. Well, someone had to do it and that someone was Doug. As Ken once said when we were talking one day in the Unix room, "There's no one smarter than Doug.") "
• How To Build a Naive Bayes Classifier | Hacker News – Useful comment thread about building naive bayes classifiers
• A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects – Software Freedom Law Center –

• Strategic Frugality If you’re just starting to build a… – where you can skimp!
• Dealing with Crap apps in the catalog… – chuq on the tough problem of policing app stores.
• JSLint,The JavaScript Code Quality Tool – From Douglas Crockford
• JavaScript Lint –
• Jison – javascript bison with a yacc-alike too
• Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python – Pratt Parsing in Python. (After Douglas Crockford's Javascript version) def expression(rbp=0): global token t = token token = next() left = t.nud() while rbp < token.lbp: t = token token = next() left = t.led(left) return left

The app listed for sale for $29 on the store as “PDF Reader” is actually our free and open source Skim app, although no mention of the Skim Sourceforge project is made in the description, and the support link just goes to a livejournal post where the Skim web page ad copy has been pasted. There is also a $19 app called “PDF Expert” that appears to be another copy. That one even went ahead and used Adobe’s Acrobat trademark in their icon!

Anyone who buys these apps is paying for a program that has no support from and no coordination with the actual developers and an unknown update or bug fix schedule. They won’t know about the tips and support available on the Skim wiki or the users mailing list. They could get a better product for free.

Naturally, I’d like to see these unofficial copies removed from the store.

Because the project uses the permissive BSD license, it’s officially OK to take the code, change nothing, and sell it. However, there is an acknowledgement clause, so if a copy doesn’t mention the actual authors anywhere, it’s in violation of the license.

At one point in mid-January, “PDF Reader” was offered for free, so the main developer, Christiaan Hofman, downloaded it to check. He found no mention of the original authors. So now we have something we can actually complain about.

Now, I wrote an initial prototype and started the sourceforge project, but Christiaan deserves most of the credit for the great app that it became. However, mostly because of my role at the beginning, I am the copyright holder of the overall product and many of the source files. So I took the lead, and over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out who to talk to in Apple to even find out what my options are.

I emailed Mac App Store support, who pointed me to both the Developer Relations contact info and to Apple Legal. Developer Relations said they can’t help me because I’m not a member the Apple Developer Program, so they also pointed to Legal. Ok, a bit of runaround, but I thought contacting Legal seemed reasonable.

Funny, I never thought I’d want to send a DMCA takedown notice, but this is a copyright claim. I decided to use their copyright violation reporting form. In Safari and every other browser I tried, this form just doesn’t work! It keeps asking for my phone number even when it already has it… So on January 26 I sent a request to copyright@apple.com with the info for the form and asked what to do next.

Since then I’ve heard nothing, so I thought it might be time to ask the rest of the world – has anyone had to deal with violations like this before, and is there a better way to address it?