michael-mccracken.net

Links for January 27th through February 3rd

mike — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:08:39 +0000

My shared links for January 27th through February 3rd:

Kinesis Savant Elite Programmable Foot Switches – 1-3 pedal programmable USB footswitches. $99-$150 or so. needs usboverdrive for macs
Tutorial/Plotting – Reinteract – Trac – Reinteract does plotting!?
GHC 7.4.1 Release Notes: 9.3. Compiler Plugins – Write a compiler plugin for Haskell in Haskell
Volatile and Decentralized: Making universities obsolete – Matt Welsh on problems in higher ed.

Links for January 23rd through January 25th

mike — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:57:27 +0000

My shared links for January 23rd through January 25th:

Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu. « Canonical Design – Canonical is moving towards no menus and just using a quicksilver-style "HUD" smart text interface. That's great – menus stink and this gives a path to voice control too, but there's a big discovery problem to be attacked (which menus also have but not as bad).
Ubuntu One Blog » Blog Archive » U1DB technical preview release: tell us what you think! – Blog post announcing u1db preview
U1DB — u1db v0.0.1.dev.0 documentation – Developer preview documentation. Their summary: " U1DB is a database API for synchronised databases of JSON documents. It’s simple to use in applications, and allows apps to store documents and synchronise them between machines and devices. U1DB itself is not a database: instead, it’s an API which can be backed by any database for storage. This means that you can use u1db on different platforms, from different languages, and backed on to different databases, and sync between all of them. "

Links for January 11th

mike — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:52:23 +0000

My shared links for January 11th:

Welcome to ELPA – emacs lisp package archive
OCaml for the Masses – ACM Queue – Why the next language you learn should be functional by Yaron Minsky, Jane Street Sometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function. – John Carmack
Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research –
byrd and belle – Nice looking sleeves with wool felt and leather

Links for January 20th through January 21st

mike — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:50:28 +0000

My shared links for January 20th through January 21st:

Mail Pilot: Email Reimagined by Josh Milas & Alex Obenauer — Kickstarter –
“Getting Into Modeling With CouchCocoa” –
Galois – Home – Contract Research organization in Portland who makes use of functional programming.
Book: Real World Haskell – Full text of book “real world haskell”
Programming in Haskell – well-reviewed intro haskell book
Joe Duffy’s Weblog : A (brief) retrospective on transactional memory – Not really brief. Lots of interesting detail about TM in practice.
How to read Haskell like Python : Inside 233 –

Links for January 12th through January 18th

mike — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:44:11 +0000

My shared links for January 12th through January 18th:

Steven Frank: Notes: Home –
CVXPY documentation — CVXPY v0.0.1 documentation – Optimization, uses Disciplined Convex Programming
Progression: Supporting Optimisation in Haskell « Communicating Haskell Processes – Tools for benchmarking haskell performance
1.-Environment setup –
The GNU Prolog web site – Free GNU Prolog – supports ISO
The Ciao System – "Ciao is a general-purpose programming language which supports logic, constraint, functional, higher-order, and object-oriented programming styles. Its main design objectives are high expressive power, extensibility, safety, reliability, and efficient execution"
Marmalade: Spreadable Elisp – A repository for elisp packages. Uses ELPA. Didn't work when I tried it, but maybe a firewall issue?
Haddock Documentation Generator for Haskell – Really nice documentation generator for Haskell code. I particularly like the synopsis tab.
Archives of the Caml mailing list > Message from Xavier Leroy [2002] – From 2002: "In summary: there is no SMP support in OCaml, and it is very very unlikely that there will ever be. If you're into parallelism, better investigate message-passing interfaces."
Archives of the Caml mailing list > Message from Benjamin C. Pierce – Lots of links about CPS and continuations in Ocaml and others.

Links for January 11th

mike — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:19:47 +0000

My shared links for January 11th:

Advanced programming languages Matt Might on languages you should know. Lots of good links for each. SNEAK PEAK: OCaml, SML, scheme, Scala! And C!

Links for January 5th through January 10th

mike — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:18:47 +0000

My shared links for January 5th through January 10th:

Manning: Big Data Big Data book by Nathan Marz and Samuel Ritchie: “Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems”
byrd & belle Nice-looking felt and leather laptop, phone, etc sleeves.
Own A Front-Load Washer? Read This in [Market-Ticker] –
Order theory for computer scientists Order Theory Quick Reference! Note: no explanation of applications. Think type systems, maybe?

Links for January 3rd through January 5th

mike — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:14:15 +0000

My shared links for January 3rd through January 5th:

2011 Annual Question | Edge : "what scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit" – As usual more thought provoking essays than will fit in my head, but seriously, what is "A Proxemic of Urban Sexuality" getting at?
Simplified Unity Lens Development with Singlet | Michael Hall's Blog –
llvm-py – Python bindings for LLVM – Google Project Hosting –
The Mython Programming Language – "Mython is an extensible variant of the Python programming language. Mython makes Python extensible by adding two things: parametric quotation statement, and compile-time metaprogramming. The parametric quote statement is simply syntactic sugar for saying "run some function on this embedded string". Compile-time metaprogramming allows you to evaluate that function on the embedded string at compile time. This gives you added choice, both in terms of what your code looks like, and when you want to evaluate that code."
Solaris Internals and Performance FAQ – Siwiki – Main Page for Solaris Internals Wiki. Tons of info about Solaris' er, Internals.

Links for December 28th – 29th (Including PyCon2012 Talks of Interest)

mike — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:21:02 +0000

My shared links for December 28th through December 29th:

The Email-SIG Archives – Archives of group working on email package in python
Link Grammar – grammar parsing package homepage as part of abiword
Overview — NetworkX 1.6 documentation –
dmalcolm – Automatically detecting reference-count bugs in Python extension modules –
PyCon US 2012: Parsing Horrible Things – If you've ever wanted to get started with parsers, here's your chance for a ground-floor introduction. A harebrained spare-time project gives birth to a whirlwind journey from basic algorithms to Python libraries and, at last, to a parser for one of the craziest syntaxes out there: the MediaWiki grammar that drives Wikipedia.
PyCon US 2012: Python for data lovers – Exploring and analyzing data can be daunting and time-consuming, even for data lovers. Python can make the process fun and exciting. We will present techniques of data analysis, along with python tools that help you explore and map data. Our talk includes examples that show how python libraries such as csvkit, matplotlib, scipy, networkx and pysal can help you dig into and make sense of your data.
PyCon US 2012: Time series analysis in python – Analyzing, storing and visualizing time-series efficiently are recurring though difficult tasks in various aspects of scientific data analysis such as meteorological forecasting, financial modeling, … In this talk we will explore the current Python ecosystem for doing this effectively, comparing options, using only open source packages that are mature yet still under active development.
PyCon US 2012: Email package – The email package in the Python Standard library has had a somewhat rocky transition into the Python3 era, and still doesn't handle non-ASCII easily. That is about to change. This talk will compare how things worked in Python2 (the past), how things work now (in Python3.2), and how things will work much better in the future (hopefully Python3.3).
PyCon US 2012: Advanced SQLAlchemy – How do you take the big step from casual SQLAlchemy user, who treats your database as a mysterious object store, to advanced power user, who optimizes critical queries, plans indexing and migrations, and generates efficient reports? This talk will teach you how databases think; why humanity invented the Relational Algebra; and how SQLAlchemy grants you access to relational power.
PyCon US 2012 : Python FUSE – Contrary to classical kernel residing file-systems in *NIX, FUSE is an API to develop file systems in user space. This talk details internals of FUSE, developing your own file-system with Python-FUSE, followed by creative application of Python-FUSE based file system.
PyCon US 2012: What's new in the PyStdLib – Lots of Interesting stuff has gone into Python Standard library in 2.7, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 release. Some interesting features that went in really make programmers life easy and it can bring in a 'wow' factor to their code. Additionally, it can also help the external library developers to relook at the their libraries to use new facilities available from standard library modules. This talk distills stuff from What's new document from 2.7, 3.2 and 3.3 and presents some of the choicest new features from Python standard library. Since a lots has gone in since 2.7, focus would be given to those which have had good discussion in tracker or in python-dev and would in general was a most sought out one.
PyCon US 2012: Code Generation in Python: Dismantling Jinja – For many DSLs such as templating languages it's important to use code generation to achieve acceptable performance in Python. The current version of Jinja went through many different iterations to end up where it is currently. This talk walks through the design of Jinja2's compiler infrastructure and why it works the way it works and how one can use newer Python features for better results.
Mailman 3 — PyCon US 2012 – Mailman 3 has been in development for several years. This is an evolution of the ever popular mailing list management system that runs thousands of mailing lists around the world. This talk describes how the code has been modernized and how the architectural deficiencies of Mailman 2 have been addressed using REST and other technologies. This is a spinoff from the AOSA chapter on Mailman 3.
RelEx Dependency Relationship Extractor – OpenCog – RelEx, a narrow-AI component of OpenCog, is an English-language semantic dependency relationship extractor, built on the Carnegie-Mellon Link Grammar parser. It uses a series of graph rewriting rules to identify subject, object, indirect object and many other syntactic dependency relationships between words in a sentence. That is, it generates the dependency trees of a dependency grammar. Its set of dependency relations it employs resemble those of Dekang Lin's MiniPar and the Stanford parser (and it has an explicit compatibility mode). It is inspired in part by the ideas of Hudson's Word Grammar.
Could you start a blog on this thing? –
Chinese high end CPUs are now in the game – details: Part 2, Alpha by VR-Zone.com – Chinese supercomputer uses Alpha architecture. Article has some interesting details and some cringeworthy breathless praise for the lamented Alpha chips…

Links for December 22nd

mike — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:14:01 +0000

My shared links for December 22nd:

Pearsonified’s Golden Ratio Typography Calculator – calculates line height, font size and content width appropriately for readability. Using the golden ratio might be bogus, but the point of matching font size to line width and height is well taken and the results look OK.