My shared links for March 1st through March 5th:

• 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.

My shared links for February 27th through March 1st:

• 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 -

My shared links for February 23rd:

• 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

Sometime in January, a Skim user asked the developers if we'd submitted it to the Mac App Store. We hadn't.

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?

My shared links for February 21st through February 22nd:

• http://xpra.org/ (Wayland - Beyond X (The H) [LWN.net]) - a 'screen' for X exists. A SCREEN FOR X EXISTS!!

• A client-side Bayes classifier for Hacker News - Japomatik - Very cool idea. I'd like to see if I can bend it to my purposes - flag all comments by people under, say, 28 years old.

• University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy: Oral history interviews - "CBI holds one of the world's largest collections of research-grade oral history interviews relating to the history of computers, software, and networking. Most of the 300-plus oral histories have been developed in conjunction with grant-funded research projects on topics such as the development of the software industry, the influence of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the early history of computer science departments."

• Real-Time Fluid Dynamics for Games - from Jos Stam at Alias | Wavefront, at GDC 2003.

• This article is not well-informed. I worked on or sat next to people who worked ... | Hacker News - Linux history. didn't bother to read orig. article

• The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) - to read

• (via Photo | Mike Industries) - basketball face

My shared links for February 15th through February 20th:

• Firebirds Restaurants » Blog Archive » Firebirds Chicken Pasta I made the sauce. Delicious! I can only assume the whole thing will come together.

• Parsing Techniques - Second Edition -

• DEVONsphere Express -- Make your Mac smarter - DEVONtechnologies - Context aware search. Menu extra for 10.6.6+ (See also my XRA, nat.org/dashboard, and others. nice looking realization of the dream by DEVONtech...

• - Superpages allow each entry in the TLB to map a large physical memory region into a virtual address space. INCREASES TLB coverage; REDUCES TLB misses;

Challenges of superpages: (1) superpage allocation & promotion (2) fragmentation control

My shared links for February 7th through February 9th:

• Effective Scala -

• Video lectures for 6.851, advanced data structures - Prof. Erik Demaine's 6.851 lectures recorded with synchronized lecture notes.

• tobami/codespeed - GitHub - Python and django performance monitoring tool. Used for speed.pypy.org

• Experiences with an Icon-like Expression Evaluation System - Interesting and accessible trip through Icon's expression semantics and Converge.

• amoffat/pbs - GitHub - Clever library to let you start subprograms from python as if they were python functions. Much more usable than the stuff I'm used to in the pystdlib... Almost as concise as backticks and looks more flexible too (ie, handles piping)

• Laurence Tratt: Fast Enough VMs in Fast Enough Time - "If you can stomach the smell, put yourself briefly in the shoes of a programming language designer. What you want to do is create new programming languages, combining new and old ideas into a fresh whole. It sounds like a fun, intellectually demanding job, and occasionally it is. However, we know from experience that languages that exist solely in the mind or on paper are mostly worthless: it is only when they are implemented and we can try them out that we can evaluate them. As well as a language design, therefore, we need a corresponding language implementation."

• Introducing Twine: String Management for iOS, Mac OS X, and Android Development - Mobiata Blog - In this post I hope to show you just how bad the standard localization process is for iOS and Mac OS X apps, and how we have found a way to make it much easier for developers to localize their apps and then maintain these localizations and translations over time. In addition, I'll show you how you can easily share your translations across multiple apps and platforms. This will save your company money that would otherwise be spent duplicating your translation efforts, especially if you are developing for both iOS and Android.

• Conduit - GNOME Live! - Conduit is a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to synchronize your files, photos, emails, contacts, notes, calendar data and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device.

Conduit manages the synchronization and conversion of data into other formats. For example, Conduit allows you to :

Synchronize your Tomboy notes with another computer Synchronize your your PIM data to your mobile phone, iPod, Nokia Internet tablet, or between computers Upload photos to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, ShutterFly and your iPod Any combination you can imagine, Conduit will take care of the conversion and synchronization.

• Python NLTK Sentiment Analysis with Text Classification Demo - neat demo but the results aren't intuitive. maybe the training set isn't great.

• Gender Prediction with Python : Stephen Holiday -

My shared links for February 3rd through February 6th:

• Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers - cookbook of handy python generators

• Microsoft Research Unveils "Career Reflections Collection" » CCC Blog -

• The Algebra of Data, and the Calculus of Mutation » Lab49 Blog -

• python-dateutil - Labix - The dateutil module provides powerful extensions to the standard datetime module, available in Python 2.3+.

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.

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. "