Computing gadgets don't last long enough. I wanted to write a lot about this, but since I don't have good answers, I figured I might as well just pose some questions.

All the time, we're throwing out something that still works, because there's something new that works better.

Working better is great! Faster chips and better screens and cameras make our lives easier and help us make cool new stuff.

I used to work near people designing processors, so I know it's plenty hard just to keep that part of the system progressing. And I know that newer stuff will use less energy, which is great. I know that people designing data centers think hard about their efficiency, and upgrade ruthlessly to improve it.

But how carefully are we considering the impact of getting rid of all that old equipment? How do we compare whether it's really, globally, ethically, better to improve speed & efficiency vs. just keep using old stuff? How do we factor in things like resources mined in conflict zones?

I recently remodeled a house, and among all the advice I read, I remember this best: "The greenest building material is the one that's already there." (It was about floors. We put in new bamboo anyway. That old parquet was awful, but I hope the new stuff stays there for a hundred years or more.)

I know that designing e.g., a great modern smartphone, is extremely difficult, even 'only' considering functionality, space and power constraints. Designing something that small and integrated that could still be upgraded partially, keeping around parts that still work, sounds near impossible, but wouldn't it be great? It sounds like a fun challenge.

An idea I'd like to see: Editor Wars, the game of hacking at code.

Hackers compete on how fast they can complete code editing tasks from a variety of languages, with results plotted and dissected on a web leaderboard. The idea is not to evaluate language understanding or design, but simply editing skill and speed in the kind of thing that editor flame wars start over.

The tasks could be simple refactorings, like renaming a function throughout a source tree, or extracting code into a method. I'd expect this would show advantages of specialized refactoring tools in some IDEs. Other tasks might be more complex, like writing a new set of functions, a whole class, or adding functions to a class to conform to a protocol or interface. Good template support and autocomplete might be an advantage here. Or maybe you want to add conditional debug logging around a set of functions, with each call having a separate hardcoded counter value? Surely powerful macros win this task? Naturally, new tasks could be submitted by the public, and voted on. Each task would have a "correct" answer, but if you're really clever you could always suggest a better correct answer.

Use of extensions and custom macros would be happily encouraged, as long as you can share what you've used.

You'd need either an editor plugin or at least something that watches files efficiently to get the split-second timing your contestants will demand. Ideally you'd be able to record keystrokes and grab the source for any macros you call, then the site would be able to show a replay for the viewing public.

It'd be fascinating to learn how other people use your favorite editor by watching the best of the best compete. Not to mention, just imagine the forum threads arguing over the graphs from the vast database of editor timings.

Anyone want to build this?

Since my new blogging setup doesn't automatically pull pinboard links into summary posts like before, I'm going to run through my bookmarks manually. Sound like fun? Let's go:

• Our approach to replication in computational science - "bioinformatician makes code and all analyses available. very admirable, and yet a little worrying that this is so rare. It is also rare in computer science, where it is arguably easier to share."
• ModSquadHockey Forums - good reviews of equipment with painful forum UI. BTW, yes, a Bauer Concept II full shield will definitely fit a Stealth S19 (2010 model) helmet. You're welcome.
• Hockey Helmet Cage/Visor Compatibility Charts - really useful, but sadly not fully complete. An impossible task.
• Opengazer: open source gaze tracker for ordinary webcams - Presented without comment. Have you used this?
• Storm Python ORM - Python ORM from Canonical, used in launchpad.
• What it takes to build great machine learning products - I think the answer was careful definition of the problem domain?
• A calculator that only shows the answer after you give a suitable estimate - Really cool idea. The magic is in how to adjust the tolerance so it seems fair. Linked to the HN post because the comments are so polarized - it's interesting to swatch people violently miss the point.
• GNU Parallel - Well if you don't know, now you know: "GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers." Super useful. You don't have to use GNU parallel if you like something else that's similar, but you should probably know at least one tool for this stuff.
• GNOME + Do - quicksilver for gnome. I left out the part in the page title that says "Crazy Delicious" because come on, people. These are computers.
• Field visualization software - "An environment for writing code to rapidly and experimentally assemble and explore algorithmic systems" - A really fascinating project. It looks like big ball of squeak, python, and processing that Bret Victor rolled up. I wanted to try it out in April but haven't had a chance.
• circa - A programming language that lets you manipulate the AST and do round trips. I forget what I meant by that exactly. I also wrote that 'state is first class'. You'd better go look at the page if that sounds interesting. Don't ask me!

That's it for April. Look for May's bookmarks sometime in 2014.

My last wordpress upgrade was a long time ago, and it's going to stay that way.

These posts about blogging are really only interesting years later, and only to me, when I look back and think about what I was doing that I thought I had time to mess with blogging software.

Last time I made a major change was switching to wordpress from blosxom back in December 2005, over Christmas break. I was at my parents' house and had nothing to do after everyone went to bed at 9pm.

These days I can't remember the feeling of having nothing to do, but I went ahead and switched things up anyway, exactly because I don't have time to mess with things like upgrading wordpress.

So I'm going with octopress on github user pages. I like generating a static site from text files, and github pages are sort of convenient. (sort of)

My shared links for April 5th through April 6th:

• 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?

My shared links for April 4th:

• 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.

My shared links for March 30th through April 3rd:

• 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.

My shared links for March 18th through March 26th:

• 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)

My shared links for March 5th through March 17th:

• 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 -