michael-mccracken.net » programming

Links: Hacking, Music in Python, Rust & unitaskimg

mike — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:15:15 +0000

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

"""
>>> 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?

Links: Flattr, Haskell, Haskell QuickCheck, and Stuart Cheshire (of Bolo fame)

mike — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:20:31 +0000

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.

Links: Haskell, Music OCD Tools, Terrorism, Probability for Ranking things

mike — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 21:16:32 +0000

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.

Links for mid-March see scalable python around corners. And Future Spies on Facebook!

mike — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:20:56 +0000

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)

Links: JS, LaTeX, Live drawing and sound.

mike — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:29:25 +0000

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 –

Links: More PyPy, Academia, Censorship we Love, and Monads

mike — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:39:03 +0000

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.

Links: Structure editing, Unix History, OSS Legal Issues Primer

mike — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:53:14 +0000

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 –

Links: Cheap wardrobe, App Stores, Javascript & Parsing.

mike — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:51:07 +0000

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

Links: screen for X, computer history, Linux

mike — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:53:54 +0000

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

Links for February 7th through February 9th

mike — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:46:24 +0000

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 –