We’ve all seen those credit-card-entry (and other) forms which ask us to leave out dashes, spaces and other punctuations when entering our numbers. Never mind that credit card numbers are naturally written with spaces, that Social Security numbers use dashes and that phone numbers have a number of different representations involving dashes, parentheses, spaces, periods and plus signs. The really ridiculous thing is that removing extraneous punctuation is dead-simple for a computer to do.
Read more →
We’ve all seen those credit-card-entry (and other) forms which ask us to leave out dashes, spaces and other punctuations when entering our numbers. Never mind that credit card numbers are naturally written with spaces, that Social Security numbers use dashes and that phone numbers have a number of different representations involving dashes, parentheses, spaces, periods and plus signs. The really ridiculous thing is that removing extraneous punctuation is dead-simple for a computer to do.
Read more →
Adam Petersen demonstrates how to create a simple polling web app in Common Lisp — in around 70 lines of code! It’s not perfect (as one reddit comment noted, he needs to escape his strings for HTML), but it’s a pretty cool demonstration of how Lisp can serve as a rapid development platform.
Lisp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives out there.
Read more →
Adam Petersen demonstrates how to create a simple polling web app in Common Lisp — in around 70 lines of code! It’s not perfect (as one reddit comment noted, he needs to escape his strings for HTML), but it’s a pretty cool demonstration of how Lisp can serve as a rapid development platform.
Lisp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives out there.
Read more →
Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network of size n is proportional to n2. This follows from a simple observation: that the number of possible connections for each user in a network is n - 1; and since there are n users, then the total number of connections is n × (n - 1), which is roughly n2. This all seems reasonable and makes sense.
But it’s wrong. It begs one simple question: Metcalfe’s Law assumes that each connection is equally worthwhile.
Read more →
Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network of size n is proportional to n2. This follows from a simple observation: that the number of possible connections for each user in a network is n - 1; and since there are n users, then the total number of connections is n × (n - 1), which is roughly n2. This all seems reasonable and makes sense.
But it’s wrong. It begs one simple question: Metcalfe’s Law assumes that each connection is equally worthwhile.
Read more →
My fellow web programming geeks will have heard a lot of buzz about Representational State Transfer (REST). It’s definitely an improvement on the Ozymandian Web Services stack. But what is it really? How is it used? How does one adapt a design to it? Stefan Tilkov has a top-notch brief introduction to rest. If you write or design web-consumed services, or plan to, or manage those who do, check it out.
Read more →
My fellow web programming geeks will have heard a lot of buzz about Representational State Transfer (REST). It’s definitely an improvement on the Ozymandian Web Services stack. But what is it really? How is it used? How does one adapt a design to it? Stefan Tilkov has a top-notch brief introduction to rest. If you write or design web-consumed services, or plan to, or manage those who do, check it out.
Read more →
We all know that Windows Vista breaks a lot of things. What’s surprising is that it breaks Windows software so badly that running that same software under Linux and Wine (a free Windows implementation) can be a better choice. Here’s a list of games which run better under Linux+Wine than under Vista. Microsoft sure have some egg on their face with this one.
Read more →
We all know that Windows Vista breaks a lot of things. What’s surprising is that it breaks Windows software so badly that running that same software under Linux and Wine (a free Windows implementation) can be a better choice. Here’s a list of games which run better under Linux+Wine than under Vista. Microsoft sure have some egg on their face with this one.
Read more →
Today AOL has killed Netscape Navigator. I remember using Mosaic on Solaris and Macs, and when Navigator came out I thought it was just a ripoff of Mosaic (which is was — in fact, IIRC the first version was called Mosaic …). But then it became extremely popular, setting several records (including buggiest software ever).
The best thing Netscape ever did was free its code, giving us Firefox. The rest is … well, it happened: that’s the best which can be said for it.
Read more →
Today AOL has killed Netscape Navigator. I remember using Mosaic on Solaris and Macs, and when Navigator came out I thought it was just a ripoff of Mosaic (which is was — in fact, IIRC the first version was called Mosaic …). But then it became extremely popular, setting several records (including buggiest software ever).
The best thing Netscape ever did was free its code, giving us Firefox. The rest is … well, it happened: that’s the best which can be said for it.
Read more →