The Image Quiz searches Google Images for pictures related to some keyword or keywords, then displays them to you; your job is to guess what keywords were used in the search. Strangely addicting, and loads of fun.
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I just ran across Craig Finseth’s book The Craft of Text Editing. It’s a kind to implementing a text editor, given the knowledge current as of 1991 (which, sadly, hasn’t progressed a bit — the old text editors are in many cases far more advanced than the modern ones). An essential read if you’re looking to write an emacs-like editor.
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Many years ago I started to get into Scheme, an academic programming language which was supposed to become the official language of the GNU Project; it was this which drew me to it. After all, if the GNU Project would be using it everywhere, then it’d serve me well to learn it ASAP.
Scheme’s an interesting member of the Lisp family; code is represented as a list which may itself be manipulated.
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Well, for one, Zed Shaw will kill them if they don’t. But seriously, he brings up some very important points about the use and misuse of statistics in computer science circles.
I’ve used R, the statistical package to which he refers; it’s a nice piece of work, and very useful for my purpose at the time (which was determining the root cause of some performance problems on one of my hosts).
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I just read an article about iAudio, a portable little audio player which — unlike the iPod — might be worth owning. It uses a real AA battery, not some expensive proprietary failure-prone one; it plays unencumbered audio formats like Ogg Vorbis; it has a little FM tuner. The iAudio might be the player for me.
4 February 2018: I did end up getting one, and I really liked it. There’s a newer version available, too.
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Tristan Miller pleads that his correspondents not send him Microsoft Word files. I echo his plea: if you love me, you will not send me Microsoft (or Apple) formatted files.
05 February 2018: update URL
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A school-child watered houseplants with water heated to boiling either by a stove or a microwave, then cooled. It turns out that the plant fed microwaved water did dramatically less than that with the stove-heated water. A proper scientific study would be useful, though — this one hardly qualifies.
04 February 2018: updated URL
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Found some comparison screenshots of video games from twenty years ago and today. Pretty impressive how much graphics have improved! I didn’t realise that games were this good — I might need to get a system one of these days.
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A blogger named ‘why the lucky stiff’ argues that we need more little languages for kids to play with. When we were young, every computer system had an included programing language which let one play around. I myself was inspired by the Basic available for our TI-99/4a; it’s no doubt a large part of the reason that I’m now a software developer.
But most devices these days lack such accessible tools, and hence kids are much less likely to get drawn into programming.
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The Guardian (yes, their politics are execrable) has an article about the explosion in beta software these days which is quite good.
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From C|Net comes news that digital restrictions management hurts audio player battery life. Yet another reason to avoid it.
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Kevin Kelly has a great piece on what he calls ‘consensus web filters’ — that is, sites which rely on their readers to submit & rank items of import. This is a category which will become only more important with time; the ability to filter out items in which one is interested out of the millions generated daily is highly useful.
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