sness

Saturday, February 28, 2009

rogue

roguescience.org - home of Justin Love. He was performing at the Interdisciplinary Day yesterday at UVIC, where I also gave a talk. Really amazing things happening at UVIC right now.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

apple.com

Usability Analysis of Apple.com: Why is it so Good?

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

urb

Clojure + CouchDB = Urbantastic. That's a lot of functional programming for web. Interesting.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

start it up

Startups in 13 Sentences - By Paul Graham.

spring

Spring 3 is in the air - a first look - Spring 3 moves to Java 5 / JDK 1.5 and gains REST support

Monday, February 23, 2009

i will follow


tail --follow=name -f /var/log/messages

Friday, February 20, 2009

test

Integration testing
jtest
System Testing

fu

command line fu. some pretty good intermediate level commands in there.

but seriously switch to zsh for the real fu.

!git

what git is not. git is rock and roll. and flowers. and sparkles. i <3 git.

undel

How to undelete any open, deleted file on linux.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Super! Power! Cheesy and Sleazy Lyric Writing Stall

This is so FREAKING AMAZING!!!!

Ravioli Caprese

Ingredients
Dough:
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1 cup very hot water
Filling:
3/4 cup whole milk ricotta
1 egg
1/2 cup finely shredded store-bought rotisserie chicken
1/4 cup grated Parmesan
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh basil leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Sauce:
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil leaves
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Directions

For the dough:

In a large bowl combine the flour and the water. Using a wooden spoon, stir to combine into a large ball. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 10 minutes.

For the filling:

Combine all the ingredients in a medium bowl and stir to combine.

To form the ravioli, cut the dough into 4 evenly sized pieces. The dough should be slightly sticky. Add extra flour as necessary for rolling, but use only a little as necessary. Form each piece into a 2 by 6-inch rectangle. Recover the dough with the plastic wrap.

Lightly dust the work surface and a rolling pin. Working with 1 piece of dough at a time, roll the dough into a 4 by 19-inch rectangle. Place 9 rounded teaspoons of filling about 1-inch apart down the center of the dough. Fold the dough over the filling. Press down around the edges of each of the ravioli with your fingertips. Cut the ravioli into small squares and press down around the edges again with your fingertips to seal. Place the finished ravioli on a baking tray and continue forming the remaining ravioli.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add half the ravioli and cook until the ravioli float stirring occasionally, about 3 to 4 minutes. Drain into a large bowl and cook the remaining ravioli.

Pour the olive oil over the cooked ravioli. Add the basil, lemon zest, salt, and pepper. Gently toss to coat and serve immediately.

integrate

Continuous integration at Mozilla - Very neat ways to visualize problems with the source tree of mozilla.

while

while (1) if (1 != 1) printf("cosmic ray detected\n");

unix

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson

funny

Top 13 Funny Software Development Quotes

"In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion." - Author Unknown

random

Why you should never use rand(). Interesting analysis for speed of random number generation for game developers.

hello multicore

Ask Reddit: what's the "hello world" program for multicores?

Funniest answer:

hlelow oldr

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Stanislav Grof

Stanislav Grof - Holotropic Breathing

Grof rocks. shaman comes out the other side of the tunnel. sness.

Have Guru Darshan 1977

5

fifth column

ioloader error

I was having some major problems with some Actionscript 3.0 that I was writing. I was trying to write a try/catch block to handle the case when a URL was missing:


 _metadata_loader = new URLLoader();
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(MarGridFlash._metadata_filename);
_metadata_loader.load(request);

But no combination of try/catch worked. It turns out that it was a case of "ur doin it wrong", and instead, as I learned from this excellent post that I should instead be doing:


loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, loaderMissing);

function loaderMissing(event:IOErrorEvent):void
{
    trace("ERROR");
}

why?

An interview with why the lucky stiff. Why is just so random, I like.

git!

Git - is the C of Version Control Tools. I realllly like git, much better than svn. It sometimes gets a little hinky, but I'm sure it's because I don't understand it well enough yet.

font

Consolas - is a monospaced (non-proportional) typeface, designed by Lucas de Groot.

I use "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-14" myself.

test

Your Unit Tests Lie to You. Mostly interesting.

lp

Graphical solution of 2-var LP's. I'm thinking of taking a Linear Programming course this summer at UVIC.

zsync

zsync - is a file transfer program. It allows you to download a file from a remote server, where you have a copy of an older version of the file on your computer already. zsync downloads only the new parts of the file. It uses the same algorithm as rsync. However, where rsync is designed for synchronising data from one computer to another within an organisation, zsync is designed for file distribution, with one file on a server to be distributed to thousands of downloaders. zsync requires no special server software ? just a web server to host the files ? and imposes no extra load on the server, making it ideal for large scale file distribution.

xmonad

xmonad - A Linux X11 window manager written with Haskell. Go FP!

netcat

netcat - very cool unix network utility program.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

happy

From 5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)

"This may be why studies show friendships, altruism and religious practices bring happiness. It may be that taking the focus off your own happiness is what makes happiness possible."

This is so true. One thing that I would like to add is that people who are really into self-improvement, and talk about self-care, are in fact deluding themselves. The only way to be happy is to take the focus off of your own happiness and focus that love of self to love of the universe.

I think that this might be due to the way that our brains have been constructed by evolution, but I have to do more thinking on this before I can present a really cogent argument.

And it's past my bedtime. :)

ixda

Interaction Design Association

tricky

Here's a real quick and dirty way to test to see if the program I'm refactoring continues to do the right thing. If the diff command prints anything out, I need to take one step back and try the refactoring again.


./newnotes > la      
./newnotes | diff - la

NuMOG (twinkle twinkle 2)

NuMOG (twinkle twinkle 1)

java mozilla

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_11/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Saturday, February 14, 2009

CSS - Move

great new song!

P-Funk All Stars - We Want The Funk

Flash Light (Part 1)- Houston 1978

metric - dead disco

Sounding the Stars with Genetic Algorithms

Seattle Conference on Scalability: Communicating Like Nemo

Jenn!

Friday, February 13, 2009

balloon

Trying to decide whether to use balloon tags, like Google Maps in a new application I'm building

balloonhelp in C
what is a help balloon
problems with balloons on Google Maps
Balloon Help at Wikipedia
Tooltip at Wikipedia

I might go with a status bar instead:

Status Bar at Wikipedia