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Free the mouse
On Wednesday, Laurence Lessig will take on the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft. He will probably lose, but I sure hope he doesn’t. Last night I watched Lessig’s <free culture> keynote presentation from OSCon (made available in Flash format by Leonard Lin) with my girlfriend, and I’ve been catching up on the case with this Wired article and MSNBC’s Glitterati vs Geeks. Lessig’s blog has some interesting links as well.
Eric has permalinks
Eric Meyer now has permalinks! Now if he would only start pinging weblogs.com when he updated I (and many others) could add him to their blo.gs-powered blogroll.
[... 189 words]Sidekick suck
Leonard Lin has a new HipTop—a hand-held wireless device for browsing the internet. His description of how well different sites work in the device makes for depressing reading. Blogs constructed with CSS and web standards in mind frequently fair worse than less well structured sites—it seems that rather than ignoring the CSS as it should do the device’s browser attempts to render it and mangles sites in the process. Anil Dash has an excellent summary of why this is a Bad Thing(TM) for all involved.
Lisp special forms
Special forms are generally exceptions to normal Lisp syntax that make coding easier and more convenient for the programmer. They are expressions that do not follow the normal rules of evaluation. Examples we have met so far include quote and if.
EuLisp
EuLisp gives programmers the ability to define their own error handlers. The default error handler used by the interactive interpreter displays a description of the error and starts the debug loop.
[... 970 words]Googlebad
Mark Pilgrim explains why Google’s latest update tweaks (mentioned yesterday) are a lot less harmless than they first appeared.
RDF query-o-matic
Mental note: Read Burning Bird’s RDF Query tutorial and have a play with the Query-o-matic.
Write on
A year ago, Mark Pilgrim’s manager told him to stop blogging. He refused, and was fired a week later. Today Mark celebrates.
Newspaper sites and the link element
Adrian Holovaty advocates the usage of next/previous link elements on newspaper sites to add optional linear navigation. His comments include some interesting discussions on whether or not this feature would really be of use on that kind of site.
Googledumping
It seems Google have tweaked their algorithm a bit, resulting in several high profile webloggers losing their top ranking positions for a search on their name. Scott Andrew summarises the situation nicely:
[... 100 words]MySQL on Linux or FreeBSD?
Jeremy Zawodny: FreeBSD or Linux for your MySQL Server? Jeremy explains the differences in threading implementation between Linux and FreeBSD, and explains why Linux is a better option for MySQL databases running under a high load. Link via Scott who got it from Keith. I wonder if anyone has played with the idea of syndicating link-found-on information in an RSS feed? Tracking link trails could be quite interesting.
Applications
The above (badly drawn) ASCII diagram shows a traffic system. Traffic flows from A to B to C to D and back to A again, with new items flowing in to A, B and D at 10, 20 and 40 items per timeunit respectively. Items flow out of the system at point C at the rate of 70 items per timeunit. We assume that the flow in to each of the nodes on the system is equal to the flow out of that node.
[... 933 words]Gauss Jordan Elimination
The steps of the Gauss-Jordan elimination process are as follows:
[... 870 words]Basic Lisp
Typically, Lisp is run as an interactive interpreter. People write a whole load of Lisp in a test file and then load it in to the interpreter and try it out to see if it works. Lisp is a very dynamic language—functions can be redefined on the fly and it is perfectly possible to shoot yourself in the foot (by redefining Lisp internals for example) if you really want to.
[... 905 words]Managing data
These notes cover chapter one of “Data Management” by Richard T. Watson.
[... 974 words]Maths for apps problems class
I didn’t quite understand this part of the lecture as we arrived late. These are the notes copied from the board.
[... 1,060 words]Pingback and Trackback
Hixie has written a whitepaper comparing Pingback to Trackback, and answering pretty much every question that has been asked about Pingback in the past week.
XML transformations with CSS and the DOM
Scott Andrew: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. Forget about XSLT, Scott demonstrates how CSS can be used to visually style XML documents while a bit of Javascript can add additional behaviour such as clickable links. Unfortunately the demonstration document doesn’t seem to work in my 1.1 version of Mozilla (the styles work fine but the clickable links don’t work at all).
Taming lists
In CSS Design: Taming Lists, Mark Newhouse explains in detail every CSS list trick in the book, including inline lists, nested breadcrumbs and a variety of other useful techniques. He also links to Eric Meyer’s essential DevEdge article Consistent List Indentation which explains how to deal with the differences between list indentation in Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
CSS in the real world
Adrian Holovaty: CSS in the real world. Adrian uses CSS to reduce the markup for a list of news headlines by 75%:
[... 56 words]Peter Gabriel
Today’s weird blogging observation: Bloggers love Peter Gabriel. Jeremy Zawodny is a big fan, Scott Andrew can’t wait for his new album, Jeffrey Zeldman praises his sophistication and daypop returns 44 blogs currently talking about him. Despite being good friends with his nephew I’ve never really listened to him that much, but with glowing reviews such as these I’m tempted to grab the new album and see what the fuss is about.
XFML 1.0 soon
Peter Van Dijck: Future XFML news will be posted on the XFML.org site.
XFML 1.0 will be with us soon.