Items in Oct, 2002
Filters: Year: 2002 × Month: Oct × Sorted by date
The css-discuss Wiki is now live
The css-discuss wiki has finally gone live to the public. Here’s my message to the mailing list announcing the launch.
[... 30 words]Voostind interview
Virtual Interview: Vince Oostindie (via techno weenie). Vincent is the author of the excellent Eclipse Library for PHP and a regular on the SitePoint forums, where he frequently educates people in programming PHP using OOP methods. The interview is well worth a read if you are interested in either of these topics.
[... 58 words]Eldred oral arguments
Lots of news on Eldred vs Ashcroft today. The best account I’ve seen so far of proceedings in the courtroom is this one by Kwindla Hultman Kramer, who has a press pass and was thus allowed to take notes in the court room. I tried to explain to a house mater yesterday why extending the copyright term is bad for creativity, but today I found this article which does a much better job than I did. Slashdot has some excellent links and a lengthy discussion as well.
[... 106 words]Google News to RSS
Google News to RSS is brilliant. Simply type in some search terms (or append them to a query string) and the script queries Google News and returns the results formatted as RSS, allowing you to add a customised feed to your aggregator to follow interesting news stories.
[... 48 words]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.
[... 80 words]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.
[... 100 words]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.
[... 27 words]RDF query-o-matic
Mental note: Read Burning Bird’s RDF Query tutorial and have a play with the Query-o-matic.
[... 20 words]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.
[... 33 words]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.
[... 46 words]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.
[... 87 words]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]