Links

• Paul Graham: What You Can't Say [to read]
• Channel 8 put a wiener on tv
• The Fourteenth Amendment
• Continuations Made Simple and Illustrated -- via LtU
• Matt Croydon: Martian Links -- via Erik
• Laird has disciplined himself to never throw a NullPointerException again -- via Erik
• TagSoup
• HTML Tidy
• A Whirlwind Tour of the Protestant Reformation -- via Kottke
• My new year's resolution is 1024x768. Hahahaha. -- via Kottke
• Howard Dean wearing a cheese hat -- via Kottke
• http://www.wafflepoweredhoward.com/ (via a comment on the previous post from Kottke). That site isn't as good as you'd think. It seems like there should be a lot more there than there is.
• Dave Thomas: Kata Twenty One: Simple Lists
• What today's game designers can learn from Space Invaders. Oh my gosh it's like this was written with Prince of Persia in mind. -- via Matthew. Cool quote: "Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity." By the way, I pretty much hate Prince of Persia now.
• wikidPad -- via Matthew
• A hurricane modeled in a computer for the first time ever in Japan's Earth Simulator.
• Paul Graham: Java's Cover (from 2001)
• The Register: Google buys search engine - PageRank™ RIP?
• Seattle P-I: You're All Stupid!
• Building Web Applications with Common Lisp -- via Leslie
• Express Yourself -- Correctly -- via Erik. He left out "alot" and "a lot". Surprisingly, people still screw this up.
• Steven Den Beste goes over lots of poll results about the war in Iraq, and finds them remarkably consistent. Graphs and everything.
• Free Smalltalk books! -- via Erik
• Which Christian theologian are you? -- via Mike
• Tim Bray: TPSM 2 (Losers) and TPSM 3 (Candidate Predictors)
• Alterslash - "the unofficial SlashDot digest"
• World Buddy - time zones and world weather
• HTML Tidy Online
• Vote For The Democrats Or You're Stupid!
• Planet RDF

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Random | id 4621

03:55 (utc-5)
edited: 21:31 (utc-5)

 

Object Prevalence

Leslie has a link to Common Lisp Prevalence, an "object prevalence" system for Common Lisp. Object prevalence systems allow you to keep all of your business objects in RAM instead of serializing them back and forth to an RDBMS for every query. With a transaction log, your data is safe even in the case of a system crash.

Here's an article at Advogato explaining Prevayler, an object prevalence system for Java, and here's An introduction to object prevalence at IBM developerWorks.

Object prevalence systems are different than OODBMS because OODBMS usually use some kind of object query language, while object prevalence systems just use your normal programming lanugage operations. As long as your data set is small enough that you won't start paging to disk -- and with systems with many gigabytes of RAM there are many applications for which that's not a concern -- object prevalence systems seem like a great idea.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 4620

01:41 (utc-5)
edited: 01:46 (utc-5)

 

Blended-metal bullets

Via Leslie, Blended-metal bullets

Some observers are convinced that Special Operations Command officials’ refusals to test RBCD ammo stem from work that’s well underway at that command. For some time, the special-operations community has been conducting work on a new 6.8mm round to replace the 5.56mm. If a 5.56mm round proved to be as effective as larger 6.8mm ammo, the rationale for new ammo and a new weapon would disappear.

Thomas isn’t interested in any of the reasons that might be keeping RBCD ammo from reaching U.S. special-operations forces, but he is convinced that its use would save soldiers’ lives. An adversary hit by a blended-metal bullet — even if struck in an arm or leg — would be in no condition to continue the fight, he said.

The former SEAL’s experience with RBCD ammo should be reason enough for Pentagon officials to insist that Special Operations Command immediately begin realistic testing of the blended-metal ammunition. Further foot-dragging by the command should trigger a congressional inquiry.

This article leads me to wonder again why hollow-point bullets are outlawed... I'll have to look it up.

Permalink | 10 Comments | id 4619

01:10 (utc-5)