Archive: November 07, 2005

Monday, November 7, 2005

1. Don Knuth: Musings and More (via LtU):

   The Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) is posting “Computer Musings,” lectures given by renowned Professor Donald E. Knuth, Stanford University’s Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming. SCPD is digitizing about one hundred tapes of Knuth’s musings, lectures and selected classes and posting them here. They are available to the public free of charge.
   
   “I have always liked the concept of universities as they were in Ancient Greece, where folks who had something cool to say would just come and say it,” says Knuth. “It wasn’t about recognition; the impetus was the thought that you were resonating with ideas.” These archived tapes resonate with not only his thoughts, but with insights from students, audience members and other legends in mathematics and computer sciences.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

2. Ian Bicking: Ajaxy Exception Catching, via Ned Batchelder, who writes:

   But when I saw Ian Bicking's Ajaxy Exception Catching screencast, my mouth dropped open. He's built something (WSGI middleware, what the heck is that?) that catches exceptions in your web application, and displays a stack trace in your browser. Big deal. But you can also expand the line numbers to see context lines of code around the lines themselves. Nice. Then you can expand some more to see all of the local variables at each frame in the stack. Whoa! Then you can type arbitrary Python into an edit control and have it evaluated in the context of that frame. Magic!!

   Really was impressive. Check out the screencast.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Ajax, Python, Web]

3. I Am Bored .com: Funny Voice (video). Thanks Linc!

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Random]

4. The Guardian: Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head (via, via):

   Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel... The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible.

   Update: Glenn Reynolds links to "Mr. Snitch": There really is one born every minute! Why does this story sound so familiar to me?

     ¶ (1) Tags: [Science]

5. Variety.com - Will 'Guy' fly with FCC?:

   "It'd be the greatest compliment of all if they actually watched us and fined us," he says, laughing. "We'd know we'd gotten their attention."

     ¶ (0) Tags: [TV/Movies]