Keith's Weblog

Zero Hedge on Greece and the failure of the Euro

Thu, 17 May 2012 04:54:03 +0000

ZeroHedge: A Crazy Idea That Might Just Work: Greece's New Currency, The U.S. Dollar:

If you eliminate the market's ability to price risk and credit, the market breaks down. That is the eurozone in a nutshell.

Ward Cunningham on Perl and open source

Thu, 17 May 2012 04:43:48 +0000

Ward Cunningham on Perl and open source:

That's when I picked up Perl. And it shocked me, just how well it worked for finding and plundering files because it had those reg exes built in and stuff like that. And it was so fast. It was fast to compile, it was fast to develop, it was fast to run. I could not believe it was so fast. And I know people like to complain about it, but I also thought it showed a tremendous amount of insight. It was insight, and I looked at it and I said, "Who would have thought of making a language like that?" That's when I realized that open source was here to stay. There is no commercial endeavor that ever would have invented Perl.

Here's another interview with Ward Cunningham I've been intending to read.

Flotr2 - Graphs and Charts for Canvas in JavaScript

Wed, 16 May 2012 22:21:23 +0000

flotr2 - Graphs and Charts for Canvas in JavaScript (via).

Ars Technica: Say hello to the real real-time Web

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:56:47 +0000

Ars Technica: Say hello to the real real-time Web (via). Mentions Firebase and Meteor. To read.

Pretty RFC

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:45:20 +0000

Pretty RFC (via). Doesn't have a lot of RFCs pretty-fied

To boldly Go where Node man has gone before

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:33:20 +0000

To boldly Go where Node man has gone before (via). So does Go's net/http module really provide basically exactly the same programming model as Node? If so, why use Node?

One thing the author didn't mention is that Go will use multiple cores in this example, whereas Node is single-threaded. Right?

How we use Backbone.js to build Codiqa – Part 1: API

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:25:00 +0000

How we use Backbone.js to build Codiqa – Part 1: API (via). To read the next time I mess with Backbone.

CodeMirror - In-browser code editor

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:04:34 +0000

CodeMirror (via). In-browser code editor.

Organization tools

Tue, 15 May 2012 22:22:13 +0000

11 Alternatives to OmniFocus. Trying GQueues again now. They finally have a "compact" display format, the lack of which was a major annoyance last time I tried it. I need to give OmniFocus a try though.

Here's an article on Mail Pilot. Also http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-online-to-do-list-application which mentions Flow

George W. Bush: ‘I’m for Mitt Romney’ - ABC News

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:42:00 +0000

George W. Bush: ‘I’m for Mitt Romney’ - ABC News. Of course he is. Bush, Obama, Romney are all basically the same big-government pro-war crony-capitalist person.

PyCUDA

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:21:23 +0000

PyCUDA.

Hans Boehm: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:14:30 +0000

Hans Boehm: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library (via). To read.

The grammar of Vim

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:13:49 +0000

rc3.org - The grammar of Vim (via).

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived - The Oatmeal

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:07:36 +0000

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived - The Oatmeal (via). Sheesh!

Acknowledging the Arrival of Peak Government

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:58:29 +0000

Acknowledging the Arrival of Peak Government. Interesting comments about the State's "ontological imperative to expand".

Must See: Greece Explained In One Picture | ZeroHedge

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:55:29 +0000

Must See: Greece Explained In One Picture | ZeroHedge. To watch. The dominos are starting to fall. This is going to be interesting.

WebOb — WSGI request and response objects

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:53:53 +0000

WebOb — WSGI request and response objects. Not really familiar. Via Ian Bicking.

Krugman's Misreading of US Banking History

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:51:10 +0000

Krugman's Misreading of US Banking History (via):

But Krugman has a much bigger puzzle to explain away: if free markets in banking are the problem, why did Canada, which, during this period, had a far less regulated banking system than the US, not experience the panics we did, and why did no Canadian banks fail during the Great Depression while around 9000 US banks did? If Krugman’s criticism of the “mythology” is correct, the Canadian banking system of that era should have been a basket case, but instead it was a model for the world precisely because it lacked the two most damaging government regulations present in the US. Canadian banks have always been free to operate nationwide and were, before 1934, able to issue their own currency free of bond collateral requirements. The very free market in Canadian banking dramatically out-performed the much more regulated US system.

Tab EXSPLOSION

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:20:43 +0000

Halp! Way too many tabs open!

Cursor Invisible.swf (game)

Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:29 +0000

Cursor Invisible.swf (game)

Pykka — Actors for Python

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:07:35 +0000

Pykka — Actors for Python (via). I still have to learn about the Actor model.

Mat Zo- Frequency Flyer (Original Mix) Official Version - YouTube

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:10:18 +0000

Mat Zo-- Frequency Flyer (Original Mix). Quality seems meh

Mat Zo feat. Linnea Schossow - The Sky (Extended Mix)

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:57:15 +0000

Mat Zo feat. Linnea Schossow - The Sky (Extended Mix).

Avengers

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:14:41 +0000

Avengers was good. Whedon finally gets the big hit he deserves.

An excellent response to an anti-gun person

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:50:23 +0000

Great response to "Guns are silly":

From a war vet friend:
Which demonstrates the value of your opinion and thought processes.

Let's wave the magic wand, and make all guns (which are nothing more than machines for throwing rocks) go away.

This returns us to the days in which everyone is at the utter mercy (or often lack thereof) of the men who are the biggest and strongest, and can use the weapons of that world--all of which depend on massive upper body strength and long years of training which must be supported by keeping the peasants down so they can supply these men with food and such, so they can spend all their time training with these weapons.

Guns are tools, usable by anyone regardless of strength and gender, and requiring only a little training for minimal competence. They are tools, for a specific purpose, and enable a 98lb woman to stand up to her 300lb male attacker. Civilized people use tools, especially tools which allow equality and productivity, as opposed to those which impose rule of brute force and inequality and destruction.

I make blades, I practice with blades, and I've actually used blades in combat. Take a gun from me, and you render me no less dangerous. You do make it much harder for the young woman who isn't as comfortable and practiced with blades as I am, and isn't as strong as her attacker will be, to defend herself.

InfoQ: Dealing with Performance Challenges - Optimized Data Formats

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:55:50 +0000

InfoQ: Dealing with Performance Challenges - Optimized Data Formats. E-bay engineer discusses Protocol Buffers, Thrift, and so on in great detail.

Things I learned about that I hadn't heard of before:

West Virginia paid $22K each for Internet routers

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:39:38 +0000

West Virginia paid $22K each for Internet routers:

Nobody told Hurricane librarian Rebecca Elliot that the $22,600 Internet router in the branch library's storage closet was powerful enough to serve an entire college campus.

Nobody told Elliot how much the router cost or who paid for it. Workers just showed up and installed the device. They left behind no instructions, no user manual.

The high-end router serves four public computer terminals at the small library in Putnam County.

The state of West Virginia is using $24 million in federal economic stimulus money to put high-powered Internet computer routers in small libraries, elementary schools and health clinics, even though the pricey equipment is designed to serve major research universities, medical centers and large corporations, a Gazette-Mail investigation has found.

"Free money" from the federal government gets allocated poorly. So surprising! Again, government "stimulus" is just crony capitalism, going to big companies:

In July 2010, a West Virginia Office of Technology administrator warned that the Cisco 3945 series routers "may be grossly oversized," according to an email obtained by the Gazette-Mail.

The administrator asked state officials to postpone plans to spend $24 million on the routers so he would have time to evaluate the proposed purchase.

Five days later, state officials signed the $24 million contract with Verizon Network Integration to buy the Cisco routers.

I wonder who got kickbacks...

The Real 2012 Delegate Count

Sat, 12 May 2012 13:29:38 +0000

The Real 2012 Delegate Count for the Republican Primaries & Caucuses.

Analyzing your Gmail with Matplotlib

Sat, 12 May 2012 07:48:33 +0000

The Glowing Python: Analyzing your Gmail with Matplotlib (via). I should do something like this.

Plumbum: Shell Combinators and More (Python)

Sat, 12 May 2012 07:40:34 +0000

Plumbum: Shell Combinators and More — Plumbum: Shell Combinators (via). Not exactly sure what the use case of this is but it seems interesting, plus it provides remote execution over SSH like Fabric.