"call shotgun babe, and we can bust out of this popsicle stand"
there is a neat post on the subversion-dev mailing list (no link, the post isn't archived yet) where greg hudson wonders if the idea of storing the latest revision of a file as full text and keeping older versions as diffs to it is the best idea. (that's what cvs does too.) his idea is to use the 'delta-combiner' and 'skip-delta' technology they have to make a system where you only need to go through O(lg(n)) deltas to get to any revision. it's an interesting idea and a very simple implementation. simplicity over complexity is agreed on but is a mild loss of performance in certain cases (over others) worth it?#
there's an article on kuro5hin about film censorship. i think it's strange that there are laws to rate movies AND censor them. you would think either you couldn't see the movies at all or you would have to meet some sort of age criteria. i wonder why the movie couldn't just be NC-17 (or what it is down there) and i wonder if they routinely ban, or even look at, gross porn movies that are made? hmm. and what about movies that are made in australia? is it that they are illegal to be shown, imported, or what?#
dan hon reviews what looks like a cutesy little movie that is predictably charming and entertaining.#
this article in the spectator talks about the politics of South Africa and how attempts are being made to re-write it's history. (via gene expression)#
word soup: "Damnit. Here I was, wandering through life thinking religion was little more than a method of control to scare early cultures into complacency before there was riot gear, tazers and pepper spray. " in reference to this.#
jeff jarvis reveals aol's blogging community plans. (via dan hon)#
an article covering a paper about the problems with using metaphors when describing scientific research because it's prone to cause confusion. this is from Matt Webb who also adds that the word 'expect' is used in a confusing, nonintuitive manner in many cases and a new word needs to be found. this reminds me of the discussion of the "A NATION AS A PERSON" metaphor in politics and international relationships. metaphors bad.#
ted leung links dashboard, which is a nice way to get information about your information and will hopefully be a very useful platform for general use. kind of like that chandler bit.#
also linked by ted is gordon weakliem thinking about how some people like to program and how much a simple interface to a technology helps that technology be useful. his quoting of the david whiner comment "Python is one of the more popular languages for XML-RPC apps, because it has a very flexible way of creating remote procedure calls that look much like local ones." reminds of The Law of Leaky Abstractions and that you often can't treat remote things "as if" they were local. so even though it's 'easier' to use it may be 'harder' to debug. (also linked is larry o'brien's rant about what's wrong with today's languages.)#
tony pierce honors the america he loves so dearly. because "everything's free in america, for a small fee in america" murda. "You gotta compete to turn up my heat"#
don park favours backwards compatibility over searching aimlessly for the 'ideal, graceful' solution that doesn't exist, and it's good.#
hunting the muse links the article at msnbc "Citing 9/11, Bush defends Iraq War" and says "I've seen a few different articles phrasing their headlines like this. It's interesting to me because it strikes me as pretty suggestive, almost as if they are begging a question. It's not quite far enough, though - none of them make the explicit point that there is no linkage whatsoever between Iraq/Hussein and 9/11. Maybe someday." Atheistic Amen.#
gary hart is awesome: " the current administration and particularly its rigid, orthodox ideological supporters are defining anyone who disagrees with them out of acceptable political society. It\u2019s really a form of fundamentalism, of the very kind we\u2019re at war with, that takes upon itself the authority to decree the saved and the damned." and "The First Amendment (according to the right-wing): \u201cCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, except to encourage attendance in Christian churches, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, except to require prayer in schools, or abridging the freedom of speech, except for those questioning the Bush administration, or of the press, except that not owned by Rupert Murdoch, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, except those protesting preemptive wars, and to petition the government for a redress of grievance, except those we don\u2019t like.\u201d Salute this amendment or we\u2019ll declare you treasonous." - hah!#
the smalltalk blog links this "Lessons Learned" article about how to do open source development and the st blog points out the bit about how "C/C++ is no longer a viable development language". both agree that dynamic languages like python and smalltalk are the key to success. #
james robertson also writes complaining about why people don't choose smalltalk and actually useful dynamic languages over free open source and free corporate languages and tools. noting that "People seem to recognize that you get what you pay for - right up to the point where they select development tools. Then they expect a handout." and making the interesting remark that "Why is Eclipse boring? Perhaps it's because - unlike Smalltalk and Lisp - it takes no advantage of being written in itself. You can't modify the environment, or even ask intelligent questions of it." - it really is the tools and languages that make programming easier and more effective. Why focus on the tools you're using to solve the problem, rather than the problem itself?#