Inklings: a tumblelog

John Cowan’s nascent hacker translation of the Tao Te Ching

This is one of the more interesting projects released by a commercial company. It’s not a product, it a declarative presentation system and layout engine. At first look, it seems rather clever: it allows you to build interfaces cleanly in a wholly declarative manner. Follow the via link to LtU and read that. All I can say is wow.

A flash animation set to the music of John Coltrane.

Wow, that’s surprisingly uncomplicated. It’s much simpler than the old method I’d been using.

A 3D FPS technology demo written with Shockwave. Really quite impressive.

It’s based on Dave Raggitt’s HTML Tidy, and it’s quite nifty. It plonks a small icon down on your message bar that shows whether the page validates or not. And it can clean up the code too!

This sounds like some of the stuff I wrote when I wrote that OS for MEMS as part of my college work experience. Maybe there’s some differences, but they’re not entirely obvious. Mentions Simon Tatham’s coroutine article.

That fascistic little weaselshit (and I don’t use those words lightly) of a Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, is at it again. “Progressive Democrats, a liberal party”? My arse.

Kinda useful.

I’m thinking of getting this. It’s a summary of research on group behaviour and I’ve heard good things about it.

He describes some of the improvements made to it based on feedback from the first public draft, and explains some of the background and rationale behind the design.

They mostly look pretty good even if they’re far from outstanding and are a little bit cookiecutter, though Consolas is quite nice.

A decent thread on /.? Surely this is a sign of the coming apocalypse… ;-)

A set of bindings for wxWidgets for O’Caml

FunForth (short for Functional Forth) implements some simplified aspects of the Haskell language, in particular, abstract data types and pattern matching.

Terribly elegant.

Rob Rohan’s JavaScript library. Lots of neat stuff in there.

Om mani padme hum… ;-)

A ridiculously good and clear introduction to a subject that puzzles many. Mikael Brockman: the guy’s smart alright.

This is traditionally the point where I’m supposed to defend the fact that I think she’s cute, but I really can’t be bothered.

Model-Glue helps you build Object-Oriented ColdFusion applications based on the Model View Controller pattern. It’s designed to be easy to use and play well with others, like Tartan.

A rather interesting wee tool that lets you grab data off of DVDs and CDs that are misbehaving. That includes ‘copy protected’ discs. I could use this for getting some valuable personal data of a backup DVD that started misbehaving. Note to self: always make two identical backups.

A fast, lock-free implementation of malloc().

Can’t remember where I got this one.

Slate is a prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk-80.

Something from the TUNES Project that isn’t vapourware. And it looks pretty cool too.

Mozilla and Safari/Konq only right now.

A completely mistitled, but informative guide to arguing effectively in the real world.

A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.

Paul Graham outlines his approach to writing. Pity he didn’t break down that last paragraph thematically. :-|

Something extra that might help those with difficulty understanding Monads.

I’d something written up like this a few days back, but Brent Ashley does a much better job than my rant. People, please: get over yourselves, stop ranting on about Ajax, and get back to coding. It’s nothing new, nothing original, it’s just hype. Thank you.

The International Telecommunications Union wants to get its grubby hands on the Intarweb. I don’t think so.