Inklings: a tumblelog

Cooperative threads and the like.

MySQL is just not built for large tag-systems. It just doesn’t scale. It does scale up to 1 Million items but delicious does have far more posts.

A free client side code syntax highlighter

Preaching to the choir! :-)

Laughed my pants off!

Cross-platform file synchoniser.

Using RNA to switch off genes.

Using Haskell as an embedded extension language.

MacGyver’s idea of a holiday is being dropped behind enemy lines armed only with a spoon and a positive attitude.

Now, that‘s a leader! :-)

Kool-Aid is an inexpensive non-carbonated soft drink that comes in powder form, mixed with water and sugar. It’s a sweet colorful drink favored by children. […] To ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ is to adopt a religion with suicidal zeal.

Ok, now I understand the phrase.

All well and fine, but how do you find entries linking to some entry on your blog? That’s the one vaguely useful thing about Technorati, no matter how utterly crap is might be otherwise.

A wiki about, well, PHP security.

Oh, to not be on dialup right now…

Now, this is great to see. Continuations will play a big part in making web development a lot more naturalistic than it is now. All that’s needed is for people to stop being intimidated by them, and realise just how useful they are.

Although I wasn’t able to attend, it got me thinking about ‘compulsive production’ and how it relates to my life.

Dr. Norman Wildberger, of the South Wales University, has redefined trigonometry without the use of sines, cosines, or tangents. In his book about Rational Trigonometry (sample PDF chapter), he explains that by replacing distance and angles with new concepts: quadrance, and spread, one can express trigonometric problems with simple algebra and fractional numbers. Is this the beginning of a new era for math?

Holy crap!

Rather cool Python webdev uberframework.

How a more expressive programming language can trumph a faster, yet less expressive one.

Old article on from when C# appears. Goes back to when MS attempted to introduce them into Java with J++.

I refuse point blank to use AJAX as a name for Remote Scripting. Stupid name.

This is something I should definitely do!

Java port of Textile

Java port of Markdown

At last! The one thing that annoyed me about their redesign was that I could no longer print out the articles. But now I can again. Eric Meyer explains how they went about designing a printer-friendly stylesheet for the new layout.

Yup, no ads and no registration. This is a great idea on their part: the desktop market isn’t important to them (only 3% of users register at all), it creates a lot of good will marketing, and it has the potential to shake things up even more in the browser arena, which is never a bad thing.

All worth reading.

A way for poor, disorganised sods like myself to get things done.

Venom! I’m dancing in my spidey fan pants! But no Carnage? What’s with that?

Interesting. It’d never have occurred to me that SAX might be as useful for generating XML as it is for parsing it.

‘Apatheism’, the article states, is ‘a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s’. I didn’t have a name for it, but that’s a view I’ve tried to hold myself for a long time now, albeit I’ve waivered quite a bit!

Hallelujah! As someone who hates reading articles off the screen with a passion and likes to print things off, if only to save my eyes, there’s nothing I hate more that when sites don’t use print-friendly stylesheets. Or worse: when the printable version is paged! Surely when Jakob Nielsen admonished use all that users don’t like to scroll, surely the point was really that you should make them have to read as little as possible rather than having them scroll or page through a bunch of bloated writing. And if there’s one thing I hate more than sites without print-friendly stylesheets, it’s sites that make me page through articles if I want to print them off!

Making browser history work in the presence of remote scripting.

A John Holbo post from ages back here he rips into Frum’s book of the same name, showing his tendancy to appeal to some kind of rugged visceral aethetic tends to undermine the point he’s trying to get across. A great piece of writing, and worth reading regardless of your political colouring. Really! Lots of great comments from right across the spectrum, both arguing for and against what John wrote. I think the book itself might just be worth a read.

A component that allows you to add autocomplete in words in a HTML text area.

And more on the RIFE wiki explaining the use of continuation on the web.

Gives me an excuse to toss away a lot of my DB code. :-) This implements a lot of same kinds of helper classes I’ve created myself for making JDBC a lot less painful to work with.

Another Java continuations framework.

Most Java applications must store data to a data store whether it’s XML files or a relational database. Changes to the mapping technology should be transparent to the rest of the application allowing changes to be localized in the mapping layer. Commons Mapper is a thin abstraction layer around a project’s chosen data mapping technology. It allows the developer to vary the mapping technique behind this layer (often combining several technologies) so that the rest of the application doesn’t change.

While it’s pretty easy to convince people about the efficacy of not having a single development server that everybody work on, and to instead have seperate development workstations and use source control. But doing the same with database is another matter. I guess the only way to do it is to store the schema and sample data as text files, and modify these, and rebuild the various databases whenever they’re changed during the build or when a developer checks out the updated schema/database. It’s a hard problem though, and I know a lot of people who don’t like the idea of doing that though. Maybe the problem is that the RDBMSs we have today just aren’t up to the task of being developer-friendly?

Sorry, I can’t help myself. I know this is lapsing from Apatheism, but then again, bible literalism is something I’ve always found rather amusing, if not risable. And this is rather an entertaining read.

Time management guru David Allen has established a cult following. Devotees of his Getting Things Done manifesto claim it has the power to change lives. Ben Hammersley is a believer.

A PHP port of Ruby on Rails.

Crap! I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!

A Manchester scientist has found a 20-million year-old spider, perfectly preserved in a lump of amber.

Really, really cool! Mind you, I see no reason why it needs to be so blocky.