At last, here’s the droid we were all looking for. In this frame you can clearly see R2-D2’s cameo in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek. This time there’s absolutely no doubt about it: It’s been confirmed by ILM.
via gizmodo.com
Posted via web from Kevination
Confirmed: R2-D2 Finally Discovered In Star Trek
November 16th, 2009The Go Programming Language
November 11th, 2009I’m glad to see this; there has been too little innovation on the system programming language front. I do like C, though I’ve become more conscious of its faults since I learned it (*mumble*) years ago.
I’m a little disappointed that Google didn’t throw its weight behind the other major contender in this category, The D Programming Language. They have to have considered it; I wonder if their decision not to use it involved technical considerations, licensing considerations, or a little of both.
The write-up on TechCrunch is light on technical details, and the comments are hilariously clueless: paranoiacs spluttering that Google is taking over the world, people who’ve never written a line of code in their lives declaring it an instant failure, and Johnny One-Note programmers insisting that this will never take the place of PHP, or C#, or JavaScript, or whatever their One True Language is, shrieking with terror at the thought of learning something new.
For myself, I like what I’ve read so far about Go. It looks not much more complex than C (and waaaay less complex than C++), with a more modern, more streamlined feel. I like the idea of trying to head off the formatting wars by including a canonical pretty-printer in the core tool set (though I wish they had standardized on spaces instead of tabs for indentation). Requiring braces around blocks is good: it heads off a common error in C/C++ coding, and there shouldn’t be any ‘friction’ in changing a one-line block into a multi-line block. I liked structural equivalence of types when I first encountered it in Modula-3, and the Go concept of interfaces is nicely reminiscent of that. I don’t miss the whole object oriented feature list (encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance, and dynamic binding), so long as modularity and information hiding are supported. And garbage collection is a huge win, so long as it can be done efficiently and without causing the program to stutter.
All in all, very interesting, and a worthy challenger to D as a 21st-century systems programming language.
Go vs Go!
November 11th, 2009Go! is a concurrent programming language, first publicly documented by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe in 2003 [1]. It is oriented to the needs of programming secure, production quality, agent based applications. It is multi-threaded, strongly typed and higher order (in the functional programming sense).
via en.wikipedia.org
Google’s new ‘Go’ programming language, the very day it is announced, is already embroiled in a naming controversy.
Personally, I think they should contact the makers of LabVIEW, and see if they can acquire the naming rights for the G programming language.
Posted via web from Kevination
Convicted Murderer To Wikipedia: Shhh!
November 11th, 2009In 1990, Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr was brutally murdered. Two of his business associates were convicted, imprisoned for the crime, and recently paroled. Who killed Sedlmayr? Its a matter of public record, but if one of the men and his German law firm gets their way, Wikipedia (and EFF) will not be allowed to tell you. A few days ago, the online encyclopedia received a cease and desist letter from one of the convicts—represented by the aptly named German law firm Stopp and Stopp—demanding that the perpetrator’s name be taken off of the Sedlmayr article page.
via eff.org
German convicted (and paroled) murderer attempts to censor Wikipedia, to hide his crime. I suspect this will be subject to the “Streisand effect” — where trying to hide something only succeeds in drawing more attention to it.
“Oh, and by the way, the convicts were Wolfgang Werlé and his half-brother Manfred Lauber.”
Posted via web from Kevination
Talking Politics (or Not, Actually)
October 12th, 2009I’m intensely interested in politics, and follow current events. I have my own opinions, of course, and they are not blandly ‘moderate’. I think what happens in the world of national and international politics is important to our lives and our future, and we ignore it at our peril.
And yet, talking politics (or writing about it) is something I do less and less these days. That’s partly because my own views have little or no representation on the national stage, and so it seems futile. But mainly it’s because political conversation these days seems always to be an attempt to bludgeon one’s opponents, rather than persuade them. (And this is true of all sides of the debate: if you think the people on your side are innocent of such, or even perceptibly better than your opponents, you are a damned fool.)
I’m not saying I’m innocent of that kind of behavior myself; quite the contrary, I tend to get drawn into it far too easily. I’m trying to break myself of the habit, mostly by no longer talking or writing about politics. I’m not sure it’s right to do so — as I said, politics matters, and requires attention — but it’s what I feel like I have to do for the sake of my own self-respect.
The One Where I Say Something Nice About .NET
October 9th, 2009I’m working my way through Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, by Steven Sanderson, published by Apress. So far, I like it, for values of ‘it’ of both the book and the framework.
The book — well, the reviews on Amazon were glowing, and they’re basically right: clear prose style, ideas well expressed, and enough critique of other Microsoft technologies that you can tell it’s not a Microsoft Press title.
The framework … is interesting. It mostly abandons the ASP.NET model of server-side controls, postbacks, and viewstate in favor of plain HTML and CSS. (Though there are still advantages to using their HTML helper functions rather than coding up raw HTML yourself.) For pity’s sake, they even make jQuery available for your AJAX hacking pleasure.
What has always bothered me about “classic” ASP.NET was that it seemed to be an attempt to transplant the VB/WebForms style of development — drag-and-drop controls, a low-level event loop — onto the web. It’s a layer of abstraction over the web in an attempt to hide that fact that it is the web.
And it shows in terms of performance. Outside of low-latency intranets, the underlying architecture doesn’t support the chatty postback/viewstate implementation needed to emulate a desktop GUI event loop.
ASP.NET MVC, in contrast, feels like a web-native architecture. It’s designed around the strengths and limitations of HTTP, rather than fighting against it.
On top of that, it encourages the strong separation of concerns implied by ‘MVC’; it nudges the developer towards unit testing and test-driven development; and with the source code placed under an OSI-approved license, it represents a step by Microsoft into the world of Open Source.
All in all, I think ASP.NET MVC is quite cool.
Emerging into the Light « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
September 23rd, 2009Stephen Fry meditates on the subject of writing (and writes about it, of course):
I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.” It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.”
via Emerging into the Light « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry.
RIP Norman Borlaug
September 13th, 2009One of the greatest men of our time, a man who saved more lives than Hitler or even Stalin destroyed, has passed away.
Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.
via Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Fed the World – WSJ.com.
An in-depth story about the man by Penn & Teller.
Edit: Andrew Steele at the Globe And Mail contributes his thoughts on Borlaug’s passing.
RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win
September 10th, 2009I’d been hearing the terms ‘PubSubHubbub’ (silly name) and ‘rssCloud’ a lot lately, and decided I ought to figure out what the heck these people are talking about. Just in time, along comes Josh Fraser with a guest post on TechCrunch, RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win.
Both [PubSubHubbub] and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”
While Fraser favors PubSubHubbub, he apparently agrees that the name just doesn’t work, and refers to it throughout his piece as ‘PuSH’. If fate is kind, that name will win out. (Or else it will get submitted to IETF, and given a nondescript acronym, a la Jabber’s rehabilitation as the more businesslike XMPP.)
Whimsley: Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche
July 5th, 2009Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.
Whenever I make these claims someone says “Well I use Netflix and it’s shown me all kinds of films I didn’t know about before. It’s broadened my experience, so that’s an increase in diversity.” And someone else points to the latest viral home video on YouTube as evidence of niche success.
So this post explains why your gut feel is wrong.