Ryan Tomayko

alandipert's ncsa-mosaic —

The sources for NCSA Mosaic v2.7 — one the first graphical web browsers (1993) and certainly the one that led to the World Wide Web as we know it — can now be found on GitHub.

You can even run it on a modern Linux. Here’s what the GitHub homepage looks like:

The team that built NCSA Mosaic (Marc Andreessen et al) would go on to create Mosaic Communications Corp., which eventually became Netscape Communications Corp., which open sourced the Mozilla browser, leading to Firefox.

I wonder if any of the original NCSA Mosaic code still exists in any form at mozilla.org.

The Mosaic Wikipedia entry has a thorough history.

Beauty and truth in physics —

Murray Gell-Mann’s (quarks, Nobel prize winner, peer to Feynman at Caltech) TEDtalk from 2007 on the relationship between beauty (simplicity) and truth in science and mathematics:

What is especially striking is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

He goes on to give a bunch of anecdotes that show this playing out over and over during the development of particle physics.

Primer (2004) —

In honor of the greatest xkcd ever, this is Primer in its entirety. It really is that fucked up.

Slow Web —

There’s a web that’s well-considered and worth savoring. We’ll show you where. — I fell in love with the term “Slow Web” immediately after reading that description, and the blog isn’t half bad either. If you’re a tl;dr type, or prefer to not wander outside the things on the web that are merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational, then keep moving.

Via: Chris’s Trivium 13sep2009

On Saying No —

Surprisingly interesting Esquire essay by Tom Chiarella:

Yes suggests pleasure. It wants something. Salesmen train themselves to use yes at the beginning of a sentence, no matter what, which is why when you say it enough, the word yes starts to feel like a con.

But no is cold and heavy. It puts an end to things. In that way, it is a word of control. Its very use suggests a speaker who actually knows something, who won’t bend, who won’t give in to what you want simply because you want it. No says the case has not been made.

Cops use it. Operators use it. Good teachers, too. I’d always wanted to be a guy who simply said no. So that’s what I did for a month. Whenever I didn’t want to do something, I didn’t hesitate, didn’t explain. I just said no.

“No.” Is there a more elegant sentence in the English language?

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information —

Originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97. Every once in a while the internet decides to be useful and floats something old and amazing around anew. This is one of those things.

Ant Hills = Brains = Cities —

I don’t even know how to summarize this. Let’s do this: follow this link if one or more of the following apply to you. 1.) you’ve read Godel Escher Bach and appreciated the anthill discussion between Achilles and Anteater, 2.) are interested in how brains work, 3.) like cities but not overly planned ones, 4.) would like to see evidence of a city constructed in the shape of an airplane.

100 People: A World Portrait —

Interesting way of breaking down various aspects of the World’s population. e.g., “If the World were 100 people, 1 would have a college education, 1 would own a computer, 1 would be dying of starvation.”

When celebrity programmers attack: Guido on tail calls —

“Almost all non-functional programmers are unaware that tail calls facilitate a programming paradigm that they have never seen. The ability to tail call to functions that are not statically known is the foundation that makes many combinators useful. This is a style of programming where functions are composed in order to create a pipeline for values to flow through. Without tail call elimination, every stage in the pipeline would leak stack space and the whole approach becomes unusably unreliable.”

You are being lied to about pirates —

We live in a crazy world.

Journalistic Capture and Fixing CNBC —

Aaron Swartz explains why he (and friends) put fixcnbc.com together. I’ve always been skeptical of petition sites but his logic is sound here.

JSONQuery —

XPath-like syntax for expressing selection queries against JSON data structures. Interesting concept. I’ve always wondered why the basic concepts behind XPath were never borrow and applied to other types of structured data — it’s so insanely useful. I suppose jQuery popularized using CSS selectors for querying HTML but why not take the same basic concept and apply it to problem domains outside of SGML-inspired markup languages and their data models.

Taming Perfectionism —

Real artists ship.

Woonerf and Python —

Ian Bicking explains the connection between modern traffic planning and modern programming in dynamic languages.

Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? —

“The reflexive reverence for Revolutionary Road is a testament to the degree to which antisuburban sentiment is one of the most unexamined attitudes in American culture.”

The arc of history is long . . .. —

Awesome photo of Obama addressing a massive crowd in front of the Old St. Louis Courthouse — the same place slaves were being auctioned as recently as 1861. Crazy.

What’s Ruby’s future —

Rafe Colburn: “On the other hand, I find programming in Ruby enjoyable and educational, so it’s not like I’m looking to give up. It’s just that even after a couple of years of doing it, I still feel like we’re dating rather than married.”

It seems like a lot of people are down on Ruby at the moment. Odd. I’m actually more excited about Ruby than I’ve ever been. Things seem to be moving along nicely, especially on the web tooling front.

An Introduction to A/B Testing —

I’ve read about five extremely solid articles on this site (20bits.com) today; all thorough, easy to read, and cover interesting topics.

A critical look at the current state of Ruby testing —

Yeah.

Hofstadter's Terrible Law —

Adam Gomaa: “… this state of affairs doesn’t really help my general feeling of hopelessness when it comes to programming – I know that no matter how good I get, I’m still stuck at being just one person, and the code a single person can write is pitifully small.”

I’ve come to the same conclusion within the past couple of years. I take on much smaller projects now and try to contribute more to existing projects rather than playing mad scientist on massive works that will never see the light of day. I’ve also come to appreciate the idea of paying lots of attention to detail on one small thing rather than churning out large quantities of half-baked features.

Reverse HTTP —

Allows a server to turn the tables and make HTTP requests to the client. I’ve been trying to come up with some use for this for 45 minutes and I’m totally baffled but it’s kind of interesting anyways.

How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub —

Tom Preston-Werner on how GitHub came into being and leaving Powerset after the Microsoft acquisition: “When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.’”

Why Ruby is Not My Favorite Language —

Same here. I’m still looking for techniques that would make my Ruby libs and apps as simple to follow, debug, and maintain as equivalent Python versions are naturally. Ruby’s module system and cowboy shit (instance_eval, modifying Object, Class, Module, etc.) can go to hell. Python + blocks + class scope + large community and I’m sold.

Conditional classnames —

Using conditional comments to stick an “ie” classname on <body> so that you can target IE from a single CSS file instead of bringing in a separate stylesheet. Nice hack.

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White —

“Of course, Strunk and White, as the book is commonly called, has nothing to do with software (it was written in 1935) and everything to do with writing: grammar, composition, and style for users of the English language. But in its 100 short pages this book has more to say about the craft of software than many books you’ll find in the ‘Computing’ section of your local bookstore. All you have to do is replace a few key words throughout the text and presto! Pearls of software development wisdom, delivered in near-perfect English.”

Minima —

Alex Payne’s tumble-like blog on minimalism in coding and design. I didn’t realize @al3x was such a huge conscious follower of the minimalist aesthetic, although I’ve definitely noticed it in his work.

Bug 389508 – Implement Cross-site XMLHttpRequest —

Just landed on mozilla trunk a few days ago. See the draft spec for specifics.

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind —

“When the Texas Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was unequivocal: ‘There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.’”

alan.dean's REST Bookmarks on Delicious —

Alan Dean has bookmarked over 100 REST related articles in the past two days (and 757 all time). For comparison, I’ve been bookmarking REST related articles since July 2004 and have a total of 107 bookmarks. It appears that Dean is shooting for a comprehensive list of every resource related to REST ever posted on the web.

Why Ogg Matters —

Interesting. This is the first time I’ve seen mention of Firefox shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Theora built-in. That could definitely change the horrible pace of adoption we’ve seen thus for.

Ruby's $LOADED_FEATURES (Array of stuff that's been required) —

Not sure how I’ve never stumbled on this before. You can remove items from the list to cause require to reload a file.

Dead media strike again —

Rafe on Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project: “… a catalog of media formats that are no longer in use. In many cases, media stored in these dead formats can no longer be read because readers are no longer available for them.”

Babelmark — Markdown Testbed —

Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I’ve ever come across and then some…

Scott Chacon's Git Talk at RailsConf (slides) —

If you move the slides quickly, it feels a bit like playing Desktop Tower Defense.

To a T —

“… tittle is easily the most likely source, since to a tittle was in use in exactly the same sense for nearly a century before to a T appeared (it’s first recorded in a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher of 1607) …”

The Rec.humor.funny Ban —

“John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban.” – Could the man possibly be any more credentialed amongst hackers?

It's Pi Day! —

“Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi.”

HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990) —

From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”

A Nice Big Purple Reddit Stack Trace —

reddit.com is running Pylons-0.9.6, Paste-1.4.2, Routes-1.7, Beaker-0.7.5 on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (amd64). Wow. Nice environment.

Ubuntu's Upstart event-based init daemon —

I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu’s new init system (Upstart) I’ve seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.

Mercury is a new, purely declarative logic programming language. —

What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It’s like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).

Ballmer: I'm completely out of ideas —

“… Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He’s not really a tech guy. […] He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.”

Numb3rs —

Bill de hÓra making all kinds of sense on the topic of Android, mobile platforms, the cloud, and other things.

How I lost my faith (in lisp) - comp.lang.lisp —

“Between 1988 and 1991 I worked on the research program that led to the Mars Pathfinder rover […] All three of [the prototypes] were programmed not in Lisp, but in little mini-languages whose compilers were written in Lisp.”

The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power (Time's Cover Story on Scientology) —

Time Mag pulls back the curtain on Scientology and reveals the cult for the batshit criminal organization it is. It’s about time. EDIT: sorry, this was published in 1991 :–(

Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational" —

Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: “If you fill your head with ‘merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational’, it won’t stay there; it’ll trickle right out again.”

LEDs in your contact lenses? —

Contact based HUDs are coming: “Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a prototype contact lens that incorporates an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.”

On: “working alongside some of the better developers” —

Why RedMonk is succeeding where other analyst houses fail: “Other analyst firms primarily target sell-side or buy-side. We really don’t see the world that way. RedMonk’s core constituency is ‘make-side’: the makers and doers, hackers and players.”

Programs on the scale of a million lines of code are getting more common. But how big is that? —

“A million lines of code is not ten times more than 100,000. It’s well-known that schedules grow faster than the code … so the schedule for developing a million lines of code is 22 times bigger than for 100,000 LOC.”

The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science —

“The Algorithm’s coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”

ArchitectNotes - Varnish —

“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”

The Pirate’s Dilemma —

“We live in a world where it is legal for a company to patent pigs, or any other living thing except for a full birth human being, but copying a CD you bought onto your hard drive is considered an infringement of someone else’s rights.”

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder —

“Like with unix, cells are not ‘spawned’ – they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things.”

The Right and Lawful Rood —

… the primary activity depicted here is standards development, particularly the historically mandated procedure for determining the linear measurement known as the “rood”, related to the English “rod”, the German “rute” and the Danish “rode”.

What has the government done to our money? —

“Why is the dollar the world’s reserve currency? How does the government fund it’s debt? and what the hell causes inflation?”

In software, some developers take up residence on planet architecture, an otherworldly place where software is eternally planned and discussed but never actually constructed. —

Atwood’s had a great year.

VMWare: Coming Out of the Cloud? —

EC2 is my current pick for most interesting / innovative tech development of the year. Everyone will have to have an EC2 clone by the end of 2008.

Hotwire graphical terminal —

Looks like they’re bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.

adamssl on anonymity —

Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel’s GIFWT.

BoingBoing TV! —

This’ll be a fun ride.

Software Is Hard —

“Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we’ll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there’s a lack of solid evidence to support any of them.”

Sun’s Ruby strategy - Engage and Contain? —

“Maybe I’ll start to believe when they start promoting Ruby on Rails at JavaOne, as opposed to promoting JRuby on Rails at RailsConf.”

begthequestion.info —

“… it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must distinguish between the traditional and erroneous modern usage. This is why we fight.”

Ten Strange Facts About Newton [neatorama.com] —

I’m in the middle of Newton infatuation having just finished the first leg of Stephenson’s Quicksilver. Did you know they’re publishing the Baroque Cycle in three smaller trilogies now? The first is worth reading without any further committment.

Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice [studentprintz.com] —

“It’s easy to make, unpatented and could be added to drinking water. Imagine, Gatorade with cancer control.”

Pop Quiz on the situation in Iraq [truthdig.com] —

I’ve been looking for a essay-sized historical account of the Shiite/Sunni conflict for a long time now. A former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector lays out what appears to be a fairly comprehensive story over three pages.

National Survey Reveals More than 70% of Americans Don't Know Plastic is Made from Oil —

Everything is made from oil. It’s crazy.

Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy —

Being neither unhappy or intelligent, I wouldn’t know :)

UNIX® Load Average Part 1: How It Works —

Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn’t understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel —

Aaron Swartz reviews a newish book on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Insanely good topic, bad book?

Schneier on Video: Security Theater Against Movie Plot Threats —

Oodalolly!

Please drop SVN —

Oh wow. The concept of logical patches is something I never considered before. Darcs has a “record” command that let’s you split multiple changes to a single file (or files I assume) into logical changes (“hunks”).

Making Fedora RESTful —

Wow, I’m surprised I’ve never seen anything about this before.

PHYS771 Lecture 9: Quantum —

The second way to teach quantum mechanics.

Where were you on Saturday, November 9, 2002? —

Crazy.

Condorcet's jury theorem —

Interesting corollary to Vox Populi. (Via Aristotle Pegaltzis)

Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith —

Nice article on burnout, which I have to admit I’ve been struggling with on and off for the past six months or so :–(

Intelligent Abstractions —

Sometimes I think Aaron’s brain is my brain in the future. I’ve had all of these same ideas rattle around in my brain before but they never seem to line up so neatly for me. It bugs me a little.

Radio Lab: Emergence (February 18, 2005) —

This is my favorite episode of WNYC’s RadioLab and maybe my favorite piece of radio, period. The segment, “The Invisible Hand” is outstanding. The show is now in podcast and the last five eps are available in mp3. “Emergence” is only available as a RealAu

360 in a circle, 60 minutes and 60 seconds… What is so special about 60? —

Blame the Babylonians – they used the Sexagesimal system. Don’t get excited – it means that instead of using base 10 (as we do) they used base 60.

Feynman Interview: The pleasure of finding things out —

Nice little Feynman short on google video. Feynman talking, Feynman painting, Feynman being the complete bad-ass that only Feynman can be… I can’t get enough of him.

Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp —

So I’m considering automating my del.icio.us to just automatically add links with “statistically infrequent” words as tags to all Steve Yegge’s posts…

gladwell.com —

Malcom Gladwell’s blog :)

Space Time - Relativity, Quantum Physics and the Universe

Google Campus Video Tour —

ABC’s Bob Woodruff got a camera in there somehow..

HOWTO: Be more productive —

Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.

What I Did this Summer —

Paul Graham reports on the first class of Summer Founders…

Who knows? Maybe nonstandard arithmetic is just unavoidable —

Some interesting thoughts on Gödel’s Proof and its implications on nonstandard numbers.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby —

Holy crap this is the coolest language book I’ve ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters – there’s regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.

George Dyson - Von Neuman's Universe —

More great stuff from IT Conversations. This time a look at Von Neuman’s impact on math, science, computing, etc.

Mentat Wiki —

“… a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker.”

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review —

Oh wow – this is the definitive work thus far I guess.

The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel —

And the hits just keep on comin' – IT Conversations / Tech Nation has an interview with the author of a Godel biography.

Radical Simplification —

Everything I ever wanted to say about the current state of software development in ~50 slides. Thanks, Sam.

Yahoo! Buzz Game —

Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.

The Selfish Class —

How programs adhere to the basic laws of Darwinian evolution.. Seems to gel with everything I’ve learned.

AMERICA - ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN —

Simon Willison showed me this scan of a Newspaper from April 14, 1865. It looks like a blog.

Malcolm Gladwell - Tech Nation —

Nice. Gladwell talks about his new book “Blink” on IT Conversations. I haven’t listened yet but it’s impossible for Gladwell to say anything that is uninteresting.

cluetrain/hughtrain —

Cluetrain Manifesto: “This is why we hate you.” Hughtrain Manifesto: “This is how we’re going to fuck you up.”

What You'll Wish You'd Known —

Paul Graham takes the honest route with High School kids and tells them what they should really be worried about. Great quote: “Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience.”

A del.icio.us study —

I need to read this a couple times when I get some times..

Iocaine Powder Explained (How to win Paper, Rock, Scissors) —

Doesn’t this qualify as a genetic algorithm?