2007/01/31

?National? Gorilla Suit Day

Today is National Gorilla Suit Day, inaugurated by Mad Magazine's Don Martin. "Every National Gorilla Suit Day, people of all shapes and colors around the world get their gorilla suits out of the closet, put them on and go door-to-door."



International Gorrilla Suit Day? Either way I missed it - maybe next year?

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2007/01/26

Calling all UK Cyclists - fillththole.org.uk

Via the CTC:

Potholes and road defects are more than just a nuisance, they’re a danger to cyclists. They’re responsible for 12% of compensation claims by CTC members, and local Councils have a duty to fix them.



Councils can’t be everywhere, and if they don’t know about a pothole, they can’t fill it in. So if you want to get it repaired, you have to report it. Fillthathole.org.uk contacts the right people for you, to get the roads repaired quickly and easily. So you can spend your time riding, not dodging obstacles.





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2007/01/18

Scrybe™ a groundbreaking online organizer

Scrybe™ a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today´s lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.

Looks interesting - flexible lists and diary, but the "thought-stream" idea looks ver y useful. I've signed up for a beta......


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2007/01/16

Bye Don


Microsoft lures IBM Software architect Ferguson | News.blog | CNET News.com
Microsoft has hired Donald Ferguson away from IBM, where he was chief architect of IBM Software Group and a big thinker on Web services and service-oriented architectures.



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One Emacs to rule them all!

Via minor emacs wizardry:

Knuth’s Tex for the Math-kings of sigma, and pi,

Unix vim for the Server-lords with their O’Reilly tomes,

Word for Mortal Men doomed to die,

Emacs from the Bearded One on his Gnu throne,

In the land of Stallman where free software lies.

One Emacs to rule them all. One Emacs to find them,

One Emacs to take commands and to the keystrokes bind them,

In the land of Stallman, where free software lies.





In fact, "minor emacs wizardry" is a little too modest - some amazing emacs stuff on that blog if you are that way inclined!


2007/01/04

Bibtex


From Phil Windley:

"If you use BibTeX for managing paper references (and after all, who doesn’t) and you use a Mac, then you should know about BibDesk, an open source tool for managing BibTeX bibliography files."

Well I don't have Mac OS X ( gasp!) so I went looking for Linux alternatives and came up with KBibtex. Debian and Ubuntu folks can get it via here. Looks good, but I will report back later after more use.

2006/12/20

Languages of the Gods or Languages of the Brave?


Great, fun, insightful stuff from Giles Bowkett:

If there's anything godlike about using Lisp or Smalltalk when the rest of the world is on Java and C#, it isn't the skill level required. It's the balls. Standing up to the rest of the world and telling them, "your technology decisions are bad and I'm going to use a language that doesn't suck" is a very unusual move. It requires a lot of courage. But if you think about that, that's kind of bad. I mean, if what I'm saying is true, then the average technology business is kind of pathetic.

Unfortunately, I've worked for a very large number of different technology businesses, and I can tell you with confidence, certainty, and no fear of inaccuracy that the average technology business is indeed kind of pathetic.


Right on.

It's worth pointing out, the poster children for Lisp and Smalltalk are Paul Graham and Avi Bryant. Neither one of these guys actually had to stand up to management and tell them they were wrong. They just went ahead and started companies using better technology. Paul Graham obviously won pretty big when he did that. It's too early to tell with Avi Bryant, but there's no doubt at all that Dabble puts every other Web app in the world to shame.
My emphasis added.

Via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

2006/11/29

What if he has Down’s syndrome?


Times Online: I'm not a saint, just a parent

Right now I can't say much about this - my own memories come flooding back

2006/11/23

James Robertson's Smalltalk Daily - now with overview


I've organized the Smalltalk Daily screencasts by topic - there are now landing pages for the various areas I've covered.

Great stuff - that will help those of us who haven't been listening daily !

2006/11/07

This makes sense!

GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.


I have often felt the standard way was rather messy.

2006/10/31

Google buys JotSpot

Yet another on-line tool that I use ( or play with) has been absorbed into the new Borg!! Great news for JotSpot both financially (I assume) and in terms of broader adoption. Google will have to asimilate Wrtely, Blogger and Spreadsheets, but Writely can add some better glue to make the Google experience seem more cohesive, plus JotSpot as other applications.

Looking forward to using it - hope the integration goes faster than Writely's did!!

2006/10/15

Just upgraded to the Blogger beta! Labels finally!!

Cusp, An Eclipse Lisp Plugin: "Cusp, a Lisp plugin for Eclipse"

Hmmm

2006/09/22

La-la-la-la , I haven't got time for this, la-la-la-la



Stevey's Blog Rants: Shiny and New: Emacs 22:
"I finally upgraded to Emacs 22 a few weeks ago, and now I'm wishing I'd braved it sooner. Technically it's not released yet; I'm working from a build of a cvs snapshot from a month or so ago. But the Emacs dev team works pretty hard to make sure it has problem-free builds on a whole slew of platforms, so just following their instructions has a pretty good chance of working for you.

It's worth the effort. Truly. Reading through its NEWS file, there's just tons and tons of new functionality. It's going to take me some time, maybe a few weekends, just to absorb it all."


Steve, I really didn't want to know that Emacs 22 was stable and very useful - now I will have to intsall it......

2006/09/18

Welcome to ScheduleWorld: "Don't have a ScheduleWorld ID?
Signup is easy. "

No it isn't - I know tht autmated sign-up has to be discouraged but when a human can't read the special codes !!!!
BBC SPORT | Football | England omission angered Beckham: "Beckham added: 'It surprised me"

I wonder if it surprised many other people - seemed obvious to me after a lack lustre performance and the fact he probably will be too old for the next world cup.

2006/09/14

Wired News: Experimental AI Powers Robot Army:
"Perhaps the most impressive -- and spookiest -- aspect of the project is the swarming behavior of the robots. In computer simulations, they acted together to tackle obstacles and grouped together into defensive formations where needed, Thaler said. They also worked out how to deal with defenders, and spontaneously devised the most efficient strategy for mapping their environment, he added."


and
"I can relate the results of virtual-reality simulations, where swarms of Creativity Machine-based robots have deliberatively sacrificed one of their kind to distract a human guard, enabling the remainder to infiltrate a mock facility," he said.
Hang on ,wasn't that in Aliens !!!


The Universe of Discourse : Design patterns of 1972: "Patterns are signs of weakness in programming languages.

When we identify and document one, that should not be the end of the story. Rather, we should have the long-term goal of trying to understand how to improve the language so that the pattern becomes invisible or unnecessary."