Some fun CS and hard tech links below the fold:
- Croquet, a SmallTalk-based open source virtual world.
- Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks book in PDF form. Simon Phipps of Sun raved about it to me and it’s in my queue.
- Great images from old books.
- Peter Novig shows how to write a program to solve Sudoku. I’d been following various Perl and Python attempts to do this, and it’s nice to see the reasoning behind it.
- Algorithms Textbook.
- XML11 for people who love Java and can’t handle JavaScript.
- Using Puzzles in Teaching Algorithms. I’m treating this as a refresher course, implementing everything, one slide at a time.
- Mathematics, Marriage, and Finding Somewhere to Eat. “Once you’ve seen 37% of the application forms, a coherent picture of the ideal employee is built up and the next person to fulfil these criteria gets the job.”
- Interactive Mathematical Puzzles, Miscellany, etc.. Nice polish, like being able to play with the variables in a Ponzo illusion.
- The Silver Bullet, a heretical piece on solving the problems of software complexity. I feel like there has to be a better way than what we’re doing right now, but this piece leaves me cold. It feels like being cornered by a UFO believer at a dinner party.
- Very Difficult Analytical Puzzles. Got the first one in about 10 seconds thought, then quit while I was ahead. :-)
- Classic Texts in Computer Science: collection of famous papers. Every programmer should have read the original Unix paper and Epigrams on Programming. I’m amazed Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (by the creator of C) is not on the list.
- Text REtrieval Conference: looks like fun.
- Webstock Recordings: audio and video from the Webstock conference that many interesting web people spoke at.