Eyeballs: 20 June 2006

Tue

Jun 20
2006

Nat Torkington

listen

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.

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Comments: 5

Bob Aman [06.20.06 06:22 AM]

There's a ton of Soduku solvers for Ruby, thanks to it being a Ruby Quiz challenge one week.

Louis Savain [06.20.06 07:07 AM]

ahaha... Heretical? UFO believer? I love it. Any publicity is good publicity. Thanks for the mention and keep those eyeballs open, as usual. There's more to come.

Michael [06.20.06 08:15 AM]

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.

Hmm. I know what you mean. However, it does seem extremely reminiscient (with a few twists) of what we're doing with Kamaelia. I hope I'm not as cynical though - I've not actually thought of how you would build a web application in this approach yet! (Most other sorts of app, but not that sort)

I suppose the difference between Kamaelia & COSA, is that Kamaelia is real now, and looking at his forums, COSA isn't.

Thanks for the link! BTW, something similar is described at J Paul Morrison's flow based programming site .

I wouldn't pretend (as you know) to call it a silver bullet however (Werewolves have rights too!). More seriously, the lack of a clear and obvious way for writing a web application for example is something that jumps out as an issue from my perspective. (I have a niggling idea that I'm *really* missing something there though :)

dennis [06.21.06 09:36 AM]

The "silver bullet" sounds a lot like Erlang...Ericsson has a 1.7 million line Erlang program that averages 30ms downtime per year, so maybe there's something to this. I'm seeing a lot of rave reviews by people using Erlang in projects.

Just skimmed the article so far, but the main difference I see is the emphasis on timing, where Erlang uses asynchronous messaging...incidentally, I've also seen some proposals to do away with clocks on processors...

Liam Quin [04.30.07 08:18 PM]

Oooh you liked to my from old books page :-) And I only just noticed. Thanks!

Liam