I’d go to:
practical erlang
ubiquitous multithreading
making things blink
OS hardware w/ OS software
porting to python 3
bigdata
beautiful concurrency
history o failure
just enough C
tasting tour o haskell
but alas, I cannot go.
This one is worth clicking through to the vimeo site to see the video full screen, here, trust me, or don’t and watch it here :)
code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
People have been talking about “Flash Killer” again and I suppose it’s logical that they are Apple people, since Apple hasn’t tried to do this before, so it’s novel to them, and they’re very excited about having ‘their team’ beat out Flash. Well, ok, so aside from the silliness of the ‘team” thing what do we really have here? We have sproutcore, and that’s a really cool name. And what is it? Well, it apparently is something that will: “replace Flash without requiring any secondary plugin runtime”. Ooh, tell me more! Well: “Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore”. Oh! Wow! So, what is it? What is this revolutionary new technology? It’s….prototype. The classic and pretty damn awesome javascript library used damn near everywhere. It’s what ships with Rails. What else? Well, some other pretty sweet javascript libraries! And? Merb+ActiveRecord! And…that’s about it. Ok. So, really, what it is, is a nice, pretty lightweight Ruby library with a large Javascript library to facilitate building out UIs. And, that, well, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove. Is that really going to be a Flash Killer? Meh, me thinks probably not. Why? Well, because if these tools were going to “kill Flash” they already would have done it because they’ve been around for a while. Now, I do believe in an open web, I do believe in Javascript, I like merb, and while, you know, it’s pretty silly to have ‘a team’ I guess it’s fine to get all excited about what ‘your team’ does, seriously, I watch Microsoft and Adobe guys do it all the time. (Seriously, really, people, “your team” is your clients and your co-workers, not the companies that build your tech stacks). But seriously, guys, “Flash Killer”? That’s just silly.
Ok, so I was reading this “Flash killing” news from this post at roughlydrafted and while he said some kind of silly things, one thing he said that I agree with is this:
“…RIAs haven’t really taken on the world by storm. Instead, Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary tools and their required runtime plugins are all still aiming at some future date when they can claim the status of being the platform monopoly in RIA development. (EDIT this line is just silly, and not what I was interested in this quote :) However, many of the most popular rich web apps today are from Google, including Maps, Reader, Docs, and Sheets. Google’s rich web apps take on Microsoft Office desktop apps without needing Flash, Silverlight, or Java.”
which I’ll give him, is a fair point, and something I’ve said before as well. Food for thought. Anyways, even though I tease it here, I might even use sproutcore on something, I like Merb, and the ORM in it seems nice. And, of course, if you want to make iPhone apps, well then, one knows what they need to do.
What is it? A semi-accurate Greek term to describe morphing something based on it’s position in time. Yay classics class. You were worth it after all! Now, back to the coding; the video is here
Chronotopic Anamorphosis from Marginalia Project on Vimeo.
and you should look at that first to see what this is and how it works. Next, you can go to the processing exhbition space and check out the code:
Hooray open source. And congrats to Andre Mintz for making something awesome.
I’ve been wondering about the technology atmosphere in NYC. It’s certainly here, to a certain degree, there are a great number of intelligent people here, and there are a great number of very interesting people working with art and code here because there’s a lot money around art here, and that’s very cool. But there isn’t a real technology buzz per se, because there’s more of a money buzz here that drowns and subverts other things. Not in a real insiduous way, but in a sort of “wouldn’t it be better if…” sort of way. You know how when you’re talking to someone who’s say obsessed with ice cream, and you say: “let’s get some strawberries” and they say “yeah, strawberrys, but wouldn’t it be better if it was strawberries with ice cream?”. Everything gets melded with ice cream for them. New York is like that with finance and money: wouldn’t it be better if it was your idea plus the stock market? Or plus a marketing scheme? Or etc…? Which is great for some ideas, but not that great for others. I was wondering about that, and then I read Paul Grahams newest essay. And it started to make sense to me. Having lived in Boston and New York and Seattle (not that Seattle is really like SF, since it’s way more of a company town, but it kind of is, so I’m going to do that) I think he’s really really on to something.
Erlang/OTP R12B-3 with new bug fixes, yahoo.
mine:
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz
yours:
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R12B-3.tar.gz
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_win32_R12B-3.exe
and docs (for both of us):
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_doc_html_R12B-3.tar.gz
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_doc_man_R12B-3.tar.gz
enjoys it.
I like this quote:
“Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not just for computer scientists. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. Just as the printing press facilitated the spread of the three Rs, what is appropriately incestuous about this vision is that computing and computers facilitate the spread of computational thinking. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Computational thinking includes a range of mental tools that reflect the breadth of the field of computer science….Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires thinking at multiple levels of abstraction.”
Is computational thinking fundamentally different from the 3rd ‘R’ in the three R’s? Yes and no. Yes, because classic arithmetic didn’t focus as heavily on formal logic, the sorts of things that we find in discrete/continuous math, and certainly not protocols (given old teaching methodologies, i.e. rote memorization and recitation, I’d say ‘reading’ was probably not much different than memorizing the HTTP or IPv4 or etc). And no, because algorithms are algorithms, be they pythagorean, mergesort, some wacky design pattern, or implementing message passing. But anyways, it’s a very interesting paper from ACM posted up at the CMU website
Q: “If I send you questions on code in the O’Reilly Flex 3 Cookbook, will you answer them?”
A: “Yes.”
Now, don’t go crazy, there are lots of things that I can’t help you with, due to time, etc. But I do try to answer all the questions that come my way and I’d like to continue doing that because I think it’s the right thing to do, and I genuinely do want to help people with problems, questions, concerns, and most importantly, with any errors or anything misleading in the cookbook. Just so you know :)
O’Reilly Media announced the Flex Cookbook Cook-Off contest to celebrate/publicize the “Flex 3 Cookbook” as well as the Adobe Flex Cookbook site.
Prizes include:
-Grand prize: A ticket to Adobe MAX in San Francisco, California and $500 (US) in O’Reilly Media books
-Community choice award: $350 (US) in O’Reilly Media books
-Second prize: Every Adobe Developer Library book published by O’Reilly Media
-Third prize: Five O’Reilly Media books of choice
Contest runs June 2–August 1, 2008
Winners will be announced Sept 1, 2008
The rules are posted here: http://www.insideria.com/flex-cookbook-rules.html so if you’re interested, take a look, and send in a recipe.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who Leah Culver was, other than that I knew there some connection between that name and Pownce. Google search and, yeah, ok. Yep. I get it. Ha. Ok.