January 2012
134 posts
2 tags
Standalone lexers with lex:
synopsis, examples,...
[shared via Google Reader from Matt Might’s blog]
Lexical analysis is the first phase of
compilation.
During this phase, source code received character-by-character
is transformed into a sequence of “tokens.”
For example, for the following Python expression:
print (3 + x
*2 ) # comment
the resulting stream of tokens might be (encoded as S-Expressions...
2 tags
To the next Burglar
[shared via Google Reader from Letters of Note]
As he slept upstairs on September 8th of 1908, two young burglars entered Mark Twain’s home, took an entire sideboard into the garden and proceeded to break it open. They were eventually caught by police with a stash of silverware. The next day, with the help of an aspiring young artist named Dorothy Sturgis, Twain produced the following note...
2 tags
Parliament for Vendetta
[shared via Google Reader from jwz]
Polish Politicians Don Guy Fawkes / Anonymous Masks To Protest ACTA SigningThere’s been lots of talk today about how various EU governments are agreeing to sign ACTA (which still needs to be ratified by the EU Parliament). It’s gotten the most attention in Poland, where there were mass protests — but the government there still signed. Of...
2 tags
Password Sharing Among American Teenagers
[shared via Google Reader from Schneier on Security]
Interesting article from the New York Times on password sharing as a show of affection.
“It’s a sign of trust,” Tiffany Carandang, a high school senior in San Francisco, said of the decision she and her boyfriend made several months ago to share passwords for e-mail and Facebook. “I have nothing to hide from him, and he...
2 tags
This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
[shared via Google Reader from parislemon]
A lot of people have asked for my take on The New York Times piece yesterday about the true cost of making Apple products in China. Let me first just say that it’s an important piece full of good reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Parts of it are very sad — sickening, really.
But let’s be honest. The post focuses on Apple because Apple is...
2 tags
Rebecca and I talk about DSLs on Software...
[shared via Google Reader from Martin Fowler]
I’ve long been a fan of the podcast series Software Engineering Radio. The team there have built an excellent series of podcasts on various aspects of software development and I often listen to them while taking my afternoon walk. So I’m glad to get a spot on there myself. In this episode I’m on the program with Rebecca Parsons, my colleague and...
2 tags
Acquiring startups for a living
[shared via Google Reader from swombat.com]
Excellent story by Rob Walling about acquiring a product called HitTail from a larger company who neglected it, and starting the process of turning it into a bigger success.
So I tend to focus on ideas that have a 1000x higher chance of success than the next un-monetizable social website you have in mind, but the success I strive for is a bit more...
2 tags
From Regular Expression to Finite Automaton
[shared via Google Reader from Staffan Nöteberg’s blog]
For each regular expression — and I mean the three operators and the six recursive rules style — there is a finite automaton that accepts exactly the same strings. Since this is not a university book in mathematics, I’ll show you an inductive reasoning about this and not a formal proof.
The hypothesis is thus that for an arbitrary...
2 tags
10 Questions for DreamKeeper
[shared via Google Reader from The INTERVIEW WITH A CRUISER Project]
Gar Duke and Nicole Friend circumnavigated from the winter of 2006 until the summer of 2011 aboard SV DreamKeeper, a Pacific Seacraft 40 hailing from Sausalito, CA, USA. You can learn more about their journey on their website. They say: We started in our home port of Sausalito in the San Francisco Bay, CA, and went south in...
2 tags
Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs...
[shared via Google Reader from Matt Might’s blog]
Unix is an alliance
of loosely structured text files
bound together and governed by scripts.
Unix is the United Confederation of Strings:
The string is a stark data structure and
everywhere it is passed
there is much duplication of process.
It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.
—Alan Perlis
Tools built in the...
2 tags
Windsurf Awesomeness
[shared via Google Reader from H2uh0 - Bonehead Moves on the Water]
2 tags
The Kleene Star operator
[shared via Google Reader from Staffan Nöteberg’s blog]
All finite languages can be described by regular expressions. You can simply list the strings as an alternation string1|string2|string3 etc. But there are also some languages with an infinite number of strings that can be described by regular expressions. To achieve that, we use an operator we call Kleene star after the American...
2 tags
Why Tarsnap won't use DynamoDB
[shared via Google Reader from Daemonic Dispatches]
When I heard last Wednesday that Amazon was launching
DynamoDB
I was immediately excited. The “hard” server-side work for my
Tarsnap online backup service
consists mostly of two really big key-value maps, and I’ve spent most
of the past two years trying to make those faster and more scalable.
Having a key-value datastore...
2 tags
Stradiściema
[shared via Google Reader from Ziemia Niczyja | Mariusz Herma]
Po raz pierwszy w historii tego typu badań brzmienie legend ze współczesną konkurencją porównywała nie pozbawiona wizji publiczność, ale najbardziej zainteresowani – czyli skrzypkowie. 21 ochotników dostało czarne gogle oraz parę Stradivarich, parę Guarnerich i trzy świeżo klejone instrumenty wykonane wszakże według tych...
2 tags
Supreme Court Rules that GPS Tracking Requires a...
[shared via Google Reader from Schneier on Security]
The U.S Supreme Court has ruled that the police cannot attach a GPS tracking device to a car without a warrant.
2 tags
Chinese Workers’ Problems
[shared via Google Reader from ongoing by Tim Bray]
This
New
York Times story, telling ugly stories of human suffering at Chinese outsourcers, isn’t about
Apple. It’s pure politics and
economics.
It’s Simple
The management of well-connected Chinese companies needn’t
worry much about regulation or law enforcement, because China is governed by a
corrupt autocracy. They needn’t worry much about...
2 tags
announcing github-backup
[shared via Google Reader from see shy jo]
Partly as a followup to a Github survey, and partly because
I had a free evening and the need to write more haskell code, any haskell
code, I present to you,
github-backup.
github-backup is a simple tool you run in a git repository you cloned from
Github. It backs up everything Github knows about the repository, including
other forks, issues, comments,...
2 tags
On insecurity and writing
[shared via Google Reader from Scott Berkun » Blog]
A good friend mentioned he’d write more often if he dealt with his insecurities about writing.
I look at this differently.
All writers are insecure: they have doubts and fears that never go away. Kafka didn’t want any of his books published, and lived with perennial doubts about his talents. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both despaired about...
2 tags
Davos, disrupted
[shared via Google Reader from BuzzMachine]
I’m among the disrupted of Davos. Outside, there’s an #OccupyDavos encampment in igloos (really). Down the road, someone will be giving out an award to the worst company of the world. But the disruption is no longer outside. That’s what I sensed in past years; that’s what they wanted to believe here. Now the disruption is inside. Every institution is...
2 tags
#340: Who Loaned Money To Greece, Anyway?
[shared via Google Reader from NPR: Planet Money Podcast]
It’s the 11th hour for Europe’s debt crisis. Again. Greece still can’t pay back all the money it owes. So it’s trying to cut a deal with its creditors. (Again.) We’ve been wondering for years: Who are the people who loaned money to Greece? Are they suckers? Brilliant investors? On today’s podcast we find...
2 tags
This is actually the craziest chart about Apple...
[shared via Google Reader from parislemon]
This is actually the craziest chart about Apple following their insane earnings today.
There is exactly one company on that entire list that is not an oil and gas company. And they’re not that far from the top.
2 tags
Graphics going on a new mainsail for Mar Mostro.
[shared via Google Reader from PUMA Sailing]
Graphics going on a new mainsail for Mar Mostro.
2 tags
Regular Expression Precedence
[shared via Google Reader from Staffan Nöteberg’s blog]
You might be tempted to read the following regular expression as third or fifth row:
'fifth row'.match /third|fifth row/ #=> #<MatchData "fifth row"> 'third row'.match /third|fifth row/ #=> #<MatchData "third">
But unfortunately, as you can see, it’s more like either third (only) or else fifth row. This is due to...
2 tags
Other People’s Must Reads
[shared via Google Reader from patrickrhone / journal]
I recently put a call out to my friends on Twitter asking for links to the smartest writers they ready regularly. I purposefully put no restrictions on the request in order to promote diversity of subjects, styles, and context. What follows is this list.
I have added all that had an RSS feed to my daily reading list. I’m not sure all will...
2 tags
iTerm2 and tmux Integration
[shared via Google Reader from One Thing Well]
iTerm2 and tmux Integration: It’s not quite ready for prime time—you’ll need to build a patched version of tmux, your ~/.tmuxrc probably won’t work and tmux windows open as iTerm windows, not tabs—but well worth keeping an eye on.
2 tags
Black boat + blistering heat makes for...
[shared via Google Reader from PUMA Sailing]
Black boat + blistering heat makes for uncomfortable sleeping conditions below deck.
2 tags
The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising
[shared via Google Reader from Armed and Dangerous]
CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs. And there’s talk of creating an underground Market app for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don’t want you to have.
Set this against Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil new Eula for...
2 tags
Sustainable
[shared via Google Reader from xkcd.com]
2 tags
22jan2012
[shared via Google Reader from Trivium]
Request for Startups 9: Kill Hollywood at Y Combinator.
Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index, or: How Google
Code Search Worked. By Russ Cox. The trigram index is a lovely idea.
Idris is a general purpose pure functional programming language with
dependent types. It is compiled, with eager evaluation.
Doozer is a highly-available,...
2 tags
Public speaking for normal people
[shared via Google Reader from swombat.com]
Public speaking is a fundamental entrepreneurial skill. If you can’t do it - you should learn to do it.
Tragically, many people come out of the European educational systems with little or no public speaking experience, not even in front of their classrooms. By contrast, in America, most children are regularly forced to do “show and...
2 tags
Browser Sedimentation
[shared via Google Reader from ongoing by Tim Bray]
I wanted to hit my browser’s “home” button and for a baffling moment
couldn’t find it. This remains a rare experience, but I found it a worrying
symptom.
Here’s the top part of a browser window; Firefox in this case, but I think
the narrative would apply to Chrome and Safari as well.
Look, particularly at the top left of the window; are...
2 tags
On knowing
[shared via Google Reader from Backup Brain]
When I was a senior in high school, a teacher asked me to join the impromtou speaking team. In this competitive speech event, you received a question from a predefined category–for the category “transportation”, it might be something like “Should seatbelts be mandatory?”–and had just 6 minutes to prepare and deliver a speech on it. I had previously...
2 tags
"Another strange start! The line was between one...
[shared via Google Reader from PUMA Sailing]
“Another strange start! The line was between one flag on one shore and a radio tower on another, there were virtually no spectators, tons of ferries, fishing boats, and more obstacles to dodge leading up to the gun. But we’re now back to “ocean racing,” something we haven’t been able to say in almost a month.” - Amory Ross commenting on the restarting...
2 tags
Pass Along Your Best Stories
[shared via Google Reader from A Lesser Photographer]
Images corrupt and apps are unreliable. Your backups may not be backing up what you thought. Websites suffer neglect.
A few years after you die, your files may not even be readable, if someone even cares to look after them.
The truth is, there’s no such thing as an archival digital format. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily for the...
2 tags
"Access to tools is easier too. Every digital tool...
[shared via Google Reader from A Lesser Photographer]
““Access to tools is easier too. Every digital tool in the world is easily available, often for free…Alas, the only access that’s harder than ever is access to the part of your brain that’s willing to take advantage of all of this.”” - - Seth Godin
(This is the core creativity problem in photography today: everyone is looking to external...
2 tags
Kill Hollywood, Not Movies
[shared via Google Reader from parislemon]
The fallout from the failure of SOPA and PIPA is just as interesting as the main topics themselves. First, many on the web with loud voices are finally waking up to how corrupt the lobbying/political system is in this country. Second, directly-related, there’s a quickly growing anti-Hollywood sentiment.
The most forceful stance has to be Y Combinator...
2 tags
Kilka znalezionych, niewiele ale zawsze cos /...
[shared via Google Reader from RAFAK NOTES]
Kilka znalezionych, niewiele ale zawsze cos / Few more images found…not a lot but at least something
2 tags
Regular Expression Article #4
[shared via Google Reader from research!rsc]
In January 2007 I posted an article on my web site titled “Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast.” I intended this to be the first of three; the second would explain how to do submatching using automata, and the third would explain how to make a really fast DFA. These were inspired by my work on Google Code Search.
Today, the fourth...
2 tags
Duly noted
[shared via Google Reader from stevenf.com]
Speaking of notes, there has always been a subset of my notes that I’ve wanted to share with the public — those little techie one-liners that take hours to figure out or find on the web. The ones where I’ve had to look up the same thing over and over so many times, I finally said to myself, “I should really write this down somewhere.”
I couldn’t find...
2 tags
Bliki: AggregateOrientedDatabase
[shared via Google Reader from Martin Fowler]
One of the first topics to spring to mind as we worked on
NosqlDistilled was that NoSQL databases use different
data models than the relational model. Most sources I’ve looked at
mention at least four groups of data model: key-value, document,
column-family, and graph. Looking at
this list, there’s a big similarity between the...
2 tags
Stewart Reid
[shared via Google Reader from The Burning House]
Name: Stewart Reid
Age: 30
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Occupation: Analyses business / plays drums / takes photos
Website: Band - www.realbitsofpanther.co.za / Photos - www.sketchesoflila.com
List:
Camera bag (holds most other things already)
Camera and 50mm f/1.4
Other lens
Two notebooks
Ipad
The Lord of the Rings
Portable hard...
2 tags
The other guy just blinked
[shared via Google Reader from Letters of Note]
In April of 1985, in a misguided attempt to revitalise the brand, The Coca-Cola Company stunned millions by announcing their decision to change the formula of Coca-Cola. Almost as soon as “New Coke” was unveiled, the backlash began, and in fact the reaction was so negative that within three months the old formula had been reintroduced....
2 tags
Regular Expression Alternation
[shared via Google Reader from Staffan Nöteberg’s blog]
From rule number 2 and rule number 3 we can define paradigms — a number of possible patterns. This means that we add two or more languages by applying the set operator union to them. The union of the sets {a, b} and {c, d} is {a, b, c, d}. Hence, it’s all the elements that are either in one or more of the sets. In boolean logic, we...
2 tags
zsh-completions
[shared via Google Reader from One Thing Well]
zsh-completions:
This projects aims at gathering/developing new completion scripts that are not available in Zsh yet. The scripts are meant to be contributed to the Zsh project when stable enough.
Having used zsh for a few years, it always comes as a bit of a shock when I can’t lazily autocomplete a command or argument—this does a great job of...
2 tags
Using False Alarms to Disable Security
[shared via Google Reader from Schneier on Security]
I wrote about this technique in Beyond Fear:
Beginning Sunday evening, the robbers intentionally set off the gallery’s alarm system several times without entering the building, according to police.
The security staffers on duty, who investigated and found no disturbances, subsequently disabled at least one alarm. The burglars then...
2 tags
Regular Expression Concatenation
[shared via Google Reader from Staffan Nöteberg’s blog]
Using Rule number 2 and Rule number 4, we can create regular expressions that consists of any sequence of symbols from our alphabet. Rule number 2 said that if the symbol a is in the alphabet, then a is a regular expression. Rule number 4 said that if p and q are two regular expressions, then the concatenation pq is a regular...
2 tags
Wernisaż “Wystawy Fotografii”
[shared via Google Reader from Bart Pogoda | blog and photography | www.bartpogoda.net]
Kuba Dąbrowski, Paweł Eibel, Karol Grygoruk, Jakub Karwowski, Szymon Małecki, Rafał Masłow, Bartek Pogoda, Szymon Szcześniak. Każdy z nich wykonał jedno zdjęcie zainspirowane hasłem „nośnik’, które zaszyfrowaliśmy QR-codami. Wszystkie kody zostały namalowane na płótnach, jak obrazy, naciągnięte na blejtramy i...
2 tags
SOPA
[shared via Google Reader from xkcd.com]
2 tags
Regarding the Scope of Apple’s Education...
[shared via Google Reader from Daring Fireball (Articles)]
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in a piece headlined “Apple’s Education Event Is Getting Seriously Over-Hyped”:
We interviewed MacInnis over the weekend, and as near as we can
tell, Foresman — and the 18 other reporters who followed his lead
— got it wrong.
“Apple is not trying to kill the incumbents,” MacInnis told us.
“They’ve learned their...
2 tags
Schlep Blindness
[shared via Google Reader from Paul Graham: Essays]