Month: June 2008
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Insane Architecture
It is generally believed that anybody who sees the lost city of R’lyeh goes insane. My personal observation is that the towns of Silicon Valley make me feel insane. It seems therefore plausible that Silicon Valley is in some way associated with Cthulhu. Of course there are many people who live in Silicon Valley, but…
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Jackie Chan
Watching The Forbidden Kingdom the other day reminded me of Jackie Chan’s glory days, the string of movies from Project A to Drunken Master II or perhaps Rumble in the Bronx. It is unfortunately hard to see those movies in theaters these days; they used to be shown regularly in Hong Kong film retrospectives. In…
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Newsqueak
A mention of Squeak in a comment on my last post reminded me of Newsqueak, an interesting little language by Rob Pike. Newsqueak has nothing to do with Squeak. Newsqueak implements Hoare’s idea of Communicating Sequential Processes. The interesting part of Newsqueak is the channel data type. A channel is a two-way communication path. Given…
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Scheme
When I was in school I wrote programs in Scheme and its variant T. I still remember that as the easiest programming language I’ve ever used. In Scheme you never waste time on pointless boilerplate. You just write code. In order to run some function on a bunch of data, a very common operation, you…
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Left Behind
On Bruce Schneier’s blog he pointed out a service on the Left Behind website. Left Behind is of course a reference to the popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (my capsule review: first volume is a decent thriller, subsequent volumes become increasingly pointless, I stopped after four). The website lets people…