April 2012
20 posts
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A Challenge!
My favorite podcast at the moment, recently having overtaken Back to Work on the mighty 5by5 media empire, is easily Hypercritical. Since doing a Google Lucky search for the term ‘hypercritical’ gets me to the show’s site, I’ll trust that many other people feel the same way. Mr. Siracusa’s dry wit and quiet, nerdy charm combined with his detailed knowledge and extreme...
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Functional Thinking in Clojure: Part 3
Refactored Number Classifier
Neal starts his latest article demonstrating what he would have done if he’d been programming in a functional language like Scala from the beginning. Seems like the perfect place for me to do the same in Clojure.
Voila!
Some notes about what I’ve done:
When I originally optimized aliquot-sum, I slavishly followed (or thought I...
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InfoQ: Rich Hickey on Datomic: Datalog, Databases,... →
Rich waxing poetic about Datomic and why it rawks.
Some day soon I really need to dig in and figure out this product.
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Tuts Hub — The Best Place to Learn Online →
I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this Tuts before. Looks like an amazing place to learn a wide variety of information related to web development and design.
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The Lineup Card for T4G - Desiring God →
Insanity!
The picture of Pastor John had me rolling.
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Ring Handlers – Functional Decorator Pattern |... →
This is a brilliant little document on how easy it is to use the ‘decorator pattern’ in functional languages and Clojure in particular.
Ring is an amazing library for creating web applications and it’s use of functional decorators for folding behavior into your app was inspired!
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Don’t docwrite scripts | High Performance Web... →
Good tip, though it’s not terribly relevant to me as the only time I ever async a script into place is after a page has already loaded.
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Alternative Units for CSS3 Rotation Transforms |... →
Interesting.
I definitely like grad best, as they allow you to do many of the interim rotations with whole numbers. turn sounds interesting, but it’ll suffer from the same thing that em does, namely, that you have to use floating points to get ‘exact’ sizes.
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Functional Thinking in Clojure: Part 2.0.0.1
Who knew I’d need 3 .s to number these posts!
OK, I really don’t need all those dots, but whatever. I needed some clever way to let you know that I got caught with my pants down.
Turns out that my reading challenges have continued and here I am to say that I poorly implemented the square-root factorization optimization documented in Neal Ford’s Functional Thinking Part...
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In the extraordinarily extraordinary event that... →
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“The power of Lisp is its own worst enemy.”
– The Lisp Curse
(via @fogus re-tweeting @mfeathers)
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Infinity Blade Review - - Kill Screen →
I heard about Kill Screen from the excellent Christ and Pop Culture blog way back. I stopped subscribing to it for some reason in one of my many RSS purges, but I’m very thankful to have been pointed to this review of Infinity Blade.
I found the post absolutely compelling and, though I’ve never played the game, incredibly thought provoking about gaming and popular culture in...
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‘Paper’ for iPad →
cameronmoll:
There are so many things right about this app. The lovely watercolor, miniature sketchbook icon. The marketing site. The “take this everywhere life takes you” video above. And the undo gesture: Place two fingers on the screen and draw a circle counter-clockwise to undo and clockwise to redo. (Though the number of undo/redo steps are limited.)
Ooo baby! That does look awesome. I...
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swissmiss | The Lorax Experiment →
I hadn’t watched the trailer for The Lorax up until this post, figuring that The Lorax would be just another in the long train of abused childhood tails.
But the trailer really blew me away. Maybe we’ll finally have a use for those movie theater gift certificates people keep giving us!
March 2012
26 posts
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Functional Thinking in Clojure: Part 2
Welcome to part 2 of my Functional Thinking in Clojure series. Today we’ll discuss how to optimize the Number Classifier we implemented last time like the original Java implementation was, and how to do closures in Clojure.
The Number Classifier (Optimized and Optimizable)
If you remember, the requirements for the Number Classifier are as follows:
… given any positive integer greater...
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1-BIT CAMERA for iPhone →
Warms my heart to, Mr. Siracusa!
(via @siracusa)
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Can you play Super Mario Bros from right to left?... →
Hah! That would complicate things, wouldn’t it?
(via kottke)
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Functional Thinking in Clojure: Part 1
I admit it. I’m one of the poor sods who had no idea who Neal Ford was until I watched his plan for world domination at the 2011 Clojure Conj. It’s a good presentation and discussion related to how to get your technology (even if it’s not Clojure) adopted by the circles you travel in. One of the things he mentioned in passing in that talk was his Functional Thinking Series at IBM...
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Coding Horror: On Parenthood →
I don’t often associate Mr. Atwood with moving philosophical prose, but if he could write this sort of thing once I’m alright. Beautiful. A truly great description of the wonder and terror of being a parent.
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How To Convert Any Video To iPod Format In A Snap
I recently discovered that the amazing HandBrake app added support (or perhaps always had support for?) for formats other than VIDEO_TS. This is amazing, because it’s command line interface is one of the simplest permutations of video encoding if your only goal is to get that file into a format understood by Apple devices.
Because this blew my mind so much, I figured other people might...
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Myst: The Book of Atrus
★★★★☆
It was time to re-read several of my childhood-favorite, game-related novels. This might have something to do with me finally making time to play through Wind Waker, or it may just be that I kept seeing The Book of Ti’Ana on my shelf (as it’s one of the few books that weren’t donated to my local library), or it may just be the old R-Mode in action that decided all on...
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Hypercritical #2: Backup Vortex @ 5by5 →
To continue with the posts about back ups, I feel utterly compelled to point everyone to e2 of the most excellent 5by5 show, Hypercritical.
Entitled “Backup Vortex”, the entire show is dedicated to back up strategies and why it’s so important to back up, as well as some of the hairier parts of doing back up on a Mac.
Hypercritical may have beaten out Back To Work as my...
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SyncToy
If you’re like me, you’re stuck on Windows at your day job.
I know, I know. But it’s reality. No point in getting all upset about it.
On my mac, if I need to sync a large number of files between me and a remote disk, I have trusty rsync.
There are a number of utilities that offer support for rsync in Windows, but they aren’t that good. Cygwin runs like a dog on my...
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prompt sets your… prompt
I’ve been doing a lot of long running operations in my CMD prompt of late, and I’ve remembered why I used to have the time in my prompt. It gives a nice easy way to figure out whether the command has died.
Enter prompt. prompt is no where near as powerful as the options that bash gives you, but it does allow me to put the time in my prompt.
> prompt $t$_$p$g
Boom. Now I just...
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How to implement a command to pop open a new deft...
I’ve recently begun re-implementing a few of the remaining custom functions that I had written that had survived the move to the Emacs starter kit in terms of deft, the amazing notational velocity replacement for Emacs written by the inimitable Jason Blevins.
If you’re anything like me, you want to deal with text of any kind in Emacs. I’ve had somewhat poor success with things...
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Make Your Windows Wallpaper Experience... →
I’m a big fan of wallpaper on my boxen. That might not make much sense, considering that I almost always run my software full-screen, but it’s become one of my unusual ticks that every now and again I sneak a peak at the desktop to see something visually pleasing. I also obsessively hide or minimize apps that I’m no longer using so I see my desktop enough that having nice...
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dired-dwim-target is j00 j00 magic! →
Dired is, hands-down, the best way to browse your file system. Yeah, yeah, the command line is still faster if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but you’re simply trying to find something or trying to familiarize yourself with the tree, Dired is the way to go.
I’ll have to write a post some time that fully explores Dired, but for now, let me see if I can help you solve...
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Why z-index is probably not what you want to use...
Recently, I asked a question over on StackOverflow related to a site that I was building for my family’s annual “Merry Christmas” project.
The site was coming along fine, using a lot of the new CSS3, HTML5 hotness with transitions and sections (Thank you, HTML5 Boilerplate), complete with a full exploration of SMACSS (which I love and am using wherever I can at this point).
...
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Lyndsey Piecyk's New Home On The Web! →
My buddy Lyndsey Piecyk (Read: ‘π’) has just released her online home to the world, and she did a terrific job of it.
Lyndsey is a phenomenally talented musician and singer who recently got her masters in jazz studies from UArts and is now pursuing a full time career in music.
She’s open to a lot of different options, including performance and teaching, and is actively...
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An open letter to my representatives and President...
Dear Congressman Jim Gerlach, Senators Robert Casey, Jr. and Pat Toomey, and President Obama,
I’m writing to you in order to encourage you to do everything in your power to oppose the requirement by HHS for all employers except for an extremely narrow definition of ‘religious’ institutions to purchase insurance that provides free-of-charge access to abortifacients.
Please...
February 2012
1 post
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What were these books?
Here’s what I remember.
Physical Appearance:
Color but mostly washed out.
Somewhere between 50 and 75 pages.
Roughly 5/8” dimensions
Kids wore horizontal-striped shirts. Knobby knees. I’m fairly sure that the girl had short afrow-ish hair that was blond. Both kids were white.
Content:
One of the puzzles was related to finding a note by running a pencil horizontally over...
December 2011
11 posts
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“This creation of things from nothing speaks an infinite power. The distance...”
– Charnock On the Power of God - The Existence and Attributes of God v2 p38