Yearly Archives: 2006
Best Programming Languages at UnSpun
Amazon has a beta up of an interesting little app called UnSpun. It’s a way to create and vote on “best of” lists for any subject. It’s a little like Reddit, but less news-oriented. Ruby currently leads Best Programming Language … Continue reading
Not So Slow
Perhaps I was premature worrying about how slow Ruby is. John Wiseman was benchmarking Montezuma, his Common Lisp port of Ferret/Lucene, and found out in the process that Ferret is 10 times faster than Java Lucene! As he says, Ferret … Continue reading
Comment Spam as Popularity Index
I just noticed that the Askimet spam filter plugin for WordPress provides PHP code to display its spam-comments-blocked counter on your blog. I wonder: could one use the number of spam comments received as a measure of a blog’s popularity? … Continue reading
Tagged Blogging
Leave a comment
LaTeX for the Rest of Us
I really like LaTeX. So much so that I bought a used copy of the original LaTeX “blue book” just so I could write a class file to print my freshman English papers in MLA format, which requires breaking most … Continue reading
Ruby More Memory-Efficient than Lisp?
I continue to sweat (see previous entry) over the question of language choice for future iterations of Project Posner (and some as-yet-unnamed similar projects). Ruby on Rails is the obvious mainstream choice, mainstream at least compared to Lisp. But a … Continue reading
Note-taking on the Web
I just started playing with this, and already I love it: Zotero. It’s like a bookmark manager crossed with a note-taking program crossed with BibTeX. Zotero is an extension that runs inside Firefox 2.0 — click the icon, and it … Continue reading
Borrowability
The first draft of Project Posner was written in Common Lisp. I thought it would be fun to see how Common Lisp fared as a language for doing heavy text processing with a web front end. It worked well, and … Continue reading
Premature Cleverization
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil,” say Hoare and Knuth. I have determined that I suffer from a slightly different but related malady: premature cleverization. At the start of a programming task, before I’ve written any real code, … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
5 Comments
The Woz
I got to see Steve Wozniak speak at Columbia University last night, promoting his new book iWoz. Strongest impression: The man has an incredible amount of energy. He talked in a strong voice at high speed for nearly an hour … Continue reading
Project Posner: first look
Been too busy with work and class to post much, but here’s a link for all the IANALs out there: Project Posner. It’s an on-line database collecting the case opinions of Richard A. Posner, judge on the 7th Circuit Court … Continue reading