Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
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 by a 7-to-1 margin, not surprising given that the site’s built on Rails. I’m glad…
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 gets help from about 65,000 lines of C code. I’ve heard this before, perhaps not…
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? Presumably spam bots target sites that are more heavily linked by other sites, making them…
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 of the typesetting rules that make LaTeX output look so professional to begin with. But…
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 part of me really wants to do it in Common Lisp, just to prove I…
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 captures a complete bibliographic record of the page you’re looking at, and saves a copy.…
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 I’m convinced it made the process easier than it would have been with any other…
“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, I get some wacky idea like “I could do this all with binary XORs” or…
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 before rushing off to tape a spot on The Colbert Report. Most interesting fact: he…
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 of Appeals. This was the brainchild of law professor and former Posner clerk Tim Wu.…