Like many arts aficionados, Hofstadter views music as a fundamental way for humans to communicate profound emotional information. Machines, no matter how sophisticated their mathematical abilities, should not be able to possess that spiritual power. As he wrote in Virtual Music, an anthology of debates about Cope’s research, Hofstadter worries Emmy proves that “things that touch me at my deepest core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages — might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.”

introducing the "medusa float", the number which when rounded crashes your debugger, providing a measure of copy protection.

2^63 - 0.5 = 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.1

But here's the thing: while the hardware problem of overheating chips lends itself nicely to the hardware solution of multicore computing, that solution gives rise in turn to a tricky software problem. How do you program for multiple processors? It's Anwar Ghuloum's job to figure that out, with the help of programming groups he manages in the United States and China.

So does CouchDB suck? No, it's by far my favorite new database technology on the block. What it's good at doing, it's great at doing, but that doesn't mean that it should be used for everything. With the kinds of scaling issues that we're seeing with today's highly-interactive web applications, we need to make use of a broad range of technologies, and use each one for its greatest strengths. That's called using the right tool for the job, and that's never gone out of style.

The best, imho, is a standard implementation with different facades to allow programming any of the common models (master-worker, fork-join, map-reduce) that allows chaining. This allow the cleanest representation of the task rather than coercing one model to act like another. This is how I went about it, so I'm fairly biased.

In the past few weeks I've sampled numerous Python IDEs for Mac OS X. Without exception, every one of them has major problems.

4. Do not use software that must sync over the internet to function.

Currently, we have ten job queues running in parallel. At creation, each job is randomly assigned a queue and inserted — usually at the end of the queue, but it is possible for certain high-priority tasks to jump to the front. The queues each have a master process running on dedicated hardware. The master is responsible for fetching jobs from the queue, marking them as in-process, giving them to local children to do the work, and marking them as complete when the child is finished. Each task has an ID, task type, arguments, status, create/update date, retry count, and priority. Tasks detect their own errors and either halt or put themselves back in the queue for retry later, when hopefully things have gotten better. Tasks also lock against the objects they’re running on (like accounts or groups) to make sure that other tasks don’t stomp on their data. Masters have an in-memory copy of the queue for speed, but it’s backed by mysql for persistent storage, so we never lose a task.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.
Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use its recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.

Amid all this hi-tech digital trickery, it is sometimes nice to be able to cast one’s mind back to the simpler analogue age and the measuring devices of the past. For example, we hooked up an analogue meter like those used in many industries for decades, fed it some different input and ended up with a literal desktop dashboard that measures average website response time.

ELIE is a tool for adaptive information extraction from text. It also provides a number of other text processing tools e.g. POS tagging, chunking, gazetteer, stemming.

Unlike C, Objectivist C does not require the programmer to keep track of memory allocation and deallocation; instead, objects in memory allocate and deallocate memory themselves according to their rational self-interest. Similarly, threads in a multitaski

Come on, people — you could load a usenet thread off a floppy drive in that time! (ah, memories of timesharing 50 people on a 486-50)

I have never, ever, ever seen a great software developer who does not have amazing attention to detail.

This was a rather painful thing to develop, mainly because I'd been mislead by a WWW reference to <xsl:strip-space .. > as an element specifying "source elements in which input whitespace is to be discarded". This is wrong, <xsl:strip-space .. > specifies

The essence of the Solution Architect (SA) role is the conversion of the requirements into an architecture and design that will become the blueprint for the solution being created. This conversion is based largely upon the previous design patterns that th

i had a problem today that Jon Udell solved and documented 19 days ago. awesome.

The 600-page tome arrived recently, and as I’ve been reading it I’m struck once again by the theme of narrating the work. Of the chapters I’ve read so far, three are especially vivid examples of that: Karl Fogel’s exegesis of the stream-oriented i

This plugin creates a backup of all changes to posts and pages and allows you to revert back to an old version if needed. (No updates since 2005; sounds like the right idea, though.)

with notes for the optometrist

nice feature on knuth

extended, civil discussion of 'goto' as a programming method. no discussion of the essential "comefrom" operator.

not actually about thrift stores. Facebook releasing their programming framework as open source.

MapReduce is a secret behind scaling up algorithms to run on huge networks of computers

Mondrian is a web-based code review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end. Mondrian is a pretty impressive system and is currently in use across Google.

start out just styling things with the color red, and then when you have it figured out do more. +9 other tips

python-based toolkit to manipulate RFID tags. no experimenting with library rfid in this collection, but perhaps it would be where to start

software reflects the organizational structure of the groups that produced it. originally from 1968

"late binding"

Sawzall is a high level, parallel data processing scripting language built on top of MapReduce. The system allows Google to do distributed, fault tolerant processing of very large data sets.

ah, here we go. for the todo queue: assemble all of the AADL and Mirlyn library hacks into one greasemonkey script, then compile it into an extension

embed python in web page templates

at LBL

a wiki full of patterns for programming in Ajax