bor.borygmus

Letting other people fill the metallic, judgmental silence.

• I am a former virus writer. Ask me anything.
• Antiobjects, and Pac-Man.
• A short explanation of Gödel’s theorem by Raymond Smullyan.
• You know your software is hard to install when… something comes up with a business model for it.
• Avery Pennarun’s weblog is basically software programming gold.
• Ditto for Robert Nystrom, who’s making an ML-like language called Magpie.
• sigfpe: What if you were only allowed one monad?
• Remember Synergy, the project by Chris Schoeneman that would make join the keyboards and mice for two computers? It got forked (for good reasons) into Synergy+ by Sorin Sbarnea and Nick Bolton!
• Alexander Limi would like to make your internet faster with resource packages.

Hello, hello. Witty banter here mingled with contrition about not posting. Laughs. Tears. Segue.

• I am a video codec engineer. Ask me anything.
• I wrote a PHP compiler. Ask me anything.
• What is the worst bug you have ever solved?
• Joe Damato walks us through the Matasano C++ security challenge.
• Thomas Ptacek on keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC).
• Jonathan Corbet summarizes Google’s how-we-use-Linux presentation at the 2009 Kernel Summit.
• Mark Dominus finds a gray code at the pediatrician’s.
• The animator of the first under-construction GIF.
• Ryan Tomayko likes Unicorn because it’s Unix.

Don’t give me that look. I’ve been busy.

GNU Emacs 23 has been out for a while now (Windows, atomized.org’s OS X builds from Emacs’ source control). It’s the little features that count, as you know.

• Tramp now works on Windows.

• The mode-line-buffer-id face seems to no longer dynamically inherit from the standard mode-line face: For example, if your mode line’s active background is green and inactive is gray, then on Emacs 22 the buffer-id (the place where your buffer name is written) would change backgrounds along with the mode line as you shunted back and forth. In Emacs 23, I had to choose one background for mode-line-buffer-id, finding no other way of replicating 22’s behavior.

• Not a feature, but: If you open the electric buffer list (M-x electric-buffer-list) you’ll see the column headers “CRM” in a curious serif typeface. The letters correspond to Current, R-something, and Modified, marking out which buffers are what at a glance, but that little corner is the only place in Emacs I know of where a different typeface as been used.

• customize-face seems to be unable to override color-theme, no matter where you put customize-face in your initialization script. I shrugged, opened up customize-face, and saved all my colors from deep-blue and my own tweaks into a file. Tentative goodbye, color-theme library.

• New window decoration icon on Windows! The window decoration icon is what I call the cute little 16x16 thing sitting at the top left of all Explorer windows.

• A little graphics bug: the refreshing stutters if you hold down Ctrl-N or Ctrl-P and scroll line by line. This is forcing me to navigate by search (As It Should Be Done), so let’s pull out an overall plus from this.

• python-mode highlights built-ins!

Hooray!

Update There is now a fancy website by David Caldwell written in SVG for Mac OS X builds. (via Hacker News, where a fantastic thread about building Emacs on OS X is taking place)

WebMynd has a great little post about extending SQLAlchemy to back Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. I wasn’t even aware of MapperExtension until now. If you love reading about all the little nooks and crannies of SQLAlchemy, check this out. I also just realized that the Mike Bayer who commented on bor.borygmus’s first grumble is the same person who created SQLAlchemy, which is marvelous.

ridiculous_fish, a stellar programming weblog, went on hiatus in 2006 but now it’s back with a post about weak externals in C++. See the reddit discussion for even more details and language lawyering. Other memorable posts include trying to outrun grep, outlining nested functions in C, and using pi to combat spam.

Max/MSP (Wikipedia) is a visual programming language that lets you create music in as cool a way as possible. This is a demo by why the lucky stiff, who recently just threw a party that many people are calling the Art and Code conference at Carnegie-Mellon University. (Music starts at around 1:00.)