2008 Oct 10, 1:43A blog comment included the phrase 'hard-core conlangers' which at first glance sounds dirty, then based on the context I thought it was made up, but of course Wikipedia has the actual answer: "A
conlanger ... is person who invents conlangs (constructed languages)."
language klingon nerd wikipedia conlang 2008 Oct 10, 1:32Xkcd providing answers to questions that I forgot I had, like what is the answer to the lawn-sprinkler question from Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. "Feynman used to tell a story about a simple
lawn-sprinkler physics problem. The nifty thing about the problem was that the answer was immediately obvious, but to some people it was immediately obvious one way and to some it was immediately
obvious the other. (For the record, the answer to Feynman problem, which he never tells you in his book, was that the sprinkler doesn't move at all. Moreover, he only brought it up to start an
argument to act as a diversion while he seduced your mother in the other room.)"
humor feynman comic blog xkcd physics science math 2008 Oct 10, 10:26Sounds like Wayne Coyne, of the Flaming Lips has a home like you might expect if you've ever seen one of their concerts.
music via:boingboing architecture home flaming-lips wayne-coyne 2008 Oct 7, 2:49
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Cadbury the bunny takes a moment from hiding under the chair to eat some mint. She comes out just to grab some mint and then goes back under the chair repeatedly for two
minutes.
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video 2008 Oct 7, 12:21
Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't
been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to
organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
carnegies personal restaurant weekend nontechnical 2008 Oct 5, 9:17
Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's
description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only
used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).
With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat
sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the
parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom
of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.
What I learned:
- I didn't realize that Java applets are easy to use via script in an HTML page. In the JavaScript I
can simply refer to publicly exposed methods on the applet and run JavaScript strings through them. It makes for a great combination: do the heavy coding in Java and do the UI in HTML. I may end up
doing this again in the future.
- I love ANTLRWorks, the ANTLR IDE, that didn't exist the last time I used ANTLR. It tells you about issues with your grammar as you create it,
lets you easily debug the grammar running it forwards and backwards, display parse trees, and other useful things.
java technical programming quickbase language antlr antlrworks 2008 Oct 3, 5:29I thought the disemvowelment of trolls was a pretty funny punishment -- much better than simply removing the comment: "Disemvowelment is - obviously enough - the act of removing the vowels from a
passage of text, as well as a pun on the word 'disembowelling'. A number of blogs and websites do this to offensive text which has been placed in their 'comments' section. ... This site exists
because I couldn't resists the challenge of trying to re-emvowel disemvowelled text. This is a challenging task, as the disemvowelled word 'dg' may well have been 'dog', but also 'dig', 'dug',
'doge', diego' and so on. I have a first cut of this functionality at the re-emvowel link at the side of the page. A more advanced version is in progress."
tool disemvowelment web comment forum troll language 2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use
cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps
eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."
antlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java 2008 Oct 2, 9:26Cheat sheet on ANTLR's syntax. ANTLR's another language parser generator.
antlr cheat parser language grammar opensource java software syntax quickreference 2008 Oct 1, 1:49One of the values in this enum is named 'STGC_DANGEROUSLYCOMMITMERELYTODISKCACHE'. After reading (and re-reading to make sure I word broke correctly) I'm left with the lingering impression that I've
had an extensive conversation with whoever named this variable. Anyway, I thought it was a fun name.
humor software msdn microsoft reference 2008 Oct 1, 1:08A weekly summary of the going-ons in the WHATWG usually on the topic of squabbles in HTML5 esp. what to do about the alt attribute in the img tag. Interesting stuff on charsets.
development software whatwg html5 html specification feed rss user-agent w3c 2008 Sep 30, 12:11"Before he was on The Daily Show, before he was the PC in the Mac commercials, John Hodgman wondered, just like you, about the very special world of famous people. Now he explains why being one of
America's best-known minor celebrities is even better than you imagined"
john-hodgman humor article apple tv fame 2008 Sep 30, 11:14Tools and hints for debugging esp. WinDbg. Some interesting things in here. "...When I'm not debugging applications with Windbg, I'm working on tools (utility software) like those presented in this
blog. My tools should help you during your debugging or troubleshooting session. "
blog windows debug windbg powershell tool programming 2008 Sep 29, 2:33A short post on the topic of those irritating high fructose corn syrup commericals: 'Really, there's no way that you could make something called "high fructose corn syrup" sound good for you. Which
is why, instead of irritating the public with defensive commercials featuring gross, brightly colored "juice," the Corn Refiners Association should just call "high fructose corn syrup" something more
appealing: like "Deliciosity," or "Yummy Tummy Syrup," or "So You Think You Can Sweeten?" or "Fun Sugar"'
humor onion video corn-syrup corn propaganda tv commercial 2008 Sep 29, 2:28'"Internet Explorer is not currently your default browser. Would you like to make it your default browser?" the software program asked in an attempt to guilt Drewing into accepting its offer out of
pure pity.'
onion humor browser ie microsoft 2008 Sep 29, 1:45"So the manual is correct, and this truly is a mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette. This diskette has officially blown my mind."
hack disk hardware history game computer 2008 Sep 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature
completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a
feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."
html5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8 2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them
bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"
steampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein 2008 Sep 23, 2:15
The names in the following anecdote have been changed. Except for my name
(I'm Dave).
I got a new laptop a while back. I had it in my office and Tim came in to ask me something but paused when he saw my laptop. "Oh, is this one of those new touch screen laptops?" he asked, the whole
time moving his hand towards my laptop and punctuating his sentence by pressing his finger to the screen. "No" I responded.
Walking down a hallway I heard Winston, one of our managers, say, "Hey Tim!" Winston catches up to me and asks, "Are you almost done with the XYZ bug?" I realized Winston was talking to me and got
my name wrong but I figured I'll ignore it and perhaps he'll realize his mistake. Winston continued "I just talked with some people who say they're blocked and waiting for Tim to finish the XYZ
bug." "Dave" I said helpfully attempting to diplomatically correct Winston since he apparently hadn't realized his error. "No, it was Jeremy and Bill." Winston said naming the people he had talked
to who were waiting for me to fix the XYZ bug. At this point I decided it would be easier to just answer his question and end the conversation than to get into this whole thing. As far as I know,
Winston has not gotten my name wrong at any other time.
work nontechnical 2008 Sep 23, 10:58Matt says this is a good restaurant. It certainly looks interesting.
via:swannman seattle food restaurant
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