A River of Words

iWorlds

Saturday.

Map information is here.

Be there at 1pm. If you can bring your $15 with you, that’d be great.

This will not be a private session – those cost like an extra $100. But when I spoke to them earlier this morning, they had no other groups lined up for this time slot, so maybe we’ll get lucky.

A Person, a Painting and a Play

I had promised some time ago to post this, and am just now getting around to it – unfortunately, some of the content has been lost in the interim. Below is the only version my review “A Person, a Painting, and a Play” from the TrekWest5 segment “Joey’s Culture Corner.”

Taking it from the end, the play is Steven Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, the Painting is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and the Person is the painter, the French Post-Impressionist and the father of Pointillism, Georges Seurat.

On its surface, “Sunday in the Park with George” is a play about the birth of Pointillism – specifically, about the painting of the “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” – but I think that this is Sondheim’s most deeply personal piece. It’s all about the cost of dedication to an ideal, and about the trade-offs we make every day. “Work is what you do for others – art is what you do for yourself!” decries one of the characters early in the play, and Seraut himself – who is clearly a stand-in for Sondheim – tells one of his critics “I do not paint for your approval”. Last year, Sondheim published the first of two volumes where he talks in depth about his musicals and their lyrics…I think it’s telling that the title he selected for this book is Finishing the Hat. While “Sunday in the Park” was not much of a critical success – and was a financial failure – it is one of only eight musicals to ever win the “Pulitzer Prize for Drama”. I give this musical the strongest possible positive recommendation. Probably my favorite thing about the musical is how Sondheim incorporated the musical technique of “Pointillism” – see the musical number Color and Light for an excellent example.

The painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is probably my favorite painting NOT by Monet, and is probably the most famous example of Pointillism. The painting is 6’10” x 10’1” – a MASSIVE work, it took more than two years to finish. An absolutely fascinating principal of Pointillism is that it uniquely engages the brain in a behaviour known as “Neuroplasticity”, which refers to the ability of the human brain to change as a result of one’s experience. In his 2003 book The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:

If your mind has been primed with the theory of pointillism…then you will see a Seurat painting in a very different way than if you are ignorant of his technique. Yet the photons of light reflecting off the Seurat…are identical to the photons striking the retina of a less knowledgeable viewer.

Seurat himself, and his impact on the world at large, is nothing less than astounding. There are very few places in this world today we can turn without seeing the influences of the theory behind divisionism and pointillism – film and photos, televisions and computer monitors, airbrushes and spray paint, digital cameras and cell phone screens – these all operate on the same basic principles of pointillism. The theories of color and vision that were explored in the work of Seurat and his contemporaries have had a profound effect on every part of our modern world.

So – Georges Seurat, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, and Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” – I heartily endorse them all.

Pylons "Classic" (pre-pyramid) and LDAP Auth

It took me a long time to figure this out, I didn’t want it to end up locked in my head, so here’s a rough guide on how I managed to get a pylons 0.9.7 project to do LDAP authentication. All of the below is done in config/middleware.py.

The key points are:

“import ldap” (for the obvious reason) and “from paste.auth.basic import AuthBasicHandler”
Wrap the stacked WSGI ‘app’ object in the AuthBasicHandler you just imported: app = AuthBasicHandler(app, 'The value you want to appear on the browser dialog box', yourAuthFunctionHere)
Define an auth function “yourAuthFunctionHere(requestEnvironment, username, password)”. Some tricky bits:
1. If this function returns “True”, the request will proceed and there will be a new key in the Request object named ‘REMOTE_USER’ that contains the passed username.
2. If this function returns “False”, the user will be prompted again until it succeeds. (I should probably find a way to limit these so people cannot just keep guessing.)
3. Python’s LDAP has some strange behaviours:
You can’t touch the session from within the WSGI middleware layer

All of this was done because a new server in our datacenter doesn’t have packages for the old build of Apache that we used to configure our LDAP auth back in the day. I’m actually quite pleased at how the new system works, and am glad to be rid of that Apache+PHP millstone that’s been lurking as a dependancy in all of our Pylons projects simply for the LDAP authentication solution.

Peter Nash Day

As most of you know, December 2nd is Peter Nash Day. I thought I’d share some of the photos that are pouring in from around the world demonstrating how Peter Nash Day is celebrated – feel free to add a link to your own Peter Nash Day celebration photojournal in the comments! More will be added as they come in, so keep watching this space.

Continue reading "Peter Nash Day"

AlivePDF and Pylons

I have a project at work where we are using Pylons/paster as the web service provider. One of the “clients” of this service is written in Flex/Flash, and had as a component the AlivePDF AS3 library for generating a static PDF of the Flash content.

Unfortunately, because Flash cannot save content locally, in order to actually GET this PDF content back to the user, AlivePDF posts a byte array to the service and expects the service to bundle that as a PDF and send it back. They provide a “content.php” file as an example – which, frankly, is some pretty inscrutable code until you manage to figure out what it’s working around. So when one of my employees (the one who selected AlivePDF in the first place) sent me the PHP file, it took as long to understand what he wanted as it did to come up with a Pylons solution. You can find the latter bit below – replace ${service} and ${controller} with your actual values through-out, and trim the ellipses (they are there to indicate there may be additional context on either side of the line I’m giving you):

${service}/config/routing.py: def make_map(): ... map.connect(’/${controller}/create.php’, controller=’${controller}’, action=‘pdf’) # put this before the default routes, if you have any ...

${service}/controllers/${controller}.py: Class ${controller}(BaseController): ... def pdf(self): response.headers[‘Content-Type’] = request.environ[‘CONTENT_TYPE’] response.headers[‘Content-Disposition’] = ‘inline; filename=”%s”’ % request.GET[‘name’] return request.environ[‘wsgi.input’].read(int(request.environ[‘CONTENT_LENGTH’])) ...

SSL Certificate and SSH Key Updated

If you have been using SSL or SSH to access any of your joeysmith.com, hashphp.org, or homestarmy.com services, please be aware that our previous certificates and keys have expired. I have generated a new one, and your software should prompt you on connect to approve the certificate/key.

SSL information:
SHA1 Fingerprint: 3261 57CE 794D 216D 7411 AB45 19EC F2CE 254A FD9B
MD5 Fingerprint: 850A 6195 5B5D EA5D 9D0F 36B4 9FC1 F819

SSH Fingerprint:
4e:6d:6f:6b:53:1c:50:f7:1b:dc:98:9c:c8:49:8b:cf

If you feel you need to contact me to verify this post, please don’t hesitate to use my Google Voice information or my personal cell phone.

C.J. Date's SQL and Relational Theory Master Class

I’ve recently been reading through SQL and Relational Theory by C.J. Date, who was deeply involved in the original formulation of relational model. Working my way through the book, I discovered that O’Reilly and Associates have also produced a series of videos where Date lectures on the content of the book, and I’ve really been enjoying it. You can purchase them outright for about $300 USD, or you can subscribe to one month of Safari via their “Library” plan for ~$43 and stream them from there. All together, the videos run just over 16.5 hours – here’s a breakdown of the topics and the durations.

1:19:07 Setting the Scene
1:18:08 Types and domains
0:57:28 Tuples and Relations, Rows and Tables
0:50:47 No Duplicates, No Nulls
1:04:56 Base Relvars, Base Tables
3:15:15 SQL and Relational Algebra I: The Original Operators
1:19:06 SQL and Constraints
0:56:26 SQL and Views
2:04:04 SQL and logic I: Relational Calculus Part 1
0:46:39 SQL and Logic II: Using Logic to Write SQL Code
0:20:56 Further SQL Topics
0:38:53 The Relational Model
0:32:21 A Relational Approach to Missing Information
1:08:31 Database Design Theory

If you work with databases for a living, I really think it would be worth your time to sit through these.

Uh-oh

I see what you did there, Mr. Belichick.

The Illusion of Free Choice

I don’t normally go in for Abstruse Goose (I’m more of an XKCD man myself), but I really enjoyed this comic I found in his archives:

J. C. Hutchins' "7th Son" In Print!

If you listen to the TrekWest5 podcast, you know we’ve been promoting the podiobook trilogy "7th Son" for some time now. I’m really glad to announce that as of Oct. 27th, you’ll be able to buy this book in print (in fact, you can preorder it now). To quote the email JC sent me:

This is huge news for me (the trilogy was also optioned for film development by Warner Bros.), and for podcasting. Considering that 7th Son was rejected by dozens of publishing pros before I released it as a podcast, we have accomplished something extraordinary with its publication.

To celebrate the release, he’s announcing a number of new promotions that I wanted to make all of you aware of:

- A brand-new podcast recording of the "print edition" of the novel (with new scenes, twists, and character tweaks)

- A prequel audio short story anthology called 7th Son: 7 Days. (I am currently listening my way through this and am really enjoying it)

- Serialization of the novel in PDF and and the text at Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing.net

There’s a lot to like about the 7th Son series of podiobooks, and for those of you not inclined to partake of them in the audio format, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the deadtree edition.

Internet Meme Develops into Unsettling Trend

Came across this meme on a friend’s blog, and it sounded kind of interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The rules, as I got them, are as follows:

Put your music player on shuffle
Press forward for each question
Use the song title as the answer
NO CHEATING!!! What you get is what you get!

I’m more than a little bit disturbed by the pattern that began to develop as the experiment wound on…fortunately, I can point it all to the fact that I didn’t have very much music loaded on my ipod when I did this, so maybe I can try it again later with a broader selection of my music and it will end up feeling a bit less like my ipod is trying to question my sexual orientation.

Continue reading "Internet Meme Develops into Unsettling Trend"

Nothing New to See Here

I don’t think I’ve kept secret my admiration for what Jeff Atwood does over at codinghorror.com. One of his most recent entries really appealed to me.

One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry.

He quotes an interview where someone suggests that “One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.” Having recently discussed a tangential subject with my TrekWest5 co-host, Peter, and given my on-going involvement in Freenode’s ##PHP channel I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Once upon a time (in the early 90’s), there was an attempt by a group known as advogato to provide web-of-tust like metrics to certify a programmer’s skill. Given the explosion of social networking in the intervening period, I’m wondering if any of you have ideas on how we can really bring some muscle to bear on this?

We're All Still Figuring This Out

Reading this article on “rootkits” for Javascript has really got me thinking about the kind of evil you could do by poisoning the base datatype Prototypes in a javascript environment. I recommend you read it if you do a lot of work with Javascript.

Techdump: CouchDB, Kindle Contest, Upgrading Your Win7 RC, more

What is CouchDB?
CouchDB is a new kind of database system. Instead of tables, columns, and rows, it’s just a collection of JavaScript (JSON) documents.

Design your own Kindle (and win it) with Engadget, Amazon, and Adafruit Industries!
The Amazon Kindle is an awesome “Electronic Book” device. We’re getting closer to having a PADD.

Upgrade Rules for Windows 7 RC Users
If you’ve been using a Windows 7 Release Candidate, you need to be aware of these.

Survey says most companies won’t deploy Windows 7
Not really news, but good information to have in your pocket.

The ‘R’ Programming Language
‘R’ is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Build a 10 Terabyte Storage Solution for ~$1000USD
The guys Tom’s Hardware are always looking for the next edge – I certainly could put 10TB of space to use!

1TB Hard Drive for <$80 USD @ TigerDirect
The Tom’s Hardware article sent me looking for this – this is really good news!

Google Releases ‘Remote Desktop’ Software Based on NX
NX is an attempt to make the Unix X Windows system a more viable solution for remote desktop display. When Google announced their upcoming Chrome OS operating system, a lot of people were trying to figure out what their new display system would be – the common thinking now is that it will probably be this NX implementation.

Video interview with author of O’Reilly and Associates book: Programming Collective Intelligence
Examples of Collective intelligence might be Amazon’s or Netflix’s “Recommendations” services, or the all-powerful Wikipedia – where the body of knowledge becomes something more than the sum of its parts. If you’re not sure why Collective Intelligence is important, I urge you to read the excellent book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

Brandon Sanderson's "Warbreaker"

I saw Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris back in 2005, and thought it looked interesting – especially because he was a local – but never bothered to pick it up. I didn’t hear the name again until he was selected by James Rigney’s widow to finish The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series I’ve long held dear. When I heard that Harriet selected him based on his Mistborn series, I decided to get them on audiobook and listen to them.

Six hours into the audiobook, I was crushed. THIS was the style of writer Harriet chose to finish my beloved Wheel of Time? The story is disjointed, with great swaths of time passing between pages. The dialog is overly-simplistic, as if the author were writing to the Harry Potter crowd – which, OK, I have no proof that he WASN’T, but it’s certainly not a style of writing I find enjoyable. I never even finished the Harry Potter books, having put down Book 6 and realized “I’m not enjoying this, why do I keep reading it?”. The quality of characterization is uneven, with secondary characters like Hammond or Breeze being far more entertaining and vibrant than the “main” characters of Kelsier and Vin. All hope for a pleasant ending to the Wheel of Time faded from me, and I became a bitter and angry fan.

Then, my good friend Peter suggested I read a book called The Name of the Wind – perhaps the best new work of fantasy I’ve read in the past 5 years. I started following the author’s blog, which eventually led me back to Brandon Sanderson’s blog, which – to my astonishment – I found I thoroughly enjoyed.

So, it is with no little trepidation that I bring you links to the free, online copies of Brandon’s upcoming work, Warbreaker. I have not yet read it myself, but here’s the piece of Brandon’s entry on the book that really caught my attention:

How would [being transformed into a deity] affect a person? What if they, themselves, didn’t believe that their powers made them a god—yet everyone else did believe it? Could you have a god who didn’t believe in his own religion?

I’m willing to give him another shot, and maybe even go back and finally read Elantris, which some people have told me is quite good – of course, they also really liked Mistborn…sigh

I Like Jokes

I’m often accused of being “too serious”, so when I have something that proves I have a sense of humour, I like to share it. This snippet of a conversation thread from this post on proggit really made me laugh – it mixes incredibly obscure geek humour with a long-dead internet meme regarding some strange creatures chasing a kitten through a field – you know what I’m referring to.

Every Extend

It’s been a while since I posted a “Monday Break”, so I’d like to get back into the swing by bringing you Every Extend – a free, fun, single-button game with what appears to be a Japanese origin. I could easily see something like this doing well on the Blackberry or iPhone.

Biding Time

I’m sitting here, waiting for our European offices to get back to me on an issue, and the only thing I could think of to do with my time was watch Season 2 of 30 Rock – and the only thing I can tell you about it is that someone has bottled pure ‘funny’ and unleashed it in concentrated, 20-minute doses.

Done and Done

Well, my share of the meta game has gone live. I have to say, I’m more anxious about this than I’ve EVER been before. Will people understand what I’m trying to say? Will it be as moving for them as it was for me? I don’t think I’ll handle it very well if they don’t like it, and it’s incredibly unusual for me to pin my own emotions that much on the reactions of other people. I’d guess it’s because writing the last few paragraphs of that story were so important to me that any rejection of it will feel like a rejection of me. Bleh, I’m starting to make myself sick…but if you don’t like it, do me a favor and keep it to yourself?

The Wants of Man

This week’s batch of ST:TNG episodes includes one titled ‘The Ensigns of Command’, which Memory Alpha cites as coming from this poem by John Quincy Adams, which I found to be…not horrible. For those not inclined to read the entire poem, here’s the relevant section.

I want the seals of power and place, 

The ensigns of command, 

Charged by the people’s unbought grace, 

To rule my native land. 

Nor crown nor sceptre would I ask, 

But from my country’s will, 

By day, by night, to ply the task 

Her cup of bliss to fill.

The rest is below the fold…

Continue reading "The Wants of Man"

Watchmen: A Response to Radar

[Edited on 2009-07-13 to include link to Radar’s original article, as I just noticed I never linked to it directly]

[If you don’t know how Watchmen ends, stop reading now. This is a good rule of thumb for my blog: I have no qualms about “spoiling” – if you’re reading an article discussing a subject, you’d darn well better be familiar with the material.]

Let me start here by pointing out something I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned. I owe The Mad Giggler a deep debt – back when The Homestarmy looked like this, asked me if I would be interested in writing a Guest Post on his blog/web site, thehomestarmy.com. To that point, I didn’t get it – the whole concept of blogs escaped me – and frankly, pissed me off a little bit. (Hmm…sort like Facebook and Twitter do today – no, no; don’t chase that particular dragon right now, Joey, you’re going somewhere with this post…). If it weren’t for him encouraging me, I might have missed out on a number of incredible things, including the two blogs I write on, as well as my podcast with The One Named Peter. Thank you, MG.

Last night, or early this morning, over at The Homestarmy (as it is TODAY), Radar posted what I believe is his longest entry to date

[
wait, let’s just check that…

    select title from blog_entries where authorid = 8 order by length(body)+length(extended) desc;
    16305: Where I Boldly Went
    11273: The Watchmen: Novel or just Graphic?

Nope, turns out this has that honor – dangit, Joey, stay on topic!
]

...discussing graphic novels in general, but focused mostly on Watchmen. Radar made a lot of apologies for the quality of his writing (which turned out to be entirely unnecessary, man), so I’ll follow his pattern – the main body of this article was written between the time Radar posted his article (around 01:00 on Thursday) and the time I went to bed. In between putting my thoughts down here, I was also working, and so wasn’t giving the care I usually prefer to give to my writing. However, at this point, I’m so late in publishing this response, I’m more interested in getting it out than in quality-checking it, so I’m sorry if there’s anything wrong, rude, offensive, or dumb.

Continue reading "Watchmen: A Response to Radar"

The Halting Problem in the Style of Ted Geisel

ProggIt had this amusing gem today, but it’s pretty obscure, so I put it here instead of the Homestarmy

So where can this argument possibly go?
I don’t have to tell you; I’m sure you must know.
By reductio, there cannot possibly be
a procedure that acts like the mythical P.

Great stuff.

Dire Straits

No podcast, no php-bot, and no article on creativity vs. originality – spent the entire weekend debugging this:

For the ‘hardware impaired’, here’s what you should be looking for:

Yeah – hard drives aren’t supposed to look like that.

That first image is a link to a REALLY LARGE version, for those who want to fully revel in my pain – Radar, I’m looking at you.

A "Longest-Prefix" Solution for SQL

Something came up in IRC today, I thought I found a pretty nice solution to it, thought I’d share it here. A guy has a table in his database that contains ‘prefixes’. It looks like this:

id	number
1	1
2	1800
3	18
4	180
5	1801

Given the phone number “18005551234”, he’d like to find the longest valid prefix. He had suggested to me that he was considering a stored procedure which loops, character-by-character, through the input looking for the longest match. Instead, I recommended he use ‘replace’ to trim the ‘prefixes’ off of the input, and let an ‘order by’ tell him which of those actually resulted in the shortest remaining string (and thus, was the longest match).

The query I ended up with goes something like this:
select id from prefixes order by length(replace('18005558355', number, '')) asc limit 1;
Given a better understanding of mysql’s ‘replace()’, we ended up using this instead – note the identities are renamed to reflect his actual sytem:
SELECT id, prefix from routes where locate(prefix, '18005558355') = 1 order by length(prefix) desc limit 1;

Is there a better way? Below the fold is a quick (postgresql) “dump” of the database in question so you can come up with your own proposals.

Continue reading "A "Longest-Prefix" Solution for SQL"

What Do YOU Want to Read?

Let’s be honest – there aren’t many of you reading this, and there’s just not that much of me to go around, so if you read blog.joeysmith.com, I’d like to hear from you regarding what sort of topics I should write about. Here are some ideas, but feel free to submit your own:

Information Visualization – I have at least a half-dozen articles on the subject laying around in various states of (in-)completion.
Parsing Expression Grammars – how to stop using regular expressions and use a parser instead
PHP WTFs, tricks and anecdotes – a decade of participation in FreeNode’s ##PHP channel has given me some great material in the “WTF” category
Data Structures and their Algorithms – this would probably consist of discussing a particular data structure, showing an implementation in a couple of different languages (Maybe “JS, PHP, Python…???”)
Book reviews

Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX

This week’s Trek West 5 podcast will be discussing The Measure of a Man, which contains a (brief) mention of this sonnet, one of the few I’ve actually memorized. Here it is in its entirety:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Kryptos

Wikipedia brings us an entry on Kryptos, a sculpture that stands outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA which contains 4 puzzles – three have been solved, the 4th continues to stymie everyone who attempts to solve it.

The Spell of the Yukon

Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for my podcast reintroduced me to the poem “The Spell of the Yukon”, by Robert W. Service. This poem often makes me think of my childhood in Wyoming where I would spend hours and hours getting lost to the world in the alley behind our house…

It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

The rest of The Spell of the Yukon below the fold…

Continue reading "The Spell of the Yukon"

Day 31: Leftovers, Part 2

Here are the last of the “leftovers” from the project:
Squeak by Example
The WikiBook ‘Practical PHP Programming’
Basics of Algebra and Analysis for Computer Science
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming [pdf]
.Net Book Zero
Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

There’s plenty more still to come, and if you apply a little bit of your own energy, there are many out there to be found.

If you do find something you really enjoy, drop me an email or let me know in the comments here.

Planned Maintenance Outage

Our ISP has a planned maintenance outage for the UPS unit powering our machine on Mon Feb 02 17:00:00 MST 2009. It should last about 4 hours and may result in the site being unreachable for that period.

Day 30: Leftovers, Part 1

Some books we didn’t have time for:

Getting Started with awk
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4
Logic, Programming and Prolog [pdf]
The Scheme Programming Language
A Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C
The OpenGL ‘Red Book’
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

Also, here’s an entire “directory” of online SciFi novels.

Day 29: A Nest of Vip...err, Pythons?

We’ll end the project with a list of Python books :

Day 28: The Handbook of Applied Cryptography, The Pains

Another great handbook to have around – The Handbook of Applied Cryptography

John Sundman dropped by my blog a few weeks ago and mentioned that his new novel, The Pains is also available now, as well as his novella Cheap Complex Devices

Jeff Zeldman writes, regarding The Pains:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

Day 27: Data Mining with R, Starfish

Data Mining with R – R is an interesting language which recently made the New York Times.

Peter Watts has made his entire backlist available, but I recommend starting with Starfish.

Note: I had someone challenge the past few entries, suggesting I was running out of ideas for ‘recreational’ books – I can assure you, those are books that are very dear to my heart, and I would rather recommend them than any of the 15+ other books I have on my list because I do love them so much.

Day 25's Missing Video

I repent! I never decided on a video for the “Sunday Special”, and the article self-published before I realized I had forgotten it. To make it up to you, I’m posting several:

Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto Smith, the author of “On the Origin of Objects,” combines degrees in computer science and philosophy and is an expert on the interdisciplinary convergence brought about by digitization. His talk is titled, And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?

And a couple of items from the brilliant folks over at archive.org:

From the National Film Registry comes His Girl Friday, a classic screwball comedy from 1940 starring Cary Grant.
Suddenly, a quirky thriller from 1954 starring Frank Sinatra.

Day 26: Oz, and How to Design Programs

The Internet Archive did a blog post a few years ago that points to all of Frank Baum’s works that they’ve categorized.

Another textbook, this time from MIT – How to Design Programs

Day 25: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Little Women

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Learning with C++ – also available in two Python editions, 1st and 2nd.

Little Women is another great classic that I really, really enjoy.

Day 24: My Antonia and an Algorithms textbook

My Antonia is a very important book for me – when I read it in 3rd grade at the urging of a teacher, I was convinced there was nothing worth reading in the ‘Classics’ – they seemed likely to be dry and uninteresting compared to the scif/fantasy fare I was more fond of. It’s something like 24 years later, and the beauty of this book still haunts me.

Algorithms, a forthcoming textbook from the fine professors at Berkeley, is the more “technical” half of today’s post

Day 23: Programming Ruby and The Time Machine

Programming Ruby – The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide
H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine is worth a read if you like SciFi at all.

Day 22: Underlife, Lua

As of the time this post is being written, Robert Finn’s Underlife is the most downloaded book at the excellent free-book portal Manybooks.

Programming in Lua has a similar place in life – it’s popularity is under-appreciated. Sure, Lua’s not what most people would call a “mainstream” programming language. On the other hand, it’s the programming language for writing addons to the massively popular “World of Warcraft”, so…

Day 21: Supplementing Earlier Books

Practical Common Lisp, which makes a great supplement to Day 9’s On Lisp, and 1633, the first sequel to Day 5’s 1632

Day 20: Justifiably Arrogant

Philip Greenspun is an interesting character. An instructor at MIT, he’s one those people that strikes me as “justifiably arrogant”, and has written two great books which are readily available online: Software Engineering for Internet Applications and SQL for Web Nerds. This second one focuses on Oracle – which is unusual for books that you can find free online – and actually helped me come up to speed with some of that RDBMS’ idiosyncrasies when I started at my current employer.

Another person who strikes me as “justifiably arrogant” would be Sherlock Holmes, and you can find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes here. It contains the following Holmes stories:

A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-Headed League
A Case of Identity
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
The Five Orange Pips
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (one of my favorites)
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Day 19: The Chaos Chronicles and Text Processing in Python

Jeffrey A. Carver’s entire series The Chaos Chronicles is joined today by Text Processing in Python, an incredibly handy book.

Day 18: Sunday Special #3

Today, we’ll focus on Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society Lessig is the author of “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” and an expert on the issues of copyright and “copyleft”.

His lecture video is here, as well as his books The Future of Ideas [pdf] and Free Culture.

Day 17: Accelerando and Haskell

Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando!’ – I have this as a paperback, as well. A fun read.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! – I’d love to, but I still haven’t managed to get a working GHC.