Another good-natured Matrix spoof: Matrix XP. This one is quite a production: live action, with special effects, goofy jokes, etc.

At last, someone has done the back-breaking labor of collecting together all of the math references in the episodes of The Simpsons: simpsonsmath.com. Where else can you learn what a Frinkahedron is (goyflavin!)?

Charles Miller documents the Ghetto Mini-Pattern:

The ghetto is a single file or class where issues of code cleanliness do not apply. It is entered by reputable developers with no small amount of trepidation, and left as quickly as possible.

I'm not actually sure if Charles meant this as a joke, but I think it is a useful pattern. Although patterns should ideally be used to create elegant beautiful code, they have value as well if they at least give structure and shorthand (and therefore understanding) to our darker sides as well.

Interesting stuff from recent entries at Python-URL!

¶   Communicating Sequential Processes, a classic text available online.

¶   Exception-Safety in Generic Components, a detailed analysis of ensuring predictable operation in the face of exceptions.

¶   Contracts for Python, an implementation of design-by-contract for Python.

¶   Matplotlib, matlab compatible plotting for Python.

¶   McMillan installer, for distributing Python apps.

I had need the other day to do a little isometric sketching, and remembered the triangular graph paper on which I had doodled in my youth. Back then it had seemed a precious commodity (although I could easily buy more at the local stationery store). Of course, this being the Internet age, we don't walk to a store to buy pre-printed paper, we download fabulous software like Graph paper printer and print it ourselves.

This modest program does one thing, and does it very well. Any type of graph paper your heart could desire is available here, completely customizable. Start simple with rectangular, move into polar and logarithmic, try some perspective, explore the esoteric like handwriting and music paper, and then finally print some target practice sheets. Below is the Escher-like Smith chart, which wins the award for least-interesting name paired with the most-interesting appearance.

Lawrence Lessig takes note of the Starbucks photo policy: dear Starbucks, say it ain't true?

This is not a new policy.

Jarno Virtanen writes about the secret of the popularity of weblogs, revealed. He says,

Weblogs are an optimal format for distraction and procrastination.

I wish I could refute him, but I can't think of a good rebuttal, so I'll go read some blogs while I work on it...

Interested in finding open wireless access points in a particular neighborhood? WiFiMaps.com collects data gathered by wardrivers all over, and presents them in a searchable (by zip code, for example) database. The results are displayed in a table or overlaid on maps (which are very cool, but worked only intermittently when I visited).

It amazes me (or maybe it shouldn't) how many completely unprotected access points there are. My Dell TruMobile was set for encryption out of the box, but most hardware isn't, I guess, and most people don't make an attempt to secure their access points.

My co-worker Damien arrived at work yesterday carrying what looked like a small black wastebasket, and shot me with it. It was an Airzooka, an odd-looking device which shoots air. It works on the same principle as smoke rings, but more forcefully. The effect is literally astonishing, especially when the recipient gets hit in the face with an invisible bolus of fast-moving air. We were shooting things all day around the office. Good fun, I recommend it.

BTW: The "Learn More" link off the Airzooka page has some interesting articles about larger vortex generators (as these things are called), and about how smoke rings work in the first place.

In the past, I have commented on my dislike of Comic Sans, and said I have nothing against comic book lettering in general. To prove the point, I give you Blambot Comic Fonts & Lettering.

This site has dozens of free, high quality fonts, all designed for comic work. I wouldn't have guessed that there were this many different ways to interpret comic text. I'm impressed.

In response to yesterday's post about buttons, my pal Mike McGlynn sent this, unbidden:

Apparently, in the works is another movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the classic by Roald Dahl, perhaps directed by Tim Burton.

» read more of: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie... (3 paragraphs)

I'm fascinated by the growth, morphing, and over-use of clever shorthands. For example, those country oval stickers that started in Europe to identify a car's country of origin, and can now be seen everywhere signifying anything (I myself have a "FOO" oval on my car). Or the I♥NY bumper stickers that were adapted to all sorts of affections, abbreviation-friendly or not.

Most interesting is when the paradigm shifts to accomodate a new need. For example, an oval sticker with an American flag in it, rather than an abbreviation of any kind. Or when the oval is green rather than white, with a four-leaf clover.

Now we in the blogging world have our very own hyper-accelerated instance of shorthand meme evolution and adaptation. You know those mini-badges displayed on some sites to indicate they have an RSS feed or whatever?:

Well, they have been sprouting like weeds, and now Taylor McKnight has taken on the job of creating and collecting them: Steal These Buttons.

For extra enjoyment, look at the GNU button, with an oval-sticker displayed in the blog button!

SysInternals offers a boatful of outstanding freeware for Windows. My favorites are great for reverse-engineering file and registry access:

• Filemon traces all access to the file system, allowing you to see exactly how an application is using files. Yesterday, it proved invaluable in determining exactly how Lotus Notes finds its notes.ini file.
• Regmon does the same for the Windows Registry, showing all accesses as they happen.

There are other awesome tools there, with source included!

The Selfish Class is a paper by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder about how to design software to maximize reusability. It isn't quite a collection of patterns, more a collection of mindsets and philosophical goals, but with motto-able titles (such as "Low Surface to Volume Ratio", and "Gentle Learing Curve").

I think they've nailed a number of important principles. For a long time now, when designing a class, I've looked toward an intuitive feel of whether the class was "round" or not (meaning close to circular). A class is bad if its shape has become sort of bumpy or had pieces glued onto the sides. This is very similar to Foote and Yoder's low surface to volume ratio (the circle is the 2D object with the lowest), though my criteria feels more about the single-mindedness of the class. I suppose they amount to the same thing.

Normally I wouldn't use "ain't" in a post title, but it comes from the name of Simon Willison's series of CSS tutorials. He's doing a good job laying out how CSS works, in a very real-world way: by taking existing table-heavy sites, and reworking them with CSS (Simon: care to redo mine?). It's a series of blog postings, so if you want to read the whole thing, start from the bottom and work up.

The comments are enlightening as well, if inadvertently. They are a capture of the downside of CSS: different browsers behaving differently, with the fix for one causing problems for another. The platform tradeoffs are always the problem, and the comments show them being discovered, traded off, and fixed chronologically. Included are honest feelings of frustration, even from the author himself.

Eat More Words was going to be a logophilia site (that is, devoted to devotees of words), with online access to the O.E.D., a community blog, and so forth. Membership was inexpensive, and it was being started by some cool people (for example, Caterina). So I joined.

Today comes news in an email that the O.E.D. was not going to let them provide online access, so the venture is a bust.

Although it's too bad the site didn't work out, I have enjoyed my brief membership anyway. The entire venture was classy, intelligent, good-natured, and optimistic, from start to finish. For me it represented the best of what the web has to offer: building something simple but useful, bringing people together, offering infinite variety, and making the world just a little bit more interesting.

The final email asked what I would like them to do with my membership fee (refund it, refund it minus PayPal costs they incurred, or donate it to a bookish charity). Something about the middle choice brought home the non-business aspect of this endeavor, and underscored for me how it was really just a small group of interested people trying to bring something new into the world.

BTW: if you're interested in sampling the cool intersection of books and blogs, take a gander at Weblog Bookwatch and All Consuming. Each automatically scans recent blog postings for mention of books or other media, and compiles lists of popular titles.

Web Search for a Planet is an overview of how Google manages their enormous throughput of extremely expensive queries. The answer may surprise you: tons of cheap PCs.

A similar paper is The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, written by the founders themselves while still at Stanford. I can't vouch for how much of it is still accurate, but it's fascinating nonetheless.

I just came back from seeing Matrix Reloaded. Thoughts:

• The special effects were amazing. Even knowing that the burly brawl was synthetic, I couldn't tell. They did a fabulous job.
• The movie had the same bipolar feel as the first: scenes were either extended over-the-top fighting action scenes, or quiet talky philosophical scenes with not that much in between.
• I'd like to see more of Persephone and less of Merovingian.
• It's a good thing Matrix Revolutions is coming out in only six months, because this movie is too much of a cliff-hanger for a longer interval.
• The ending credits are very long, but a trailer for Matrix Revolutions awaits you if you sit through them.
• If you go to see a movie with four 11-year-olds, be prepared to miss at least two chunks of the movie, as you take different kids for bathroom breaks!
• A funny light-hearted spoof of the original: Laid-Off.

I saw this link go around last week, but it was to just one particular page on the site, rather than the home page, which I missed, so I thought others might have as well. Starship Dimensions is the perfect intersection of obsessive fandom with an engineer's attention to detail. Starships of all kinds are drawn to a variety of scales, and ranged side-by-side for easy comparison. Wonderful.

¶   darcs (David's Advanced Revision Control System)

¶   Capon, a software build framework

¶   Bit Twiddling Hacks, fanatic algorithms for quickly twiddling bits.

¶   xmltramp, a simpler python xml interface.

¶   PyMeld, another cool Python xml fiddler.

There's been a lot of talk lately about structural markup and CSS (for example, Simon), or maybe there always is among web techies. In any case, here's my personal pet peeve about structural markup: using headers that start at something other than <h1>.

» read more of: Structural markup nit: headers... (5 paragraphs)

There's going to be a total lunar eclipse on the night of the 15th/16th. The U.S. Naval Observatory has a nifty Lunar Eclipse Computer that can tell you precisely when the eclipse will hit each of its stages in your town.

My offhand mention of switching from CVS to Perforce for source control at work brought an email from a friend. His company had also just made the same switch, and he wanted to know why we switched, how we chose, and what we thought so far.

» read more of: Perforce vs. CVS... (17 paragraphs)

Alex Moffat relays a rant against stupid Hummer owners (stupid owners, not owners of stupid Hummers). Apparently people are paying $50,000 for these monstrosities and then are disappointed in the gas mileage!

The rant arose from this story about people being dissatisfied with fuel economy. Interesting quotes:

One point of confusion, Mr. Tews said, could be that Hummers are so large that they are exempt from federal fuel economy regulations that govern most other vehicles, meaning G.M. does not have to post mileage on window stickers.

and:

"Maybe customers thought they would get 12 and only got 10 miles per gallon," he said.

To be fair, the article points out that the owners of high-efficiency hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius are also disappointed in their mileage.

Because of my advanced age, I am afflicted with presbyopia. To correct the problem, I have a new pair of glasses with progressive lenses. These are commonly known as no-line bifocals, but really, they are a different beast than the classic bifocal lens, because there is a gradual progression between the two ranges of correction.

This also makes them difficult to get used to. It seems like everything I look at is out of focus until I move my head properly to be able to see it. I'm told I will get used to it. We'll see (no pun intended).

But they got me interested to learn more about lenses. The geometry at work here is extremely complicated. And how exactly are they made? After all, the curves are complex and subtle, and the lenses that result will be used in very sensitive-to-error situations (that is, I'll be looking through them for a few years). How Stuff Works comes through with a good description of how standard lenses are made.

We've just switched from CVS to Perforce for source control at work, and the Perforce docs pointed to an amazing paper about branching: Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development.

It is truly a catalog of patterns, but rather than being about architecture or software design, they are about how to branch (work simultaneously on more than one release of software).

It is a stunningly comprehensive paper, laying out 32 patterns (eight each for elements, creation, policy and structuring), then working through variations of a number of them, and ending with traps and pitfalls (13 of them, including merge-a-phobia, branch-a-holic, the never-ending branch, and codeline pudding). I have not read it in depth, but am certain that there is much to learn in it.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day for today is about a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Chicago home, and includes this useful factoid:

The average homeowner should expect to repair direct meteor damage every hundred million years.

It turns out this snippet of HTML:

<input type>

crashes Internet Explorer. Try it.

dive into mark has a long comment thread about it, which of course devolves into anti-monopolistic rants against Microsoft. As much as I dislike Microsoft's business practices, I don't think they are inept at creating software (far from it, and it makes me even more baffled as to why they have to act like such aggressive bastards on the business side). It's just amusing to see such a simple input crash IE.

And for balance, this snippet:

<fieldset style="position:fixed">
<legend>Crash</legend>
</fieldset>

crashes Mozilla-based browsers. Try it.

A great thread about how to package Python apps to be small and self-contained. Also be sure to read some of the follow-ups for the "poor man's modulefinder".

Another bunch of those nifty web app gizmos: St. Claire has a collection of safety sign builders. Choose your style, message, and iconography, and make ANSI- and OSHA-compliant safety signs.

It reminds me of the old classic highway sign maker.

The hassle in changing the design of a site (or even the implementation of an existing design) is checking it out in all the browsers you care about. Who can track down all the different versions? BrowserCam to the rescue.

» read more of: Browsercam... (3 paragraphs)

A transcript of the ETCON demo of Chandler is up on the OSAF wiki, and it's good to get some context for the 0.1 release that's been released. I know I didn't understand what I was looking at with Chandler, and the text of the demo helped me get it, although there's still parts where Andy did something, and I don't know how to do it.

While on the topic of trans-Outlook PIMs (that is, PIMs that go beyond Outlook), here are a few more worth keeping an eye on:

• Haystack, "the universal information client" from MIT.
• Zoë, "does for email what Google did for the web".
• dynamicobject spaces, "a tool that will integrate seamlessly all information management tasks for individuals and small groups under a single, easy-to-use interface".

Sometimes it's the little things that matter most. I was experimenting with XHTML for this site, and managed to generate a page that didn't display properly at all. I was using both IE and Phoenix at the time, and they (impressively) rendered the garbage exactly the same. I selected IE's View Source option to try to understand what went wrong. I couldn't see what was wrong. Using Phoenix's View Page Source, it became clear, because while IE launches Notepad to view source, Phoenix uses its own syntax-colored window.

An empty <script> tag (because it references a remote JavaScript file) was rendered like this in XHTML:

<script type='text/javascript' src='main.js' />

Where HTML had:

<script type='text/javascript' src='main.js'></script>

Both browsers treated everything between the opening script tag and the next explicit closing script tag as script. As a result, the XHTML version had the first two-thirds of the page swallowed (incorrectly) as script. The syntax coloring made this clear.

I assume there's a proper setting of DTDs to get XHTML to accept a truly empty script tag. In any case, Phoenix saved me a bunch of time finding the reason for the wreckage of the page.

BTW: Phoenix has been renamed Firebird, and there are tons of good reasons to use it.