brainwagon

Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth was revised, but Addison Wesley decided not to republish it. That’s fine because now it is available as a PDF download. Want to figure out the basics of compiler construction? Here’s something you can download for free. [tags]Programming Languages,Compilers[/tags]

Legendary creationist con-man Kent Hovind was convicted on 58 charges relating to tax evasion yesterday, and is now jailed awaiting sentencing. The maximum sentence would appear to be 288 years. His wife is free on bail, but faces similarly long years in jail. I’m betting he gets one year and some monetary damages. News article. […]

Well, it’s Halloween again, and that means it’s the anniversary of the 1938 broadcast of Orson Wells production of The War of the World. It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to provide an mp3 for download with all my best wishes for a spooky holiday. When I get time throughout the day, […]

Circadian Disorientation Good God I hate this time switch stuff. I feel like crap.

Congratulations.

I look forward to reading the Good Math, Bad Math blog, especially on Fridays. Often there is a pointer to an interesting computer language that somehow stretches your understanding of programming languages and computer science. Today was no exception, as he introduced Fractran, and interesting “language” that does computation by multiplying fractions. It turns out […]

EXTERMINATE!

Scott Adams, creator of the amusing Dilbert comic strip, has suffered from a condition known as Spasmodic Disphonia, a normally incurable and largely untreatable disorder which is, at best poorly understood. The strange thing is, he seems to have hacked his own brain into figuring out how to speak normally again. It’s really quite interesting […]

I’ve been experimenting with more and more web services. Below is a link to a site which contains links to over 300 APIs which you can access over the web. I’m sure there is something good in there that I can use. ProgrammableWeb: API Dashboard

Ah, controversy! During Game 2 of the World Series last night, Fox showed closeup video stills of Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers’ hand that seemed to show that he had a dark, slick looking substance on the base of his left thumb. According to the official rules of baseball, section 8.02, a pticher shall not “apply […]

Some time ago, I spent an afternoon or two working on the ICFP programming contest for 2006, not as a competitor, but just because I thought it was amusing. (I wrote it up on this blog here. Tom pointed out that there was Google Video of the final presentation on the contest, which is fairly […]

Here’s a really cool article detailing some of the nonsense in the new Windows Vista licensing. Wendys Blog: Legal Tags: Forbidding Vistas: Windows licensing disserves the user Is there someone out there who thinks that these restrictions are in the least degree reasonable? Do you feel like paying for such an absurdly anti-consumer product is […]

Wow, this site contains a huge number of works by Charles Darwin. 50,000 pages of searchable text. 40,000 pages of images. Lots more to come. A fantastic resource in the history of science. The complete work of Charles Darwin [tags]Charles Darwin,Evolution[/tags] Two sad things somewhat spoil this collection for me: There is a dubious assertion […]

The first indication that the North Koreans may have tested a nuclear device came from the the seismic data coming from the USGS. I thought that was kind of cool, and I had learned a few things about parsing XML feeds and the like, so I decided to try to make a little gadget which […]

Courtesy of Lambda the Ultimate came the report that Ralph Griswold, creator of the computer languages Snobol and Icon, passed away about two weeks ago. Condolences to his family and friends. On my shelf I have a copy of his book on the Icon programming language. While it never became widely popular, it had a […]