Shiver, shiver

Shared links for 2008-02-23

• Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages
  Thoughtful. But Emacs gives you much more than an editor; with it you can customize your mail client, web browser, IRC client, file organizer, calendar etc until they fit you like a glove, or rather, like as many gloves as you need for all your daily tasks.
• TEDTalks: Raspyni Brothers (2002)
  100% pure awesome.

Shared links for 2008-02-22

• Peace! Huh! Yeah! What Is It Good For?
• Library of Lost Dreams
• The madness of a growing crowd
• join us now and eat the software
• Wired science features Chris Anderson's DIY UAVs

All in the little things

This week's Emacs has a (small) new feature which I find pretty neat; when you search for a string that cannot be found, the failing part gets highlighted in the prompt:



Since isearch is the most efficient way of moving around (at least for long distance jumps) in Emacs buffers, being able to correct typos immediately is essential and this tiny change helps a lot!

(Oh, and there's also a new M-x emacs-uptime command. Just so you know.)

Shared links for 2008-02-15

• Comic for 14 Feb 2008
• Best Craigslist Ad Ever
• The Subterranean Farms of Tokyo

So what's wrong with 1975 programming?

I enjoyed reading the ArchitectNotes on the Varnish wiki:

Take Squid for instance, a 1975 program if I ever saw one: You tell it how much RAM it can use and how much disk it can use. It will then spend inordinate amounts of time keeping track of what HTTP objects are in RAM and which are on disk and it will move them forth and back depending on traffic patterns.

Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

So what happens with squid's elaborate memory management is that it gets into fights with the kernel's elaborate memory management, and like any civil war, that never gets anything done.

Varnish was designed by FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp. There is something to be said about user-space apps designed by kernel developers: they're always super fast because kernel developers know how to make the most of the system, having spent hours optimizing the kernel itself for some usage patterns.

This is why git (designed by Linus Torvalds, for those of you who've lived under a rock for the past three years) is so much faster than other comparable systems, for example. It uses tricks such as giving the O_NOATIME flag to open() to avoid updating access times on files where it knows that they don't matter, and it's a "huge time-saver". (Of course, you can also just mount your partitions with noatime and enjoy a similar performance boost in all applications!)

emacs-snapshot 20080209-1

Now internally based on Unicode, with a new Xft-capable font backend, D-Bus integration, built-in EasyPG, XEmbed goodness, etc. And legions of bugs waiting to bite you. Get it from here as usual.

We also have a (completely fabricated) screenshot of the new font backend, for your viewing pleasure:

Shared links for 2008-02-09

• RISE Security vs ASUS Eee PC
  "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to root."
• Niall's technique for sniffing browser history to customize pages
  I'm still not sure if this is really neat, or really evil.
• Kevin Kelly has written a thoughtful post about how to...
  "When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable."
• Knee-Deep in the Dead
  More Microhoo drama.
• Mad Driving Skills

Cornflakes Heroes

Dans la Série des Inaperçus, le Off - Day 3 @ Glazart, Paris | 07.02.2008, originally uploaded by Rod | Le-hibOO.com.

(Photo credit: Photo Rod | Le-HibOO.com)

Quicksand, Saint-Michel, and a tip

My CC-licensed photo Quicksand is featured this morning on the front page of openDemocracy, illustrating this article about the US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I took this picture in the summer of 2006 in Saint-Michel bay. At low tide it's possible to cross the bay on foot with a guide, from the shore to the island, a pleasant few kilometers of flat sand with a spectacular view of the Mont. Sadly, every year tourists attempt the trip unaccompanied, get stuck in the dangerous quicksands and drown when the rising tide enters the bay and completely fills it in mere minutes.

(If you ever get caught in that kind of quicksand, here's a survival tip: the key is to lie flat either on your back or on your stomach so that the bulk of your weight is supported by your upper body pressed flat against the sand. Then you just have to crawl forward with your arms and shoulders until your legs are freed from the sand.)

Recent movies (5)

(Note: this post had been sitting in my drafts folder for some time so some of these are not so recent. I thought I'd mention them anyway.)

• No Country For Old Men: 5/5. Masterpiece.
• Into The Wild: 5/5. Beautiful story, great performances, breathtaking landscapes, and the Eddie Vedder soundtrack is really, really good.
• Blade Runner (Final Cut): 5/5. My favorite movie got even better, and the bonus material on the DVD is great!
• Ratatouille: 4/5. Cute and fun, with amazing CG animation, probably the best Pixar release to date.
• Zodiac: 4/5. Pretty good in its genre.