Atari Video Games | Arcade

Atari Video Games | Arcade: "Atari Arcade is the place to find beloved Atari classics including Asteroids and Lunar Lander. You can play them all here online, any time and free of charge."

Build your entrepreneurial confidence. Try these tips on for size.�|�JonBischke.com

Build your entrepreneurial confidence. Try these tips on for size.�|�JonBischke.com: "Entrepreneurship is hard. You’re going to go through moments where you feel like you’re on top of the world. And then you’re going to experience moment when you think the world is going to come to an end. And often those moments will occur within the same hour of the day.

When you get a little down on your luck (and we’re all there at some point in time), here’s a good little reading list (along with some comments) and a few videos for you."

uWSGI

uWSGI: "uWSGI is a fast (pure C), self-healing, developer-friendly WSGI server, aimed for professional python webapps deployment and development."

Richard Dingwall � The trouble with soft delete

Richard Dingwall � The trouble with soft delete: "Check out the book “Developing Time Oriented Database Application in SQL” for a systematic look at some options for storing historical data. A wider topic than just soft deletion, but related.

It’s out of print and the author made it available on his site:
http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/tdbbook.pdf"

Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital

Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital: "VCs are good at asking questions. They are unimplicated in your dumb decisions, unmoved by your original sense of mission and far less concerned than you that a blunder could bankrupt you. They re-imagine your business in terms of all the other businesses they’ve seen, pulling the arms off one doll and the head off another to create a perfect money-making Frankenstein. And since the stakes are high, the whole philosophical exercise tends to result in action.

Here are the questions VCs asked Redfin that changed how we think about our business."

How to Make a Million Dollars, by Marshall Brain

How to Make a Million Dollars, by Marshall Brain: "How to make a million dollars is: a) something students are interested in, and b) something I am qualified to talk about. And the talk went really well."

10 CHINDOGU TENENTS � International Chindogu Society

10 CHINDOGU TENENTS � International Chindogu Society: "Every Chindogu is an almost useless object, but not every almost useless object is a Chindogu. In order to transcend the realms of the merely almost useless, and join the ranks of the really almost useless, certain vital criteria must be met. It is these criteria, a set of ten vital tenets, that define the gentle art and philosophy of Chindogu."

papert: logo in your browser

papert: logo in your browser: "this is free software, and papert is hosted on google code"

Beowulf Page 1

Beowulf Page 1: "Since Beowulf is written in Old English, the earliest known form of the English language, one might assume that it would be easy to translate, at least easier than works printed in languages more substantially different from modern English. Yet looking at the many translations of Beowulf that are available in bookstores and libraries, it's immediately apparent that they have important differences in language, form, and style. This immediately raises the questions: Why are these translations so different? And how can I decide which, if any, is the 'best' to read?"

Comparison of different SQL implementations

Comparison of different SQL implementations: "The following tables compare how different DBMS products handle various SQL (and related) features. If possible, the tables also state how the implementations should do things, according to the SQL standard."

David Friedman, _Price Theory: An Intermediate Text_ Ch 1

David Friedman, _Price Theory: An Intermediate Text_ Ch 1: "Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them."

G.K. Chesterton: Author's Page at Ignatius Insight

G.K. Chesterton: Author's Page at Ignatius Insight: "this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India."

Amelia Earhart was too much of an icon to make an interesting moving character.

Amelia Earhart was too much of an icon to make an interesting moving character.: "Glamour is an imaginative experience, charisma a personal characteristic. A place, an idea, even an object can be glamorous, but only a person can be charismatic. A still photograph best captures glamour; a live performance most powerfully conveys charisma. Glamour operates at a distance; it requires mystery, allowing the audience to fill in the details with its own desires. Charisma works through personal contact. It draws the audience to share the charismatic figure’s own commitments. Charisma enhances leadership; glamour enhances sales."

Mac ODBC: Database connectivity for Mac OS X by Actual Technologies

Mac ODBC: Database connectivity for Mac OS X by Actual Technologies: "Applications that use SQLite databases

Which applications use SQLite to store program data?
Many applications on Mac OS X use SQLite to store information - including Apple's own Safari and Mail applications. You can use the Actual ODBC Driver for Open Source Databases to import the information stored in the database into an ODBC-ready application, such as Excel, FileMaker Pro, or even a PHP web page."

Distinctive Features Of SQLite

Distinctive Features Of SQLite:

"Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:

May you do good and not evil
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
May you share freely, never taking more than you give."

An Introduction to SQLite

Using SQLite database files as the native application data format

Size isn't everything for the modest creator of SQLite

mac apps:
apps:

skype
flipshare
firefox

iphone,android

ORACLE - DBA Tips Corner

ORACLE - DBA Tips Corner: "The BECOME USER System Privilege

"Oracle has an undocumented OCI function called upicui that will allow a given oracle user to become another user. This user has to have the 'BECOME USER' system privilege."

Writing great documentation: what to write

Writing great documentation: what to write: "Tech docs can take a bunch of different forms ranging from high-level overviews, to step-by-step walkthroughs, to auto-generated API documentation. Unfortunately, no single format works for all users; there’s huge differences in the way that people learn, so a well-documented project needs to provide many different forms of documentation."

What Makes Them Click � Blog Archive � 100 Things You Should Know About People: #8 — Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information - Applying Psychology to Understand How People Think, Work, and Relate

What Makes Them Click � Blog Archive � 100 Things You Should Know About People: #8 — Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information - Applying Psychology to Understand How People Think, Work, and Relate: "A dopamine induced loop – With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text."

cyoa

cyoa: "In scanning over the distribution of colors in this plot, one clear pattern is a the gradual decline in the number of endings. The earliest books (in the top row) are awash in reds and oranges, with a healthy number of ‘winning’ endings mixed in. Later cyoa books tended to favor a single ‘best’ ending (see CYOA 44 & 53). The most extreme case of this was actually not a Choose Your Own Adventure book at all but a gamebook offshoot of the Zork text adventure series. The Cavern of Doom (labeled WDIDN 3 above) has a virtually linear progression where endings later in the book are increasingly better than those on earlier pages. This is reflected in the nearly unbroken spectrum from red to blue when scanning down the rows."

The Happiness Project: Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.

The Happiness Project: Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering.: "One of my great realizations about happiness (and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists) is that outer order contributes to inner calm.

But as much as most of us want to keep our home, office, car, etc. in reasonable order, it’s tough. Here’s a list of some myths of de-cluttering that make it harder to get rid of stuff."

A Note on the Joel Test

Because we're not a pure software house but are instead in the movie business, we do a few things differently software development-wise. So, don't panic when Joel says "10 or lower, you've got serious problems." This is still a great place to work!

Here's a few notes on our Joel Score.

Do you use source control?

Yes, we use Perforce.

Can you make a build in one step?

Yes.

Do you make daily builds?

No. Because of the nature of our work, daily builds aren't useful for all projects. We do daily builds where it's useful.

Do you have a bug database?

Yes.

Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

Sometimes. Our priorities are driven by our movie release dates. In some cases it's more important to fix bugs, in others to add new features. We haven't missed a release date
yet!

Do you have an up-to-date schedule?

Yes, although our shifting, production-driven priorities mean that we need a lot more flexibility to quickly adjust our schedule.

Do you have a spec?

Yes.

Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

Yes. Our place is even nicer than Joel's place!

Do you use the best tools money can buy?

Yes.

Do you have testers?

Yes.

Do new candidates write code during their interview?

Yes.

Do you do hallway usability testing?

Yes.

Scary Anthropomorphic Foods Promote the British Food Standards Agency – Eat Me Daily

Scary Anthropomorphic Foods Promote the British Food Standards Agency – Eat Me Daily: "These series of short promos for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in England show healthy foodstuffs talking with their unhealthy counterparts, ostensibly to promote Family Supercooks, a program about eating healthily."

Stossel in the Classroom

Stossel in the Classroom:

"A message from John Stossel:
Dear Educator,
I am excited to offer you high-quality classroom materials that teachers say bring lesson plans to life, encouraging students to think and participate, while serving your curriculum requirements."

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions: "Vessel positions may be up to one hour old or incomplete. Data is provided for informational reasons only and is not related by any means to the safety of navigation."

The "NoSQL" Discussion has Nothing to Do With SQL | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM

The "NoSQL" Discussion has Nothing to Do With SQL | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM: "Using either stored procedures or embedding, the useful work component is a very small percentage of total transaction cost, for today’s OLTP data bases which usually fit in main memory. Instead, a recent paper [1] calculated that total OLTP time was divided almost equally between the following four overhead components:"

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly

College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey | Washington Monthly: "The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities."

Camino and Adblock Plus...who wants it? • mozillaZine Forums

Camino and Adblock Plus...who wants it? • mozillaZine Forums: "Next, update Netinfo Database by typing the following into Terminal:

sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts"

Manipulate Clipboard From Command Line - MacTips

Manipulate Clipboard From Command Line - MacTips: "An easy way to manipulate the clipboard from the command line is by using the pbcopy and pbpaste"

Figuring out what your company is all about - Joel on Software

Figuring out what your company is all about - Joel on Software: "Kathy taught me that if you can’t explain your mission in the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,” you are not going to have passionate users. What’s your tagline? Can you fit it into that template?"

The Volokh Conspiracy

The Volokh Conspiracy: "The basic lesson of Bayesian analysis is that you can learn only from information that disconfirms some part of your current belief set. But of course the natural tendency of the mind is to minimize cognitive dissonance by accepting confirming evidence and rejecting disconfirming evidence, and that tendency is emphasized when beliefs get to be badges of group membership.

This is a deeply unhealthy tendency, and it tends to defeat one of the basic evolutionary strategies of homo sapiens, which Karl Popper summed up as “letting our beliefs die in our place.” Unfortunately, it has been on full display in the comment threads to my posts, which consisted (when the comments related to the posts at all rather than merely ranting about unrelated topics) mostly of vigorous attempts to prove that the thoughts offered in the posts were worthless or wicked, and the poster an ill-intentioned idiot.

Eugene no doubt thought he was doing his readers a favor by offering them some reading that might challenge their precoceptions. There is little evidence in the comment thread that the VC readership shares that view, but it’s possible to hope that the comments are not a representative sample of reader reaction."

Start-up studies: A pop quiz | VentureBeat

Start-up studies: A pop quiz | VentureBeat: "There’s a classroom exercise that’s a part of the Stanford technology venture program hits its students with each year: If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible? STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig discusses the query and how budding entrepreneurs responded."

Talking to DC � Adam Bosworth’s Weblog

Notes on writing a good standard: "Well, the discussion was about what actually will work in terms of making health data liquid. What standards should be used for the integration of such data?

1. Keep the standard as simple and stupid as possible.
2. The data being exchanged should be human readable and easy to understand.
3. Standards work best when they are focused.
4. Standards should have precise encodings.
5. Always have real implementations that are actually being used as part of design of any standard.
6. Put in hysteresis for the unexpected.
7. Make the spec itself free, public on the web, and include lots of simple examples on the web site.
"

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell | Magazine

The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell | Magazine: "By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together."

Introducing oraddlscript � devioblog

Introducing oraddlscript � devioblog: "The answers directed me to the DBMS_METADATA package (9i documentation, 10g documentation)."

David's Favourite Captain Haddock Curses

David's Favourite Captain Haddock Curses: "From the simple ('dogs!', 'rats!') to the scientific ('pithecanthropuses!') to the sublime ('vegetarian!'), you've just gotta love Captain Haddock of Tintin fame for his unique turn of phrase. I've tried to capture as many of his idiocyncratic curses as possible."

Woot : Wootcasts from the Past: Magellan Like a Felon Edition

Woot : Wootcasts from the Past: Magellan Like a Felon Edition: "After over three and a half years of our daily podcast, we sure have a lot of episodes in the can. (It’s where we do our best thinking.) Have you noticed how certain themes recur? We have! For example, grab hold of the common thread running through these moldy oldies, which are all about Ferdinand Magellan’s trip ‘round the globe. Well, mostly about that."

7 Lessons from Startup School - mediabistro.com: BayNewser

7 Lessons from Startup School - mediabistro.com: BayNewser: "On Friday, we told you about the day-long 'Startup School' held at the University of California, Berkeley on Saturday. Given the caliber of speakers, we thought it might be a good place for journalism entrepreneurs to learn a few tips and tricks.

Here are seven lessons from the sessions:"

ClickToFlash

ClickToFlash: "Flash only when you want it."

A geeky introduction to cheap remote control helicopters and planes - Boing Boing

A geeky introduction to cheap remote control helicopters and planes - Boing Boing: "All these parts came from www.hobbycity.com:

HXT900 9g / 1.6kg / .12sec Micro Servo $10.95
T1000.3S.25 - Turnigy 1000mAh 3S 25C Lipo Pack $16.58
Turnigy-3S - Turnigy balancer & Charger 2S-3S $4.49
HK-SS30A - Hobbyking SS Series 25-30A ESC $9.25
TP2410-12T - TowerPro BL Outrunner TP2410-12T(Y) $5.99
TP_11x4.7 - TP Slow Fly propeller 11x4.7 $2.40
HK-T4A-M2 - Hobby King 2.4Ghz 4Ch Tx & Rx $29.99
Total: $79.65"

YouTube - Park Zone Vapor Slow fly mod

YouTube - Park Zone Vapor Slow fly mod: "The lightest slowest vapor yet. 1 gram 0 mph"

E-Sky 4 CH Flight Simulator Training Kit For Airplanes and Helicopters w/ USB Port

E-Sky 4 CH Flight Simulator Training Kit For Airplanes and Helicopters w/ USB Port: "If you find flying helicopter is much harder than you think, then try our RC flight simulator! You don't have to waste money on over-rated software that cost hundreds of dollars when you can just pay $24.95 to get one of the best-rated flight simulator program in the world. You will receive a complete kit with both hardware and software included. All that is required for you to do is installed the software and connect the USB cable from the supplied transmitter to your computer and off you go!"

A geeky introduction to cheap remote control helicopters and planes - Boing Boing

A geeky introduction to cheap remote control helicopters and planes - Boing Boing:

"Here's Dan Shapiro's geeky, fun, and inspiring five-minute Ignite talk about becoming a remote control hobbyist for under $100."

The Corner on National Review Online

The Corner on National Review Online: "My favorite insight about humor and the divine comes from the poet Galway Kinnell, who wrote that “laughter is our stuttering in a language we can’t speak yet.” What he’s talking about is the language of transcendence, of what C. S. Lewis called the state of being “surprised by joy.”"

The Volokh Conspiracy

The Volokh Conspiracy: "As an aside, my daughter points me to a very beautifully and subtly astute novel, Never Let Me Go, by the great Kazuo Ishiguro, who also gave us The Remains of the Day."

argparse - Project Hosting on Google Code

argparse - Project Hosting on Google Code: "The argparse module improves on the standard library optparse module in a number of ways including:

* handling positional arguments
* supporting sub-commands
* allowing alternative option prefixes like and /
* handling zero-or-more and one-or-more style arguments
* producing more informative usage messages
* providing a much simpler interface for custom types and actions"

PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python

PEP 20 -- The Zen of Python: "
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"

Shaolin Monks - Photo Gallery

Shaolin Monks - Photo Gallery: "The Shaolin Monastery was founded at the foot of Mount Song in Henan Province, China in 477 A.D.

Although Buddhist tenets emphasize peace and non-harming, the monks of Shaolin found themselves called upon to defend themselves and their neighbors many times during China's tumultuous history.

As a result, they developed a world-renowned form of martial arts technique, known as Shaolin kung fu."

Principles of the Phase Contrast (Electron) Microscopy

Principles of the Phase Contrast (Electron) Microscopy: "Fritz Zernike (1888-1966) with one of first phase-contrast microscopes were not built until 1941."

Hematology - 56 - Microscope Row, Laboratory Medicine: Yale School of Medicine

Hematology - 56 - Microscope Row, Laboratory Medicine: Yale School of Medicine: "In addition to single head light microscopes, where the majority of technical work is performed, the Hematology Lab also utilizes multiheaded microscopes for training and consultations."

The Bureau of Communication - Fill-in-the-blank Correspondence

The Bureau of Communication - Fill-in-the-blank Correspondence

"Let that which is unsaid be said"

AFCPE | Home

AFCPE | Home: "AFCPE is the Association for Financial Counseling and Planning Education. We’re a nonprofit, professional organization dedicated to educating, training, and certifying financial counselors and educators."

Corporatism: A Love Story - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

Corporatism: A Love Story - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine: "Michael Moore recently visited George Washington University to do some capitalist-style promotion for his new flick Capitalism: A Love Story and got a little more than he bargained for during the audience Q&A. Check out the clip below where college libertarian Chad Swarthout gets Moore to admit that the real problem is “corporatism” and “giving too much power to government.”"

John Graham-Cumming: Damn the torpedoes

John Graham-Cumming: Damn the torpedoes: "

three torpedos that need to be damned:

You Can't
I Can't
They Won't

PS And while you are being single-minded and purposeful, don't forget to be joyful."

Allround Automations

Allround Automations
PL/SQL Developer is an Integrated Development Environment that is specifically targeted at the development of stored program units for Oracle Databases. Over time we have seen more and more business logic and application logic move into the Oracle Server, so that PL/SQL programming has become a significant part of the total development process. PL/SQL Developer focuses on ease of use, code quality and productivity, key advantages during Oracle application development.

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph:
"* Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell - a reason to consider a decision carefully.

* Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

* Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck."

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph

Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph: "My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

I wondered whether these four principles could be used to increase the amount of good luck that people encounter in their lives. To find out, I created a 'luck school' - a simple experiment that examined whether people's luck can be enhanced by getting them to think and behave like a lucky person."

The Little Book of Semaphores

The Little Book of Semaphores: "The Little Book of Semaphores is a free (in both senses of the word) textbook that introduces the principles of synchronization for concurrent programming."

Property Values - Office of the Assessor - Alameda County

Property Values - Office of the Assessor - Alameda County

Motivational Posters: Winston Churchill Edition (Part I) | The Art of Manliness

Motivational Posters: Winston Churchill Edition (Part I) | The Art of Manliness: "“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”"

Time Out's 50 Greatest Animated Films with added commentary by Terry Gilliam – Time Out Film - Time Out London

Time Out's 50 Greatest Animated Films with added commentary by Terry Gilliam – Time Out Film - Time Out London: "In celebration of the release of Pixar's 'Up' and Wes Anderson's beautiful stop-motion rendering of Roald Dahl's 'The Fantastic Mr Fox', Time Out ushers in the help of master animator Terry Gilliam – whose own partially animated 'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus' opens in cinemas this month – to run down 50 of the greatest animated features of all time"

An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL - AMPL, AWK, a-z of programming languages, Brian Kernighan - Computerworld

An inteview with Brian Kernighan, co-developer of AWK and AMPL - AMPL, AWK, a-z of programming languages, Brian Kernighan - Computerworld: "No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code, and rewrite it, and see it used, and rewrite again."

Carsonified � 9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users

Carsonified � 9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users: "In this video from The Future of Web Apps London (FOWA), Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, WeFollow and Revision3, shares 9 things he did to increase his users to 1,000,000 and beyond.

Here’s a quick bullet-point summary. You can watch the video for the complete presentation or view the presentation slides here. We’ll be uploading just the audio for you to listen to soon."

Stossel in the Classroom

Stossel in the Classroom: "Join the nearly 100,000 teachers across the country who have experienced the benefits of using these educational and engaging segments from John Stossel and ABC News' 20/20 in their classrooms. Get your FREE DVDs and supplemental materials from STOSSEL IN THE CLASSROOM!"

Paul Graham at Startup School 08 | Omnisio

Paul Graham at Startup School 08 | Omnisio: "Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, speaks at Startup School 08 about how to create a successful startup."

“Jia Junpeng, Your Mom Wants You To Go Home To Eat!” | chinaSMACK

“Jia Junpeng, Your Mom Wants You To Go Home To Eat!” | chinaSMACK: "[What I am posting is not a post, I am posting loneliness.]"

django guys let us understand python *args and **kwargs : Dpeepul Blog

django guys let us understand python *args and **kwargs : Dpeepul Blog: "As many new django developers often confuse between *args and **kwargs i planned to write the below post which clearly explains the difference between *args and **kwargs."

Palantir Technologies � Blog Archive � The Palantir Technologies Demo Reel: screenshots, round 3

Palantir Technologies � Blog Archive � The Palantir Technologies Demo Reel: screenshots, round 3: "The Palantir family of products is much more that just pretty pictures; we have the underlying intelligence infrastructure to make those realtime animations possible and (more importantly) meaningful. That said, we sure do think they’re pretty.

By the way, if you’re interested in the progression of our interfaces, this not the first time we’ve posted eye candy: we posted a set of updated screenshots a little over a year ago; think of this as the next installment in the series.

And yes, it’s really all Java Swing."

How The Owner Of “Fail Blog” And “I Can Has Cheezburger” Keeps Racking Up Wins – With Ben Huh

How The Owner Of “Fail Blog” And “I Can Has Cheezburger” Keeps Racking Up Wins – With Ben Huh: "Ben Huh came to Mixergy to talk about how he raised money to buy a blog about LOL cats, called 'I Can Has Cheezburger,' and how he turned it into a growing publishing company that own over 20 sites, including Fail Blog and This is Photo Bomb. His network has over 11 million users and 218 million monthly page views.

I asked him how he did it and, more importantly, what YOU can learn about building a publishing company, based on his experience."

Amazon Web Services Blog: Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free!

Amazon Web Services Blog: Don't Forget: You Can Use Amazon SimpleDB For Free!: "You can keep up to 1 gigabyte of data in SimpleDB without paying any storage fees. You can transfer 1 GB of data and use up to 25 Machine Hours to process your queries each month. This should be sufficient to allow you to issue about 2 million PutAttribute or Select calls per month."

Lisp Book Home Page

Lisp Book Home Page: "Civilized Software is making available a book entitled Interpreting Lisp which presents how LISP works and how to build a LISP interpreter."

Gloss: a Pygame OpenGL wrapper | TuxRadar

Gloss: a Pygame OpenGL wrapper | TuxRadar: "Gloss is a high-performance graphics wrapper around Pygame that lets you take advantage of OpenGL without having to delve into the murky depths of 3D programming. Gloss lets you build 2D games where you can rotate, scale and recolor sprites on the fly, and also includes a selection of helpful mathematics functions to make the life of games coders easier."

Let's Discuss the Matter Further � Google Earth and Middle-earth

Let's Discuss the Matter Further � Google Earth and Middle-earth: "I wanted to measure distances in Tolkien's Middle-earth. While a flat map distorts such measurements, it occured to me that Google Earth can correctly measure both lines and paths across the curved surface of the globe. I soon found excellent documentation for using image overlays with Google Earth, so I downloaded a map of Middle-earth and tried placing it on the globe."

David MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms: The Book

David MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms: The Book: "You may download The book in one file (640 pages):"

Code Monkeyism: The dark side of NoSQL

Code Monkeyism: The dark side of NoSQL:

- ad hoc data fixing – either no query language available or no skills
- ad hoc reporting – either no query language available or no in-house skills
- data export – sometimes no API way to access all data

WEBPAGE of DENNIS HAVLENA - W8MI Mackinac Straits, MI

WEBPAGE of DENNIS HAVLENA - W8MI Mackinac Straits, MI: "Articles here include how-to-build simple but nice sounding/playing folk instruments."

Getting started with online glasses

I first learned about this via GlassyEyes. He has some good introductory articles here and here. There are some discount links there as well. I learned a lot from the GlassyEyes forum. There is a flickr channel as well.

I've bought my glasses from EyeBuyDirect. It's convenient to be a repeat customer because they keep your prescription for you.

Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1

Lost Garden: Flash Love Letter (2009) Part 1: "Flash games are currently the ghetto of the game development industry. Compared to the number of players it serves, the Flash game ecosystem makes little money, launches few careers, and sustains few developer owned businesses. Despite the vast potential of the ecosystem, Flash games contribute surprisingly little to the advancement of game design as an art or a craft.
In order to understand why this promising game platform is such a surprising dissapointment, we'll look at Flash games from three perspectives:

* Chapter 2 - Making money: How do Flash developers currently make money.
* Chapter 3 - Generating value: How Flash developers currently create 'valuable' game for their players?
* Chapter 4 - Reaching customers: How developers currently reach their players.
* Chapter 5 - Premium Flash games as a service: A mental model for understanding the new world of web gaming.

For each step, I'll cover alternative techniques that give you, the game developer, make even better games."

Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp: "Just fifty years ago, John McCarthy circulated a notice that he would be giving an informal talk that he thought would be of interest. I drove up to MIT from New Jersey to attend this seminar of typical length in a typical classroom. But the seminar was anything but typical. It was a revelation. In one session at the blackboard, John introduced Lisp—all you could do with car, cdr, cons, cond, lambda, and recursion."

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzard and Hurricanes - Popular Mechanics

4 People Who Faced Disaster—And How They Made it Out Alive - Rules to Survive Fire, Tornado, Blizzard and Hurricanes - Popular Mechanics: "Some disasters are simply not survivable. But most are, and research on human behavior suggests that the difference between life and death often comes down to the simple—yet surprisingly difficult—task of recognizing threats before they overwhelm you, then working through them as discrete challenges. The people who survive disasters tend to be better prepared and more capable of making smart decisions under pressure. Not everyone is born with these traits, but almost anyone can learn them. Here’s how to wire your brain for survival."

Dean Kamen Quotes About Health Care Debate - Interview With Inventor Dean Kamen - Popular Mechanics

Dean Kamen Quotes About Health Care Debate - Interview With Inventor Dean Kamen - Popular Mechanics: "n an interview with PM, Dean Kamen, one of the world's most prolific inventors of healthcare technologies, challenges the notion that the U.S. has a healthcare crisis. Rather than slowing the pace of medical progress in order to cut healthcare costs, he argues, America should be encouraging more innovation in life-saving drugs and technologies."

Lucian’s blog� Blog Archive � Me this trust thing = dog juicy bone

Lucian’s blog� Blog Archive � Me this trust thing = dog juicy bone: "On the upside, at least on this occasion I’m offering you some new thoughts on the subject, not just recycling that “As far as I’m concerned, trust in this country received its mortal wound, along with 60,000 soldiers in the British Army, on the first day of the First Battle of the Somme on 1st July 1916″ soapbox stuff that you’ve heard from me a million times already.

My theme today is that when we talk about consumers’ “trust” in financial services, we’re actually wrapping up about four or five different kinds of trust within that one single word - and on closer examination there are significant differences in the current status of each kind."

ORA-02437: cannot validate - primary key violated - Stack Overflow

ORA-02437: cannot validate <name> - primary key violated - Stack Overflow:

SQL>@%ORACLE_HOME%\rdbms\admin\utlexpt1.sql

Table created.

SQL> ALTER TABLE MY_TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT PK_FOO PRIMARY KEY (MY_ID)
2 exceptions into exceptions
3 /

Using DBMS_SYS_SQL to Execute Statements as Another User | Pythian Group Blog

Using DBMS_SYS_SQL to Execute Statements as Another User | Pythian Group Blog: "Sometimes you need to execute SQL (or PL/SQL) as some other user. Say you need to remove a job residing in some other user’s schema. Or you need to create a database link in a different schema. You can’t do things like these without becoming the other user. If you don’t know the other user’s password then you basically have two choices"

Online Name Generator

Online Name Generator: "Cool online names with a single click! - Free and cool name generator! - Cool nicknames and project names!"

Notes from the Metalevel

Notes from the Metalevel: "Notes from the Metalevel
An Introduction to Computer Composition"

"The Principia Discordia"

Toledo Nanochess and Toledo Picochess

Toledo Nanochess and Toledo Picochess: "Although Toledo Nanochess is smaller, it manages to beat gracefully Micromax v1.6,"

Micro-Max

Micro-Max: "As far as I am aware, this still makes micro-Max the smallest C Chess program in existence. A close competitor for this honor, Toledo, measures 2168 characters. Despite its smaller size, micro-Max seems to beat Toledo easily."

BashForth - Kwiki

BashForth - Kwiki: "BashForth is a ForthInterpreter, written entirely in the bash scripting language."

Tiny Code: Floppy booting, Open Firmware, Bitlash, more Movizt.

Tiny Code: Floppy booting, Open Firmware, Bitlash, more Movizt.: "There is a certain appeal in closing the meta-loop of minimalism in programming. Writing simple, efficient code in languages which themselves are simple and efficient. To that end, I've collected programming environments which are small and self contained, while still useful."

Speechification: Confessions of a Crap Artist

Speechification: Confessions of a Crap Artist: "Here’s some more from the (no doubt extraordinary) archives of Mr Ken Hollings – a show he made in 2006 about, well, er, Philip K Dick certainly. And tape-recorders and typewriters. And the divine. And madness, machines and mass suicide. Including contributions from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Nelson, Brian Aldiss, Tim Powers and James Blaylock. This is brilliant stuff."

Boing Boing

Boing Boing: "Seth Roberts made a list of 11 observations while shopping at a Wal-Mart in China. Here are the first four.

1. They sell live turtles.
2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging."

Analytic functions by Example | Oracle FAQ

Analytic functions by Example | Oracle FAQ: "This article provides a clear, thorough concept of analytic functions and its various options by a series of simple yet concept building examples."

Oracle Tip: Create functions to join and split strings in SQL

Oracle Tip: Create functions to join and split strings in SQL: "A common task when selecting data from a database is to take a set of values a query returns and format it as a comma delimited list. Another task that's almost as common is the need to do the reverse: Take a comma delimited list of values in a single string and use it as a table of values."

Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes • The Register

Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes • The Register: "There are places in the design where we've tried to optimize for throughput by dumping thousands of operations into a queue and then just processing through them,' he continues. 'That leads to fine throughput, but it's not great for latency. You can easily get into situations where you might be stuck for seconds at a time in a queue just waiting to get to the head of the queue."

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty

Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty: "If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic."

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph

InfoQ: Facebook: Science and the Social Graph: "In this presentation filmed during QCon SF 2008, Aditya Agarwal discusses Facebook’s architecture, more exactly the software stack used, presenting the advantages and disadvantages of its major components: LAMP (PHP, MySQL), Memcache, Thrift, Scribe."

Play Infocom Games Online

Play Infocom Games Online: "Here you can find and play online every known version of every Infocom adventure."

HR 3200 from a systems design perspective (Part I) : Bruce F. Webster

HR 3200 from a systems design perspective (Part I) : Bruce F. Webster: "On the occasions where I have reviewed the actual text of major legislation, I have been struck by the parallels between legislation and software, particularly in terms of the pitfalls and issues with architecture, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. Some of the tradeoffs are even the same, such as trading off the risk of “analysis paralysis” (never moving beyond the research and analysis phase) and the risks of unintended consequences from rushing ill-formed software into production. Yet another similarity is that both software and legislation tend to leverage off of, interact with, call upon, extend, and/or replace existing software and legislation. Finally, the more complex a given system or piece of legislation is, the less likely that it will achieve the original intent."

Northwest Montana Daily Inter Lake > Archives > Opinion > Columns > Charity and the good ol' Constitution

Northwest Montana Daily Inter Lake > Archives > Opinion > Columns > Charity and the good ol' Constitution: "'Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?'

That question was asked not of President Obama nor of Sen. Max Baucus or Rep. Nancy Pelosi, but of the less well-known Tennessee congressman, David Crockett."