iamcal.com Since May 2000

After seeing this post on MLKSHK, I want to find out if it was true - are there really that many phrases in modern use that were coined by Shakespeare? Turns out it's mostly true, with many of them being Shakespeare originals and a few more being popularised by him.

this investigation into lego nomenclature is excellent. remember having similar issues building something with a friend when young. you know, a "light frame"!

old, but still good: Java2K uses a 11-based number system, which is a very good approximation of the 10-based decimal system for many purposes, including counting up to and including 9.

the septic's companion (a guide to british words, for americans) has a book out. it's pretty good. buy it for your seppo friends

ok, i'm totally in love with erin mckean. a great presenter on an interesting topic

a useful reference as i forget how to spell completely

from a php disucssion at work: "If you're willing to continually do the heavy lifting of ensuring that your version of Smalltalk96 on Rails stays concurrent with the latest patches". omg, how awesome would that be?

a paper about intercal. very nice

this might be the best page on wikipedia - a List of British English words not used in American English

the ICFP programming contest seems fun - i wonder if anyone's planning on implementing in brainfuck. or smith. or maybe homespring :)

phil doesn't believe ruby on rails exists: "Personally I prefer Cobra with the Spoke and Hairnet modules compiled in. But I've heard Gerbera on SouflBAD+9 is even more powerful, particularly if you already have a load of Buckingham code"lying around.

london.pm has been going off topic alot lately (no suprise there), and has been talking about evolution of (non-computer) languages. "The biggest change in French spelling since the XVIth century occured during the Revolution -- the endings of the imperfect tense ("j'aimois" became "j'aimais") -- and it didn't come from the AcadBAD+9mie.", states rafael garcia-suarez.

pointed out on p6l - xquery uses smilie faces for it's comment delimiters. the current suggestion is that p6 should do the same. even if it doesn't, one could write the grammar for it easily.

a periodic table of the perl 6 operators. sterling (if scary) work. it would be interesting to do the same for perl 5 and compare. uri said: "are you going to predict any new operators based on missing boxes as mendeleev did?". maybe this is the way to organically design feature sets ;)

the great drew is finally overcome with Internet freaks. a sad state of affairs indeed. "I have friends and a wife and I eat food and drive a car and spend all day working and do some creative things in my spare time and I have neither the desire nor the time to screw around with people". way to shatter the illusion :'(

prayer looks interesting. an imap webmail client, written in c, rumored to suck less than squirrel mail. i shall have to give it a try.

"probably the most stylish computer available in the western world". given the dire state of current cases, this is probably true. when i originally bookmarked this (via james.c) it was called netbox.com. my bookmarks need a cleanout.

A complete spectrum emulator, in pure perl. that's a serious beast [via 2lmc]

i'm converting citycreator to flash, as my first big project. after quite a few hours of battling against flash i seem to be making some progress. i'm conviced flash was designed to stop people from building useful applications out of it, and optimized for shitty vector based movies.

camel bones seems really cool. must have a play with it soon

Apocalypse 12 (dealing with objects) is now out. Grab it while it's hot.

the kingdom of loathing is great. playable and very funny

discussing a hypothetical honeymoon with s: "sex is a luxury - email is a basic human right"

this dhtml stuff is very late 90s and extremly cool. nice

translate text in runes, morse, klingon and some others using this handy gizmo

webb talks in lisp: "(spectacularly well-timed and laugh-out-loud funny contribution to haddock yesterday. (i'm reading the archives))(that is all)"

lost in translation was great, but reading this translation of a key scene adds even more. i wish i spoke japanese. i'm really considering learning

what we need is more geek-oriented guides like this japanese as a programming language article

oooh - comic fest in vancouver in a few weeks. i might just go along to this.

you know what's really dumb? livejournal's atom implementation. rather than use easy auth (http basic) or the atom spec'd auth that's annoying but possible (wsse) they use fucking http digest auth - the least documented thing on the web. does anyone know any decent explanation of how to implement http digest auth on the client side? the rfc is a maze of tiny rooms, all alike.

the atom feed validator is borked, which has made me loath atom before i've even created a single feed. luckily (for me or for atom?) the alternative at feedvalidator.org (which appears to be the same validator, in style at least) works fine. the scripting news validator does atom validation too.

my initial atom thoughts: too many required attributes. entries wont necessarily have titles (these don't). annoying date format - it might be a standard, but it doesn't mean i have to like it. really just like rss with the tag names changed. again.