Chris Zumbrunn's personal think tank

Reality is an onion, and depending on how deep you think, it may seem to contradict itself

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:21:00 GMT

Nuff said.

1.9.2010, 10:21

Oh No! by Marina And The Diamonds

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:41:00 GMT

File it under "short term guilty pleasure":

16.8.2010, 19:41

If there is anything supernatural, it is humanity itself

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:45:00 GMT

Nuff said.

14.8.2010, 21:45

Lila Luftschloss

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:34:00 GMT

From the bylaws of the Lila Luftschloss cooperative in Frankfurt am Main:

"Mitfrauen (d.h. Mitglieder der Genossenschaft) k�nnen insbesondere Frauen werden"

/me is happy not to be excluded and loves it, for its precision and legal beauty.

11.8.2010, 21:34

We have the world we want

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:38:00 GMT

Nuff said.

8.8.2010, 16:38

CoffeeScript, underscore.coffee and underscore.js

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:11:00 GMT

Jeremy Ashkenas' underscore.coffee vs his underscore.js (the tie to go along with jQuery's tux)

From Michael Hunger's look at CoffeeScript on InfoQ:

Python style significant whitespace
implicit parentheses
no semicolons
String continuations
concise function literals
YAML style object literals

everything is an expression (returns a value)
all variables in local lexical scope, no pollution of global scope
simple assignment and variable declarations, destructuring assignments
switch statements compiled to if-then-else chains
chain comparisons
named parameters

variable arguments lists (splats)
literate programming (write the code within its documentation)
pythons range, array and object comprehensions
existential (elvis) operator
explicit strong binding of current self to function with => Hashrocket operator
fast and working class based inheritance support, based on the google.inherit approach
support for static inheritance and automatic delegation to superclass methods
heredocs, multiline strings, literal regexps, string interpolation/substitution
Cake a simple build system similar to Rake
<script type="text/coffeescript"> tags, minified coffescript compiler for inline use

5.8.2010, 20:11

Brendan Eich on Proxies, Modules and other Proposals and Strawman

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:49:00 GMT

Rest parameters, spread, proxies, and modules plans explained:

You wont miss anything if you skip the first five minutes.

4.8.2010, 11:49

confederate?

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:28:00 GMT

Confederation without borders
Confederation sans frontiers
Eidgenossenschaft ohne Grenzen

Unus Pro Omnibus - Omnes Pro Uno :-)

On a slightly related note:

1.8.2010, 23:28

Good for Adobe, Good for Day, Good for the Ecosystem

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:42:00 GMT

Matt Van Bergen's take on Adobe's acquisition of Day Software.

29.7.2010, 14:42

Will Adobe see the light (of Day)?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:26:00 GMT

Glyn Moody writes on Adobe's acquisition of Day:

"...Day's R&D team are strong contributors to the open source world, with a development model based on building true open source communities around key technology advancements that originate in Day R&D through the sponsorship of new projects via the Apache Software Foundation..."

"...Given that leading role there, news that Adobe is acquiring Day takes on an added significance..."

"...Adobe's acquisition of so much free software coding talent offers hope that some open source savvy will percolate through the company, turning Adobe into as much of an ally as Day was. However, the lack of any comment about continuing to support open source projects and the people who work on them at Day is worrying. If it does intend to allow its new staff to carry on as before, Adobe would be well-advised to make some public commitments to that effect..."

From his blog post on computerworlduk.com.

Update: ...and Erik Larson responded.

28.7.2010, 17:26

What's Up Doc? by Carbon/Silicon

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:31:00 GMT

24.7.2010, 17:31

How creativity occurs

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:25:00 GMT

"When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions."

"Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with."

From a Newsweek article about "The Creativity Crisis", written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

Also, the brain goes into a creativity turbo mode and locks out any distractions by deactivating the right-temporoparietal junction when improvising. However, that turbo mode only kicks in when you are highly trained/skilled in the field that you are improvising in. In this context, doing intensive Po thinking in any field probably qualifies as "improvising", I would think.

20.7.2010, 21:25

RingoJS vs NodeJS

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:12:00 GMT

George Moschovitis of AppengineJS fame, the Javascript port of the Google App Engine Python SDK, wrote a blog post looking at RingoJS vs NodeJS:

"Some time ago I switched from Narwhal to Ringo and never looked back. I strongly believe that Ringo is the preeminent CommonJS implementation."

"Ringo is mature, stable and crash free. Ringo is the evolution of Helma, one of the first server side JavaScript platforms (more than 10 years in development)."

"Access to the gazillion of Java libraries. There is no merit in reinventing the wheel, just reuse code from the Java ecosystem. The integration between Java and JavaScript is seamless."

"Thanks to AppengineJS you can run your Ringo applications on Google's scalable infrastructure." [actually, you can do that with Ringo out-of-the-box, but with AppengineJS you get the ported Python SDK APIs, which is nice, of course]

And his conclusion: "Stop drinking the Kool-Aid! Stop playing with toys. Engineer your application on top of a mature, conformant and compatible platform: RingoJS."

23.6.2010, 15:12

Sweet People by Alyosha

Sun, 30 May 2010 12:35:00 GMT

Stupid people! ...for not making Alyosha from the Ukraine the Eurovision 2010 winner with this song. Not only a great song and a great voice, but also a song with a message and a singer/songwriter with a mission: http://www.alyoshamission.com/

30.5.2010, 12:35

RingoJS 0.5 released

Wed, 19 May 2010 20:52:00 GMT

RingoJS 0.5 was released on May 19, 2010. Get it from the download page on GitHub!

0.5 is much better than 0.4 in most every respect. These are the highlights:

Increased coverage of API documentation
Package support, including simple installation via ringo-admin
Update Filesystem support, now covers full CommonJS Filesystem/A and Filesystem/A/0 except globbing
New HTTP Client supporting both synchronous and asynchronous operation
Upgrade to JSGI 0.3
Upgrade to Jetty 7 with improved support for asynchronous JSGI
Several new modules (base64, promise, subprocess, zip, basicauth)
Shared modules are now default, resulting in increased performance and less WTF moments
More command line and servlet options, including production switch to disable module reloading
Evolutionary improvements in Storage API

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release with code, bug reports, or feedback:

Panagiotis Astithas
Andreas Bolka
Chris Langreiter
George Moschovitis
Peter Newhook
Simon Oberhammer
Oleg Podsechin
Robert Thurnher
Samuli Tuomola
Hannes Walln�fer
"ccwu"

A screencast showing installation of packages, getting API documentation for them, and use of the asynchronous HTTP client in combination with the ringo-cometd package:

19.5.2010, 20:52

Your Personal Religion by Sophie Hunger

Sat, 15 May 2010 20:52:00 GMT

"Invisible" is another stand-out track on the same album. However, for now that track honors its name and there so far seems to be no video for it.

Album review by John Brunner.

15.5.2010, 20:52

Lost and Found by Steve Mason

Wed, 12 May 2010 12:11:00 GMT

12.5.2010, 12:11

RhinoJS

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:58:00 GMT

RhinoJS? RhinoJS?

Been there, done that:

[16:47] <hannesw> hah - zumbrunn: you called the pastebin rhinojs
[16:47] <hannesw> goes to show i was right about confusingness... :)
[16:47] <zumbrunn> lol
[16:47] <robi42> :D
[16:49] * robi42 admittedly almost mistyped ringojs.org sometimes just before. ;)

15.4.2010, 20:58

Server-Side Javascript since... way back: RingoJS!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:15:00 GMT

From one of the very early experiments in "Weblogs" in 1998 and the open sourcing of the "HOP" in the year 2000 to the widely deployed and mature Helma as we know it, plus the first experimental attempts at a Helma-rewrite as a lean and mean js runtime, initially called "Rhinola" and running on top of mod_gcj, which evolved into a candidate for "Helma 2" and later was codenamed "Helma NG", the project now known as RingoJS can truly be called "Server-Side Javascript since... way back!"

RingoJS is a thin wrapper around Rhino providing a CommonJS conformant module library and web application framework. If you are using Rhino and/or are interested in CommonJS and ServerJS in general, the brand new RingoJS 0.4 release might be worth checking out.

http://ringojs.org/wiki/Release 0.4/

The most notable new features:

updated CommonJS compliance
improved web application modules
optimizations regarding code caching and resource loading
updated Rhino snapshot with more ES5 features in JavaScript 1.8
unittest module; we are now shipping with 235 tests
jsdoc module using Rhino's AST feature and powering the API docs web app
POSIX support; using JRuby's jnr-posix libraries
admin script for creating web app scaffolding
simplified Google App Engine deployment
new logging module based on log4j/SLF4J
lots of new JSGI middleware; gzip, etag, transaction, profiler, ...
new CLI arguments parser in pure JS

Pre-built downloads for Linux, Mac and Windows can be found on github: http://github.com/ringo/ringojs/downloads

And, of course, our new ringojs.org site is now powered by RingoJS.

So you can see how easy it is to take RingoJS for a spin on Google App Engine, Hannes has produced the Deploying RingoJS on Google App Engine screencast for your viewing pleasure :-)

10.3.2010, 18:15

Modules, Proxies, and Ephemeron Tables

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:41:00 GMT

Kris Kowal and Mark Miller presented a synopsis of topics covered at the January 2010 ECMA TC-39 meeting:

7.3.2010, 11:41

Helma 1.7.0 has escaped its stealth existence

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:13:00 GMT

The Helma 1.7.0 release contains some bug fixes and major improvements, such as programmable HopObject collections and prototype mappings, Apache Commons Daemon support, a profiler for measuring function runtime and invocation frequency, and skin/macro introspection, to mention just a few. It also contains an updated version of Rhino and is the first Helma release that has Javascript 1.7 features enabled by default. The Helma 1.7.0 Changelog below has the nitty gritty details. Better get it now, before there is an even better one. Really, it's that good!

Our bugzilla has a list of bugs fixed in Helma 1.7.0.

Added ability to create HopObject collections programmatically and on the fly, without having to define them in the prototype's type.properties file.
Prototype mappings can now be defined programmatically as well using the newly added global function definePrototype().
Added Apache Commons Daemon support, making it possible to run the embedded Jetty server on port 80 for ordinary users on Unix and running Helma as service on Unix and Windows systems.
Property names in HopObjects are now case sensitive.
Added support for lazy collection loading, setting collection.lazyloading = true changes HopObject.list() to no longer fetch all contained objects, amongst other aspects.
HopObject.href() now takes an optional second argument, an object which will be encoded to a query string and added to the generated URL.
Added a profiler for measuring function runtime and invocation frequency.
Added generic header manipulation methods getHeader(), addHeader(), setHeader(), removeHeader() to the helma.Mail object.
Backported improved helma.file module from Helma NG, which takes an options object as argument and allows to specify the default charset to use.
Changed Object.prototype.dontEnum to be overridable and not read-only.
Added support for __defineGetter__ and __defineSetter__ to HopObjects.
Write locks for non-persistable properties on HopObjects are no longer checked.
A Rendering bug involving case in skin name has disappeared.
Fixed strictvars mode to produce the appropriate errors.
Fixed a bug where debug logging level wasn't unset if the debug property was set to false during runtime.
Network ports are now checked at startup by opening a ServerSocket on the port in question and seeing if it works.
Fixed a regression where dynamic relations were broken when the parent wasn't explicitely set.
Replaced encumbered code base of helma.util.Diff with an alternative implementation.
Fixed a comparison bug in loop macro in HopObject.js.
Fixed a slowdown when using getDBConnection() and oracle db that was due to running connection tests to often.
Fixed an error when retrieving HopObjects by accessname on a programmatic collection.
Fixed a problem where the return value of a HopObject's size() method did not change when removing children of a collection.
Fixed a problem with limit and offset on normal collections not working properly.
Adding an object to a grouped collection right after removing an object from that collection, which was in the same group and was added in the same request, now works.
Changed sessions for requests that do not already have one to be only created when actually needed.
Fixed a bug that caused helma.Html.isSelected() method to fail when the last argument was an array.
Added Skin.getMacros() to offer start and end properties, and getName, getHandlerType, getNamedParams, getPositionalParams and hasNestedMacros methods for skin/macro introspection.
Fixed a problem with persist() and collections using accessName.
Calling list() method with min and/or max arguments on HopObjects that are transient now works.
Changed String.URLPATTERN to use a regular expression instead of java.net.URL.

You can download it here.

10.2.2010, 0:13

The Moon And The Sky by Sade

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:41:00 GMT

6.2.2010, 19:41

Written In Reverse by Spoon

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:57:00 GMT

24.1.2010, 19:57

Keep Cool My Babies!

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:33:00 GMT

How? *Seven Month*? And what then? The chance of him being shown somewhere we can see him over here in Europe are slim :-(

Oh, well, I'm looking forward to watching his last shows this weekend, when they will be shown on CNBC Europe. On Conan's last show, apparently Neil Young is the musical guest! Enjoy it while it lasts, as they say!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/conan-obriens-heartfelt-f_n_433954.html:

Conan O'Brien's final "Tonight Show" aired Friday, and while much of it was funny and some was expensive, the show ended with heartfelt words from the long-time NBC host:

"Before we end this rodeo, a few things need to be said. There has been a lot of speculation in the press about what I legally can and can't say about NBC. To set the record straight, tonight I am allowed to say anything I want. And what I want to say is this: between my time at Saturday Night Live, The Late Night Show, and my brief run here on The Tonight Show, I have worked with NBC for over twenty years. Yes, we have our differences right now and yes, we're going to go our separate ways. But this company has been my home for most of my adult life. I am enormously proud of the work we have done together, and I want to thank NBC for making it all possible.

Walking away from The Tonight Show is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Making this choice has been enormously difficult. This is the best job in the world, I absolutely love doing it, and I have the best staff and crew in the history of the medium. But despite this sense of loss, I really feel this should be a happy moment. Every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and, for seven months, I got to. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second. I've had more good fortune than anyone I know and if our next gig is doing a show in a 7-11 parking lot, we'll find a way to make it fun.

And finally, I have to say something to our fans. The massive outpouring of support and passion from so many people has been overwhelming. The rallies, the signs, all the goofy, outrageous creativity on the internet, and the fact that people have traveled long distances and camped out all night in the pouring rain to be in our audience, made a sad situation joyous and inspirational.

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I'll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism -- it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

Huffpost has the video.

23.1.2010, 12:33