If you, like me, is sick and tired of sites that lure innocent googlers into registering on their site just to view content that is should be freely available. The worst of those sites is probably experts exchange with their stupid blurring technique. Luckily I’m not the only one sick and tired of this. The following greasemonkey script silently removes all links to experts-exchange.com from google results.
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TED: 50 million views in two years
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openstreetmap.org
I was told about the openstreetmap project a little while ago and finally had some time to check it out today. It is indeed a very interesting project. I found out that there are no roads for Nørresundby, so today I decided that I would help make that happen. A little walk with my trusty old n800 and the external GPS bluetooth dongle and I now have uploaded the GPS points of my trip to the site. I used maemo mapper to gather the data points. It’s quite nice to be able to look at the route you walked later by just reimporting the data into maemo mapper. Fresh air, a chance to get to know your neighbourhood a little better and helping making important information free to the world is not a bad combo for a wednesday night 🙂
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2 great links
I’ve been very happy enjoying these two pieces of distractions the last week. So happy I’ll write a small blog entry about it instead of just saving it to delicious 🙂
– Paul Graham on Disconnected Distraction
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YayArt part 2
YayArt has been running for three weeks time now and the number of visitors and art pieces have just been increasing day by day. It’s wonderful to see! One of the things I find quite interesting to see is how people are rating the art, in that regard how one makes sure to best harnessing the power of collaborate filtering without ending up in Groupthink. And it’s quite clear that we havn’t ending up in any groupthinking yet. The YayArt crowd is really a tough crowd but lets see what happens in the future. The deadline for submitting art for the competetion is just a little more than one week away now, so if you havn’t done so yet, come on over and help us find the next Picasso 🙂
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Yayart.net launched
I’m very please to announce that we, at iola, have launched a new site for digital artists today. For the 31 days there’s a competition where you can win lots of nice stuff including an exhibition at the center of Copenhagen. The site is coded in Python (Django) and uses varnish for caching.
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Wikipedia for data?
Found this extremely interesting blog post today dealing with the need for a wikipedia like approach to structured data. It hits the problem quite nicely and has a ton of comments with interesting links and discussion. I talked about the problem a little over a year ago. Time to take the power back?
I made a new release of Nemo 0.2.2 today. It has some nice memory usage improvements and indexing fixes. Plus day view got pagination so that it can handle large number of files on a single day (like an svn update) gracefully. Upgrading is highly recommended.
I remember reading in Paul Grahams excellent hackers and painters book, about how he liked the language he worked in to be dynamically typed as it provided him with more flexibility. The first time I read it I was still very much entrenched in the bondage and discipline language C++, and as so I found the statement wrong, but at the same time interesting. There had to be some deeper insight into this. A couple of years later, which would be the present day it just dawned on me that the biggest problem with statically typed languages are not the typing, you can get used to that. Its rather the fact that it becomes very hard to refactor the code afterwards. And worse, it shifts the burden of figuring out the right data structures and the right types to the beginning of the coding process instead of afterwards. Thus going directly against the good programming practice of writing for clarity first and only rewriting code if it has been deemed inefficient by a profiler.
Python is dynamically typed and after spending a year programming (this was about two years ago) in it I still found the fact that the types where missing to be quite disturbing. Especially the fact that you could have a branch in your program that had a small spelling error and only failing after you had run the program for several hours maybe. Or worse shipped it off to the customer. I realize now that this was mostly contributed to the fact that I was still coding Python as if I was coding c++. Something that the last two programming books (common lisp and programming erlang) I have been reading really have put to light.
There are tricks you can use in statically typed languages that can make the program easier to refactor later on. The var symbol introduced in C# 3.0, using typedefs in C++ and actually the whole standard library in C++ has had this covered quite nicely with the use of iterators. Still I think that maybe something like the duck types in boo brings about some interesting mix of the two styles. My very limited experiences with the boo so far has not been enough to determine if they the implicit type system does more harm that good. I sometimes find myself cursing over the fact that the system can’t detect the types for me, and at other times are happy that the system has found some trivial errors for me for free.