Bookmarks

Joel reckons that SVN has made many people's mental models of version control a busted one, and that DVCSs like Mercurial are actually better. I'm-a read it and find out.

So it turns out someone's written a tun emulator for Darwin and made a build for jailbroken iPhones. So, uh, hello routing all your iPhone traffic via a secure link to a remote node? Mmph.

This is a very funny website. I like it a lot. I think you should read it and like it too.

I really want to go here and eat their amazing-looking food. You know, just in case anyone was thinking of treating me. Thanks in advance.

Unicorn is a "mostly pure-Ruby HTTP backend" using's Mongrel's HTTP parser but using a Unix prefork model to service requests. Interesting piece on how the Unix layer can doing the heavy lifting, via syscalls from Ruby.

Long-heralded new album from Imogen. First couple of listens, it's definitely standing up to expectations.

I love the Language Log. Only on the Language Log would you get a sentence like this:

[E]ver since “fuck” became a human-denoting noun (“You've killed my Burmese python, you stupid fuck!”), it has been possible for “the fuck” to occur in NP slots on a fairly broad basis. But not as a semantically inert pleonastic epithet with the affective function of conveying personal irritation.

No. Absolutely not. No fucking way.

Security dude's written a Port Forwarding Interceptor that lets you modify a raw TCP stream on the fly. I know it's wrong, but this guy makes me grin. Don't worry, my coat's just here.

Holidaying in America, I took myself to a small town in Vermont, described intriguingly in guides as an artists' colony. My lodging seemed a fairytale house in the woods; I explored its environs, and took the advice of its proprietress to visit a restaurant in the centre of the town, where I met a trio of boisterous septuagenarians - Princeton professor, psychologist poet, and salty seadog - who regaled me each with tales from his own experience, alternately impressively erudite, unobtrusively insightful, and strikingly swashbuckling, before dragging me on to the bar over the road for beers and cheesy lines to local ladies. The poet-philosopher saw something in me, I know not what, but which moved him to share this piece of Kazantzakis' wisdom with me: "we come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life". It hit the spot; it helped me through some dark moments, and I’m in some way forever indebted both to the author and his representative.

I registered early and so got to see the Wolfram Alpha webinar presentation on Friday evening. The depth of the analysis and the breadth of the scope Alpha was apparently able to apply to any given field made me reel at the possibilities; the coherence with which the four key components of "curated data; computational algorithms; linguistic processing; automated presentation" (Wolfram's categorisation) had been married gave the impression of a genuinely capable successor to Google, not in the form of a better search engine, but of a more likely first port of call for genuine information. On seeing the demo myself, I realised not only why the questions Mr. W. addressed in the webinar painted a slightly disappointing picture of the actual information stored in Alpha - it relies on curated data, and obviously they've not got round to curating all of it yet, so it didn't know all the answers - but also why whether it knew about a particular topic was the wrong question. It will.