The ByteBaker

Reading:

Books in the age of the iPad is a very well thought out (and very well designed) article on how books and print media might evolve to be useful in a generation when lightweight, connected digital displays will become ubiquitous. It’s an old topic, but the article is definitely worth reading.

Media:

Reddit.com interviews Peter Norvig who as some of you might know, is something of a hero. He’s a prominent AI researcher, Lisp hacker and the author of a must-read essay titled Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years.

Software:

nginx is a relatively new, but rising member of the server world. It’s a lightweight, high performance server that currently holds about 7% of the market and is being used by sites like WordPress.com and Hulu. It’s also what I plan to put on my server once I get around to putting Arch Linux on it.

It’s been an eventful week with Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett passing away and all news of the Iran election situation being knocked off Twitter as a result. But life must go on and it’s sunday again.

Reading

Music Mind and Meaning This article from one of the legends of AI, Marvin Minsky takes a look at music and how it could affect the way we think about the mind (and vice versa). No directly about AI, but certainly worth reading if you have an hour’s time on your hands

Media

Merlin Mann on time and attention Too much to do and too little time? Can’t get yourself to focus on the important things in life? If that’s the case, then this video doesn’t have all the answers, but it can point you in the right direction

Software

Neuroarena I’m not much of a gamer, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate them (or the cool technology behind them). This is a fast paced action strategy games that should give you strategy fans something interesting to do on hot lazy weekend afternoons. What’s more, the game backends are written in a combination of Common Lisp and Erlang. Not bad at all.

Programmers and hackers are often an introverted bunch. But the things we create have a considerable and measureable impact on the world and conversely our work is affected and influenced by things around us. Today’s selection is an attempt on my part to highlight those facts.

Reading

What Open Source shares with Science I’m sure this analogy has been made numberous times and I think it’s a pretty good one. This post is an interesting read because it goes quite a bit in depth regarding the history of science.

Media

The Last Lecture Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch was one of the world’s prominent experts in virtual reality but he’s probably best known for his Last Lecture. I think everyone on the planet should watch this, especially if they’re young. There’s some computer science in it, but it’s the holistic experience that it’s worth watching for.

Books

I’ve decided to drop the software part for this installment in favor of something more 20th century.

Rebel Code This is the story of Linux and the Open Source Revolution and how it played an important part it creating the world we see around us today.

Those of you who have visited the site in the last few days have probably noticed that page loads are going slow. I’ve been talking to my host and it seems like they have a problem with their CGI/MySQL servers causing websites that are backed by databases (such as this one) to run slowly. They tell me that they are working to resolve the problem and I hope they come up with a solution quickly. If the issue doesn’t get resolved soon I might seriously consider moving to another host.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience this is causing to my readers and I really hope that things get resolved soon.

Reading

Pseudocode or Code? There are lots of coding styles and lots of ways to teach them. This post looks at the style of writing out an algorithm in pseudocode and then fleshing it out with the actual code. This is a method that sounds like it should be intuitive, but I don’t think I’ve ever really used it before (and I don’t think any of my fellow students have either). Does it work? Read the article, try it out and then make up your own mind.

What do you think about LaTex? This is an ongoing discussion at Programming Reddit which I think is very interesting. I currently use LaTex for any documents that I need to submit for class or otherwise because it looks very professional, but it can be a real pain to use. This discussion has brought up some interesting points about both the philosophy and implementation of LaTex and computerized typesetting in general.

Media and Software

Google Chrome and Chrome experiments I know I’ve recommended Google Chrome as a download before, but these fun little JavaScript apps really show the full potential of Chrome’s high-speed V8 Javascript engine. The most interesting (and fun to play ones) are the ones that do some kind of physics simulation.