From TextMate to Vim
TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an…
Scala as long-term replacement for Java
Don't get me wrong - I've written tons of Java over the last decade or so & think its been a great evolutionary step from C++ and Smalltalk ...
Corrupted Word Files for Sale
On one hand, this is clever: We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g…
All Tarsnap profits for Dec '09 will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation
Much of the work done by the FreeBSD Foundation is done behind the scenes, but the importance of the work they do is undeniable. They sponsor a range of important FreeBSD development which would likely not get done otherwise; in the past year this has included
Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance
Jeff Atwood likes referring to his blog post about Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive . where he writes: "Given the rapid advance ...
How My Brain Kept Me from Co-Founding YouTube
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Why charging for access to news sites won't work
I wish them good luck with this, and I mean that sincerely, but I believe this is a fundamentally flawed strategy.
Palm Pre Privacy Invasion
I've been taking a closer look at the WebOS side of my Palm Pre tonight, and I noticed that it periodically uploads information to Palm, Inc.
Nate Lawson Breaks Google Keyczar's HMAC Crypto Signatures
I recently found a security flaw in the Google Keyczar crypto library. The impact was that an attacker could forge signatures for data that was “signed” with the SHA-1 HMAC algorithm (t…
If you think you haven't found your passion...
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
How Credit Card Numbers Are Generated
Visa,Master Card,Discover, and American Express credit card validation and generation techniques using the luhn algorithm.
"Whatever happened to...?" The odd fates of 25 legendary tech products.
Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market--even though they haven't been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products--available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they're obsolete--long after the rest of the world has move
What is Erlang-Style Concurrency?
Finishing up a whirlwind tour of the US West coast (QCon SF, Erlang Factory Lite LA, and a Cognitive Modeling workshop in Scottsdale), I am now waiting for a delayed BA flight at the Phoenix airport. Although I’ve spent as many days flying as I have on US soil, it’s been a great trip.
A Week in Hacker News
I started posting to Hacker News recently. The rise and fall of submissions through the rankings is really hypnotic. I wrote a screen-scr...
Ongoing · Concur.next — Hard-Core Clojure
Here’s real news: Alex Osborne of National Library of Australia , also known as @atosborne , whom I first met on #clojure , took the Wide Finder bit between his teeth and has posted a remarkable implementation story: Widefinder 2 with Clojure . Um, 8m4.663s! If you care about any aspect of this stuff you really ought…
Understanding Engineers
Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
How .NET Regular Expressions Really Work
Remember when you first tried to parse text?