Class hierarchies considered harmful

Good article from Raganwald.

Editing binaries

Here's a cool article on the why and how of editing binaries, with a convenient link to an open-source disassembler. (About time!)

So ... the analysis of binaries is really the same thing as exegesis, just at a lower level. That makes it really tasty from my point of view, if I only had a sabbatical coming up. (I'm seriously thinking of that, by the way. I need to do some technical things and it's clearly never going to happen at the profitable workload I've got going lately. The only time I slow down is when I'm sick, and nothing technical happens then, either, for obvious reasons.)

Loomio

A collaborative proposal creation site and the open-source software that powers it.

Stony Brook Algorithm Archive

Tasty!

Duktape

One-file embeddable Ecmascript engine (that's JavaScript to you and me). This would be relatively easy to put into Perl...

Language Construction Kit

This is a neat article about constructing artificial languages.

Nightingale translator

Enter a string, click the button, and this generator assembles a string of nightingale song encoding your string. Pretty!

Upside-down-ternet

How to configure a router to turn all graphics upside down. Brilliant!

RenderPixie

An open-source RenderMan. Ooooh. Do want.

DecideRight

A non-free decision support tool, runs on Windows. Interesting.

Emergent

A system for working with emergent neural networks.

Compling C++ to a DLL and calling it from Perl

Detailed instructions. Just in case.

Yahoo's best practices for Website performance

And they ought to know.

Peer-to-peer reputation system

Aura. Interesting.

2048

This one's not from the archives, it's timely! 2048 [github] is the latest popular Internet game (you can tell because even Randall Munroe is playing it [xkcd 1344]. And of course, StackOverflow has discussed strategy and said strategy has been automated (a simple minimax approach).

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.

Buffer not empty after all!

I found a bookmark trove from 2008-2011. A good quarter of the links are dead, which is a little worrisome, but some are still good, and quite interesting. That'll keep me off the streets for a few more days.

Open malware

A database of malware, apparently.

OpenBUGS

Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling. BUGS.

I've run out of buffer

I've been so used to having a three-month buffer of bookmarks that it's a very strange feeling to ... have caught up today. Posts will now only happen as I find actual new things; since I've fallen out of the habit of frequent scans of HNN, that means posting will probably get more scarce. On the other hand, the posts I do write will probably be longer than ten words now. Like, actual thoughts, not just bookmarks.

We'll see. I thought it was interesting to have caught up, anyway.

Ideas for small data projects

Here are some ideas. Here are some more (medically related).

GraphVizFiddle

Online diagramming and code display. Cool!

Hackathon starter

Node.js boilerplate to get a simple app up and running.

App analytics and tracking

A spare how-to.

FiveThirtyEight

A new era dawns in data journalism. Study these guys. Do that.

The 17 equations that changed the world

From Business Insider. When did they get to be such interesting journalists?

The Interlock Project

Another mental-map kind of thing presented as a public database.

Writing a planner

Here's an article about a STRIPS-like planner that chains together different calls to utilities according to the starting situation - I'd like to do this in the general case.

Replacing d3

Angular+pure SVG. For performance reasons? I don't know. Still cool.

BayesDB

This is cool - a Bayesian query layer on top of tabular data, I think.

Knwl.js

Test processing in JavaScript - cool!

Dynatables

Here's a neat jsQuery-based site component: the dynatable.

Obesity system influence map

I'm not sure what this really is - a kind of mind map of the interacting concepts and behavior patterns in the mind that influence obesity, more or less. I find it fascinating both from a technical standpoint and for the fact that it's an impressive map in and of itself.

Filed under mental models and diagramming...

JSONT

JSONT is a transformation processor for JSON with a specification format written in JSON containing simple templates. Kinda neat!

Shell explainer

This is utterly fantastic! Give it a shell command of arbitrary complexity and it will draw a nifty chart-slash-diagram with explanatory text for it. I love this.

wxPython for plotting

What it says.

Free (open source) website designs

This is interesting.

Chef

Here's a neat how-to about using Chef to provision a server (Rails and PostgreSQL).

COM stuff

And then there is just a whole passel of stuff about COM in Perl - again.

• Get the type name of a COM object
• A truly excellent rundown of C++ COMming.
• AutoHotKey can do it, too.
• Getting to the Registry in Perl is boring.
• Registry.
• ProgIDs in the Registry - this would probably be a smaller doable module.
• Registry. Registry.
• And finally Tcl for the win with COM!

GetMessage

I already used this page when writing Win32::MessageLoop. Easy stuff.

The PuzzlOR

A programming competition, quarterly, with lots of ML-type stuff.

Spreadsheet in JS

Tiny little thang.

Robot game in Python

Another one of those games where you define robots and they compete.

Advanced R programming

Another tutorial.

Deep learning 101

The latest!

Fourier toy

So. Pretty.

More Windows stuff

You can also use IE.ExecWB to download stuff using IE on Windows. You can do a lot of interesting automation on Windows, it's just that today's Windows security models make it a royal pain. For the obvious reasons, of course - they're trying to slow down the botnets.

Statistics Done Wrong

What the title says. "The woefully complete guide." I'd be willing to bet it's not.

Trials and tribulations of IE::Mechanize

So yeah, Internet Explorer is a very broken and odd application, everybody knows it. In November I hurled myself into that breach, and here are some of the links I ran across in the attempt to figure out how to use Perl under Windows.

• The OLE IE API.
• Capturing IE screenshots with Perl using Imager::Screenshot, a tasty module that looks quite useful.
• Navigation between security domains silently starts a new IE instance, so OLE automation breaks. Thanks, Bill. Here are some clues about keeping that handle, which really use some stupid shit.
• And how to find the IWebBrowser object given an HWND. Again - stupid. Direct link to the sanctioned hack. And again in Perl (quite a useful link). And on StackOverflow.
• SAMIE is a non-CPAN competitor of IEMech, who knew? Also obsolete at the moment.
• A little more information about the security (integrity level) problem with IE>7. It might be solvable with this method. However, for the sake of testing I discovered a workaround with the Mark of the Web (oy): motw. (If it weren't for the fact that everything Microsoft does is this hacked...)
• Then the Monks come up with a beaut: accessing C++ COM objects from Perl. This can probably be polished up and made usable. Another take on it here, I believe.
• Counterpoint, kinda.
• More obsolete Windows manipulation.
• Here's something I bookmarked about IE security management. This might also have something to do with it. Or this might.
• The security zone for a given WebBrowser object can be downgraded, but not upgraded. I think.
• A nice way to manipulate package stashes in XS.

WinFF - open source video manipulation

Open-source video conversion project.

Tweetylicious

Microblogging in one Mojolicious file.

Bioblender

Blender for biology, and grist for that mill.

Analog literals for C++

Cute. This is kind of along the lines of what I'd like to do for layout in Decl.

Superhero.js

A kind of best-practices for JavaScript.

Generating test data for databases

Possibly a useful tool.

The RESTful cookbook - best practices

I like cookbooks.

Serving Django statics

Serving Django statics, from SendHub.

Intro to Bayesian methods

Bayesian stuff.

Twitter mining with Avivore

Avivore. [hnn].

3-instruction Forth

For convenient embedding.

Sprite-based games with HTML5 Canvas

Cool!

But a full list of HTML5 gaming engines is better found here, with rankings by feature and price. Scirra's Construct 2 appears to be the current winner, at a basic price of GBP 79 and going up to GBP 259.

Gambit-C Scheme for small-footprint native applications

Interesting.

Twilio SIP

Still need to work out VoIP.

XKCD sort

Infinite monkeys meet sorting, courtesy of xkcd 1185 [hnn].

Lua scripting

And what it means for Wikipedia and open source.

Benjen

Yet another static blog generator.

OverAPI

Roughly a million API cheat sheets.

First five minutes

First five minutes troubleshooting a server.

This one weird kernel trick

Oneweirdkerneltrick. Very meta.