Semantic programming

Open-source target: Bookmarkly

2012-02-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

A quick node.js bookmarking site example, open-sourced by Dan Grossman. [HNN]

JavaScript fractal viewer

2012-02-03T13:55:00.000-08:00

YAJSFW. This one's very smooth.

Mental models of software

2012-02-03T09:39:00.001-08:00

While hacking (just a very little) on the Fly stenography tutorial in Python, getting it to run on Windows, I was musing a little bit about just how I do that. How do I get from a general description of task ("Make this run on Windows.") to actually making the changes to the code needed to get things running?

Clearly, the initial thing is to build a mental model of the software, then - guided by that model - look at the specific parts of the code that might be problematic. But what does that mental model look like?

Embarrassingly, I haven't dedicated any time at all to researching the literature in mental models of programming, despite having written a blog called Semantic Programming for two years. A good place to start might be with this paper (CMU and Microsoft Research) and its citations.

A brief sketch of the mental model I've built of Fly might be something like this:

The "main" file sets up the UI, then starts the thread; the thread starts the Plover listener and then goes into a standard Pygame loop.
During each turn around the loop, Fly checks up on all the parts of the UI, checks and handles keyboard and mouse events, and redraws the UI appropriately.

... You know, writing it all down would be impossible. (Which is why nobody ever does.) It is literally easier to just poke around in the code for a day, which is essentially the problem with programming. How do you get from code to a simulated mental model? That's probably more important.

Codecademy now accepting lessons from the masses

2012-01-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

They support lessons in Javascript, Python, and Ruby; this might not be a bad place to earn some street cred.

Productivity technique

2012-01-31T20:20:00.001-08:00

So it turns out that a lot of Silicon Valley companies use a weekly review of tasks accomplished and goals set as a productivity tool. That's kinda neat and could easily be used in personal projects as well.

I'd go so far as to say that expression of this type of goal/achievement could be a valuable part of the documentation process for any software.

Big Data links

2012-01-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

A few things about big data:

A book on best practices by Marz and Ritchie. You can pre-read it as well. I'm thinking about it. [hnn thread]
The data science toolkit, a specialized Linux VM for download with lots of juicy databases and tools preinstalled and a common API.
Real-time feed processing with Storm. Storm abstracts out the queue-workers pattern into an infrastructure component. Interesting stuff.

Bash scripts

2012-01-26T19:58:00.000-08:00

Interesting article on some techniques for writing bash shell scripts. I'm wondering if this would be an interesting target for Decl, actually. Maybe in the deployment domain?

Finding resources on the Semantic Web

2012-01-26T19:41:00.000-08:00

SparQL and the Semantic Web, and finding resources using semantic markup.

Econophysics

2012-01-26T19:39:00.000-08:00

Did you know econophysics existed? I didn't, but now I want to be an econophysicist when I grow up. It involves the study of large populations of (simulated) actors in an economic framework, like this: cartels are an epiphenomenon.

So cool!

Scaling PHP

2012-01-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

Now that Oracle owns MySQL, MySQL-related articles are at Oracle. It's weird. Anyway, here's one about scaling PHP/MySQL applications.

A couple of posts about hating programming

2012-01-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

A post last week, "I want to fix programming," suggests that declarative programming (keeping around the "why" of what you're doing instead of the "how") would be a step up from what we're doing, and adds a couple of neat magic keywords that indicate how it might be done. Color me unconvinced, though, because just saying what you're doing and hoping the compiler is going to get it right might require a little too much from the compiler.

His specific case is a sort algorithm - he just specifies what he wants from the sort, and the compiler would do the sort. Well, I still think the answer there is to tell the compiler: "sort this stuff". Now I don't have to look at his constraints and say, "Well, wait a minute, that's a sort." If I were talking to a colleague, I wouldn't say, "All the elements of this list should match those in the other, with the constraint that each element in the list is less than the one after it." I'd say, "We'll sort this list." Then I'd look up a sort algorithm, and later, down the road, if it turned out that sort was a performance bottleneck, I'd maybe look for a better sort algorithm.

Just specifying the constraints is not enough. You're still losing information if you don't have a machine-readable set of semantics of what you're doing. (I say that as though this was already achievable with today's tools, when of course it mostly isn't, but you see my point.)

This week, we have a response, "Yup, programming is borked," and makes the cogent point that formalization of requirements is the key - and then still goes off the rails with brand-new syntax that's not human language or anything like it. He's got some interesting ideas, and is looking at authoring systems for non-programmers, which I find pretty fascinating, but I think he's still getting lost somewhere along the way.

I remain convinced that a hierarchical set of semantic views, preserved in the final program, is the way to go. Each part of the program not only has formal syntax defining it, but a conceptual framework indicating what it does, why it's done that way, changes that were made along the way, related tests (which can be seen as constraints) or even constraints (which can be seen as tests) - the whole ball of wax is right there and amenable to software manipulation. Changed requirements can then drill down right to the code that must be changed, and with sufficient sophistication, you could imagine that tools could make suggestions or even rewrite the formal syntax to conform to the requirements.

That's the goal.

Task: file upload/download and manipulation center

2012-01-25T19:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a thought: I keep running into various reasons to have a place where you could upload a file and have various tools run on it. Given the closure of MegaUpload, just the ability to share files within workgroups would be a useful spinoff of that.

So that's now an official task: write this platform.

Google Code search algorithm

2012-01-20T21:25:00.001-08:00

This is a pretty neat article by the guy that wrote the search engine for Google Code.

Visualizing sorting algorithms with Python and Cairo

2012-01-19T21:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice article about visualizing sorting algorithms [github] - but I like the fact that the graphics generated are really nice-looking. They use the Cairo graphics engine, which I clearly need to examine more closely.

More recently, the same guy did some visualizations of malware.

Conficker

2012-01-19T20:33:00.001-08:00

Well, now I know when I was laying down these old bookmarks: ReadWriteWeb wrote about the Conficker virus in 2009. I toss this in here because malware is fun.

openFrameworks

2012-01-19T20:14:00.000-08:00

I ran across openFrameworks in September; it's the framework used to build that real-time video face mapper. The framework itself is pretty interesting, and it would be fascinating to write a domain for it in Decl - I'm having the same thoughts about Pygame, actually, the basis for the Fly steno tutorial I'm porting to Windows.

Anyway, I was just perusing old bookmarks and found a fascinating link to aesthetics reading for programmers that just begs for followup, and that guy's blog has some newer posts that reference openFrameworks - he's written a crawler for Github that automatically indexes add-ons and catalogs them at ofxaddons.com.

There's something like a language for ... creative ... stuff developing there. I get these glimpses of it. This is another lead to follow up when I have more time.

Data mining: similarity

2012-01-18T10:50:00.001-08:00

Nice little article on similarity metrics.

Twitter influence graph on SOPA

2012-01-18T10:49:00.001-08:00

Nice visualization. I'm a sucker for this stuff.

Clay: programming language

2012-01-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

Clay is a programming language based on C that has lambdas and some other nice modern features. Very attractive-looking, actually.

1% map - income percentiles on a map of the US

2012-01-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

Fantastic income analysis from the NYT. Oh, and another!

AI game design

2012-01-14T21:28:00.001-08:00

So AI game design is a thing: given a set of possible games defined by the pieces available, board, etc., come up with a "good" set of rules. What a "good" game is seems ... really human, but some exploration of using AI programming techniques to augment human game design has been done.

Here's a neat article. It's about exploring a very small game set using "Shibumi" equipment (released in October of 2011), which consists of a 4x4 set of holes and three colors of marbles to be played on those holes and stacked on one another to make pyramids. That totals up to 30 possible positions, which can be empty, white, black, or red (two bits each), so the set of possible board positions is encoded in 60 bits.

Turns out evolution isn't so hot for game design - the universe is too uneven to allow much gradual improvement. They've been having success with "Monte Carlo tree search", building trees using a semi-random process. Kind of neat. They want to compare it with GA in finding new games in this universe.

Their fitness function has to be playability as judged by a human.

Here's a notion: judge playability by determining how challenging it is to evolve a good player. Or something. That is to say, automate both ends of the process.

Self-adaptive honeypots

2012-01-14T20:27:00.001-08:00

Neat thesis about a system for self-adapting honeypots that analyze attacker behavior and try to learn more about the attacker.

Analyzing github projects by language

2012-01-14T20:26:00.001-08:00

Interesting little project attempting to compare project behavior between languages.

Flashbake

2012-01-14T20:22:00.000-08:00

A rolling git update of works in progress, imagined and used by Cory Doctorow. It autoupdates your current working files to git and marks them with the current weather and some other indicators of what you might have been thinking. Really neat idea.

Chatter about machine learning

2012-01-14T20:20:00.000-08:00

... well, data management. However you want to classify it, I found it interesting.

Rolling your own map widgets

2012-01-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

Google Maps is going to a usage cap model that means serious money for biggish sites with map embeds. One enterprising real estate site looked around and realized they could roll their own for less. Lots of interesting stuff going on in mapping these days.

Twitter Bootstrap generator

2012-01-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

Closer and closer....

Data analysis of Twitter to determine you want to learn Objective-C

2012-01-13T09:07:00.000-08:00

I find this kind of project fascinating every time: analysis of tweeted jobs to find popular keywords, with nice graphics. Learn Objective-C in 2012, apparently.

Configuration management tools suck

2012-01-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

A state-of-the-art look at configuration management. And it sucks. That makes me interested.

OpenTag translation XML formats

2012-01-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

I need to think harder about declarative formats in XML. Here's an example.

Feedback models of big data usage

2012-01-13T08:59:00.001-08:00

Interesting article at O'Reilly on modeling the use of data in companies. Feedback being good.

STUPID, GRASP, and SOLID in PHP

2012-01-13T08:58:00.001-08:00

Some good advice on PHP coding and object model maintenance.

Malware deobfuscation

2012-01-13T08:57:00.001-08:00

I'm always a sucker for this. A good article here.

NPZ visualizer

2012-01-10T19:44:00.001-08:00

A Processing model of a neat biological system. Very cool.

Infer.NET

2012-01-10T19:25:00.000-08:00

ML in .NET. Weird.

PDFminer

2012-01-10T18:43:00.001-08:00

PDFminer is a Python library for extracting information from PDFs.

iText PDF API

2012-01-10T18:27:00.000-08:00

I'd forgotten about this, but it's a pretty slick-looking Java/C# (?) library for working with PDF. Oughta go into the domain.

Patterns and boilerplate

2012-01-10T16:49:00.000-08:00

A couple of old ones, and a couple of new ones. I really think patterns and boilerplate are a key component of the semantic approach, and for some reason they're cropping up in my daily reading today.

Designing social interfaces - a Wiki with about 100 user interaction patterns; also a book.
UI patterns - I'm pretty sure this has been linked from this blog before.
Flask boilerplate
Backbone.js boilerplate
Pattern tap - these are more design elements, perhaps.
Yahoo! design pattern library, of course
Patternry open UI patterns

Ooooold bookmarks - D

2012-01-10T16:21:00.001-08:00

The D programming language is a replacement for C that isn't C++. I have yet to really look hard, but it actually looks pretty nice.

This is the first of a long list of programming bookmarks from way back that I'm going to serialize onto this blog so I don't lose them.

Speaking of mail

2012-01-08T15:48:00.001-08:00

Nobody seems to be able to manage to provide a mail aggregator and stay in business.

Overview of mbox formats

2012-01-08T15:47:00.001-08:00

Good overview of mbox formats.

Veneer: modal dialogs in JS

2012-01-08T15:46:00.001-08:00

Simple little library for modal display dialogs.

Fbootstrapp: Facebook design bootstrap

2012-01-08T15:45:00.001-08:00

And as long as we're talking about design, here's a Facebook answer to the Twitter bootstrap.

Excellent post on learning design

2012-01-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here. Lots and lots of good resources linked there.

Social network sleuthing

2012-01-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

Neat post on how social network charting was used to bust some slumlord fraudsters in Chicago. [hnn] Prompted a post of this fascinating picture, which was generated at least in part with this code. Finally also prompted a link to sharesleuth.com, a Mark Cuban project tracking securities fraud. I do so love reading about detective work.

Database design mistakes

2012-01-06T19:46:00.000-08:00

Interesting post with five common database design mistakes. This is the kind of best-practice knowledge that should eventually be boiled down into domains.

Target application: translation service provider suite

2012-01-06T19:42:00.001-08:00

I've wanted to build this for a while - and in the meantime, somebody else did. Here's the link. I need to mine it for features. Meanwhile I have a possible business partner wanting to build something like this; it's possible it will be Drupal-based and start from Open Atrium.

Dreadnot for continuous deployment

2012-01-06T19:40:00.000-08:00

Rackspace just open-sourced their continuous deployment tool. Interesting move - and it makes me want (again) to start thinking harder about that software component database.

The Oatmeal: How to make your shopping cart suck less

2012-01-06T19:39:00.001-08:00

The Oatmeal with some excellent usability advice that simultaneously makes you laugh until your solar plexus hurts.

Data on tutoring

2012-01-06T19:38:00.001-08:00

I happen to think that the education industry is ripe for some upheaval; on that note, here's Tutorspree with some interesting data from their 2011 work.

Government documents as grist for the mill

2012-01-06T19:36:00.001-08:00

Another fascinating archive of large amounts of messy government text: the government attic. In particular interesting for their recent posting of (a lot of) FBI documents pertaining to the security of telephone services.

Futurist strategy

2012-01-06T19:35:00.001-08:00

Here's a neat BoingBoing post of all things, presenting more or less "how to be a futurist". It would be interesting to boil these down into usable tools.

Decision tables

2012-01-06T19:33:00.001-08:00

Here's a neat old technique I actually remember reading about long ago - and had forgotten about just as thoroughly as the rest of the industry had forgotten about it. Decision tables. A great user-responsive way to define complex logic.

Scrollorama

2012-01-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

A jQuery plugin for neat scrolling tricks. I gotta start figuring this stuff out.

K-means clustering on pixels in art

2012-01-01T15:57:00.000-08:00

Neat.

Dedicated hosting at a reasonable price

2011-12-30T16:40:00.000-08:00

I might move.

Top skills for 2012

2011-12-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

Just FYI.

Interesting cryptography/number theory library

2011-12-30T16:37:00.002-08:00

Interesting post on HNN recently (as always): a bloke whose uncle spent a lifetime implementing some pretty amazing algorithms just open-sourced them.

Perl and Twilio

2011-12-30T16:37:00.001-08:00

Who knew?

Perl documentation in the news

2011-12-30T16:34:00.001-08:00

OK, so there have been some efforts this year to get Perl looking as up-to-date as it actually is; the problem is that the language has been around so long that typical search results may be a decade old, even though the community has decisively moved on. Since competing languages haven't even been around, the result is that it looks like it's easier to do modern tasks in, say, Ruby - because that's what you see in relevant results.

My Lego inventory project should do well for this; it's a typical Web scraping database program that will make a good article. I just have to find out how to cross-post to, say, perl.com.

Waffles command-line ML toolset

2011-12-30T16:27:00.000-08:00

Waffles is a comprehensive set of command-line tools for doing machine learning and data mining.

I really, really need to sit down and do a survey/implementation tool thing.

Scaling a blog

2011-12-25T17:34:00.000-08:00

Another scaling article - worth reading, tomorrow.

Task: Lego inventory tracker

2011-12-25T17:28:00.001-08:00

This one's actually underway, a Christmas present for my son. I'll write it up separately somewhere - perhaps on the Vivtek site itself! (A blast from the past - I haven't written anything new there since probably 2009; Blogger has been so much more convenient.)

Task: News scraper/tracker

2011-12-25T17:24:00.001-08:00

I want to scrape the Reuters news feeds (later, others) into a database for various analytical purposes [eg]. That's going to consist of a daemon on my fileserver that checks the feeds on a period basis and loads things into a database. Then we'll do other analysis on that database. I'm most interested in linking stories and identifying trends.

Yeah, OK, I know this isn't groundbreaking research. It's new for me, though. And it will be a good microcosm of scraping tasks for declaratization as well as a valuable component for all kinds of things. So ... it's a task.

Trading platforms

2011-12-25T17:11:00.001-08:00

A couple of trading platforms that were advertised on a blog I follow. Probably stupid even to think about securities trading this year. Or next.

Trade Architect from TD Ameritrade.
OptionsHouse allows you to do simulated trading to start off and has flat trading fees for real trades. Interesting.

John Carmack on static code analysis

2011-12-25T17:10:00.002-08:00

Short version: DO IT.

2011 Visualization Roundup

2011-12-25T17:10:00.001-08:00

What it says on the tin.

Markov chains in Chutes and Ladders

2011-12-25T17:09:00.001-08:00

... Cute.

How startups succeed

2011-12-25T17:05:00.001-08:00

Good article. tl;dr:

Fire lots of bullets, not cannonballs (MVPs again)
Fanatic devotion to performance goals even when times are hard
Productive paranoia: cash in the bank, reduce risk whenever possible, anticipate killer strikes
Don't bet on luck. Bet on being good.
Seize opportunity when it arises.

Context.IO: mail replacement API?

2011-12-25T17:04:00.001-08:00

Looks neat.

Questions for startups

2011-12-25T17:03:00.001-08:00

Here's a funny little look at VC questions by a Croatian startup. Toss it into the slushpile.

Open source target: IndexTank

2011-12-25T17:02:00.001-08:00

IndexTank was bought by LinkedIn and is now open source. It's apparently also used by Reddit. I need to learn it.

20 sites pushing the limits of JS

2011-12-25T17:01:00.000-08:00

Another cool JS roundup.

DD-WRT

2011-12-25T16:56:00.000-08:00

... is the open-source firmware for my new router. I want to do per-MAC bandwidth tracking, and here are some leads.

From the dd-wrt forum.
Refers to Google code here.
Possibly upgraded here.

Probably my best bet is to assume a control panel on the local PC (which is the situation I've got) manipulating a remote "sensor head" on the router. The router doesn't have a huge amount of resources, after all.

Twilio set to explode

2011-12-25T16:55:00.000-08:00

I need to be on board. Patrick usually knows what he's talking about.

Data mining without prejudice

2011-12-25T16:53:00.000-08:00

Interesting article from MIT about a paywalled article in Science about a new technique for data mining developed at MIT, the upshot being apparently that it's doing curve fitting with no preconceived notions of the variables being fit. Or something. I need to read it after some sleep.

Open Government

2011-12-25T16:50:00.002-08:00

Another post about open gov - "Dear Internet, it's no longer OK not to know how Congress works", which is clever, but instead largely about disrupting the system with better political software, which I like.

25 Time-saving generators

2011-12-25T16:50:00.001-08:00

Another link-list Webdev post.

HTML too complex?

2011-12-25T16:47:00.000-08:00

And by HTML, I think the industry now means HTML+CSS+Canvas, as a Flash replacement. Interesting point here about "I'm too lazy to be a HTML dev" - which just means the level of abstraction is wrong.

And that's interesting.

Task: Write a Blogger to-do list manager

2011-12-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

I do my thinking aloud here and on other blogs, and one of the perennial problems I have with that is that Blogger has no particular way of dealing with task lists. (Boy, that sounds stupid, doesn't it?)

Seriously - a blog is a fantastic way of entering tagged text that could be scanned for tasks, progress notifications, and even completion of tasks in a structured way. Remember how I said Blogger has an API? Well, how about the following scheme, then?

1. Introduce a task by prefixing it in the title, like "Task: Write a Blogger to-do list manager". Then introduce the tag just by making up a tag for it, e.g. "todo list manager". The tag can now be a miniblog for the task, you see - for free.

2. Progress reports are just posted using the tag. Optionally, if you put a percentage in there, you could use it as a completion estimate.

3. Completion is also flagged in the title, with the word "complete".

4. The current to-do list can now be generated automagically with a simple script you run whenever the blog is updated (or periodically, or whatever). I'd personally write it as a Perl script against the Blogger API run on my local machine.

5. If you post any post named "To-do list" or something along those lines, the to-do list can be updated into it (say, at the end, or wherever a given comment appears). The current to-do list can link back to old to-do lists of historical interest, and you can just post another one whenever you feel it's appropriate.

6. The updater can even make sure that the current to-do list post is the one linked from a sidebar highlight. You could even put your to-do list on the sidebar (perhaps in an abbreviated form).

So. I should do this as soon as my vacation starts. And on that note, I'm going to get back to work to hasten that very day.

Startup escape path

2011-12-17T17:38:00.002-08:00

Swombat again. Toss it kind of into the "procedural" pile.

Big data predictions for 2012

2011-12-17T17:38:00.001-08:00

Interesting article, for which I have time measured in microseconds. It's more time than I have just to post a link to it here.

Google on bug prediction and Microsoft on empirical programming

2011-12-17T17:35:00.002-08:00

Neat post on HNN about bug prediction at the Goog; answered at HNN with a link to Microsoft's publications on empirical programming, many of which are mouthwatering. Gotta look at this when I have a minute.

Blogger has an API

2011-12-17T17:35:00.001-08:00

Blogger has an API. Lots of things have APIs, actually.

Research tools in Python

2011-12-17T17:34:00.001-08:00

Not sure how much of this is directly useful, but don't have time right now to figure it out. Good for statistics, perhaps.

Coroutines

2011-12-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

An absolutely thought-provoking presentation on co-routines in Python.

Things not to forget

2011-12-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

OK, so as soon as I've finished my current project-that-will-not-die, there are a few things I've been meaning to pay more attention to. Here is something like a list, roughly in order of age.

Paraphrasing tools. This is something I came up with a couple of years ago that would be a lot easier now that I've spent some time thinking harder about NLP.
HVPT word pair trainer.
Depatenting, still, I guess.
Despammed rebirth, possibly based on CRM114.
Practical PHP exercises as kata.
Run back through the big translation project management tasks from last spring in light of Windows automation.
Code structure examination of OpenLogos, finally.
In general, continue automation of my translation workflow.
The Heritage Health Prize. Even doing halfway decently on it would be good advertising.

That ought to keep me out of trouble for a while. Now I can close some windows.

Target application: Todoist.com

2011-12-17T17:24:00.000-08:00

Nice to-do/project manager application - but so very many of its features are premium! (Which is smart, sure. It's just that I've wanted to do a task manager [again] for a long time. And this one is ripe for analysis.)

Here's a top-ten list of Web to-do apps.

Infunl query language for clickpaths

2011-12-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

This is really, really neat. (examples here) I want to see more of this kind of thing.

Sketching UI

2011-12-13T18:58:00.001-08:00

Interesting article on designing UIs on, you know, paper.

Running R on the GPU

2011-12-13T18:57:00.001-08:00

I guess? (Can you tell I'm in a hurry this week?)

Tokenizing the Common Crawl corpus

2011-12-13T18:56:00.000-08:00

Interesting scalable approach.

ATS: programming language du jour

2011-12-13T18:55:00.000-08:00

ATS. Statically typed sysadmin language?

PDFMiner

2011-12-13T18:54:00.001-08:00

Python library for reading PDFs.

Evolutionary database design

2011-12-13T18:53:00.001-08:00

Heck, I haven't even had time to read this. Looks promising, though.

Programming in Syn

2011-12-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

OK, now here is a macro language to end all macro languages - Syn. The point of Syn is to provide a language that just operates on parse trees, and thus compiles to ... anything. Exactly where the code generation of Decl is aimed. Fascinating read!

Evolved to Win

2011-12-11T20:33:00.001-08:00

Ebook about GA evolution of gameplaying algorithms or strategies. Interesting stuff!

Target application: WildChords

2011-12-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Neat iPad app that listens to the mic on your iPad to analyze your guitar playing, then runs a game where you have to play particular chords to lead animals out of the zoo. Like Guitar Hero, except it actually teaches you to play the guitar!

The market cap is stupidly large. I mean, really stupidly large - do you know how many people want to learn an instrument? It's applying the superstimulus of gamification to allow you to reach a goal you desire. So I predict they're going to make money by the boatload.

I'd like to reverse engineer their signal processing (which they say is patent pending, to which I say boo!) and provide it for open-source games. That would be neat.

Infographic: What tools developers actually use

2011-12-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

Neat survey of 500 developers on what tools they use in different categories, presented in infographic form.

Tesseract 404 page

2011-12-07T17:38:00.001-08:00

Neat.