GAE for static file hosting

A post noting that App Engine is actually another valid strategy for hosting static files.  That's pretty cool.

Tern

Tern is to be a JavaScript analysis engine for embedding into editors.  The author made his Kickstarter goal, so the code will be open (still not sure what I think of this trend).

I'm ambivalent about Tern per se, but I really like the general idea of parsing editors; it's halfway to a semantic editor.

A couple of JavaScript posts

And here are a couple of neat site-design JS posts from this last week:

• donuts - by Mattia Larentis
• Breaking down Amazon’s mega dropdown - Ben Kamens

A couple of sysadmin/security posts

Two good ones:

• My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers | Bryan Kennedy
• mmb.pcb.ub.es/~carlesfe/unix/tricks.txt

That last one has a lot of stuff I don't see great use for (personally) but I want to kind of get a little database of snippets going for this kind of thing.

NoSQL pondering

This guy seems to have some good thoughts about databases.  I should probably read more of him.

Authorea

Authorea is a scientific publication-specific editor in the browser.  That's pretty rock-n-roll.  Free for open science publications, paid for private publications.  Nice model!

More accounting

• SQL-Ledger ERP
• Its newer fork Open Source ERP: accounting, CRM and more | LedgerSMB
• And command-line based Ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system

I'm really looking for the back end here, essentially an accounting ORM or something.  It ought to be easy to extract that from SQL-Ledger/LedgerSMB.

Note that both of those are firmly PostgreSQL-based.  I don't particularly want to be bound to a single database system, because I think the overall concepts should be defined at a higher level.  They're not interested in that approach (quoting the LedgerSMB guys), so extraction is probably my best bet.

Also it would be good to compare-and-contrast with OpenERP and Sage ERP.  And anything else I can find.  The usual plan.  Probably on the usual timetable.  Sigh.

PHP still the right tool for many applications

This same question keeps coming up, but this answer is a good one.  Tl;dr: the usual - PHP is ubiquitous and reliable.  End of story.

PaperPort .MAX files

I've still got about 85 PaperPort .MAX files from 2004-2006 when we had a scanner bundled with the format.  It's proprietary, which is a real pain now that I no longer have the software to read it.  None of the files are drop-dead crucial, but it turns out there's no converter available at all.  And I'm hardly the only person in this pickle.  Proprietary formats are a Bad Thing.

Well, but honestly - how hard could it possibly be to come up with something that could convert these to a bitmap or something?

That would be an interesting exercise in file format management.  I should do it.  I already know the first four bytes.

Memetracker

Considering, just for a moment, that I might take up the practice of following blogs (which would be stupid because I don't even have time for the things I already do right now), I looked at tools for following blogs, and from there to the concept of a memetracker, and from there came to a Drupal module of that name looking for a maintainer.

I could see that.

But yeah.  Meme tracking.

• Memetracker.org - moribund, but follow the authors' links for loads of interesting things.
• Data from Memetracker - for 2008 and 2009 in support of a paper.  As is the whole site, it appears.  I could see doing that, too.

Tiled Text Engine

Here's a really neat concept in editing of parsed text.  I like this a lot.

Math/pattern/Mathematica blog

This entire Tumblr blog is just fantastic.  It makes me want to do this stuff, too.

Some more that he links to (note I'm not even troubling myself to pretty the links up):

• http://blog.matthen.com/
• http://iomikron.tumblr.com/
• http://sayitwithscience.tumblr.com/
• http://spookyactioncollective.tumblr.com/
• http://notationnotes.tumblr.com/
• http://tumblr.wblut.com/
• http://wowgreat.tumblr.com/
• http://homespungeometry.tumblr.com/

CSS for layout considered dangerous

This is a little old, but its point is very well-taken.  For tabular layout, just use a freaking table.

Neural networks

I need to spend more time with personal development.

Data sources

Another cool post about finding neat data sets.

Crowdfunding science

Seems like steam-engine time for scientific crowdfunding.  I love Internet disruption.

Nice task manager

Droptask.

Literals

An exhaustive list of ways to encode literal data in programming languages.  Kind of neat.

The Chaos Monkey

I like this; a post on Amazon's approach to scalability: they have a Chaos Monkey that randomly takes down their component servers to see if the remainder are really running as resiliently and failing as gracefully as they should.

That's brilliant.

Literate programming reprise

So Jeremy Ashkenas has a post on literate CoffeeScript, which is a feature of 1.5, apparently.  And he links to Knuth's own CWEB write-up of ADVENTURE, the original adventure game.

As always when reading Knuth, it makes me think.  One of the thoughts it provoked yesterday was this.  Literate programming as currently conceived has been criticized as not being sufficiently cognizant of the practice of reusability - which is true.  On the other hand, it might actually be nice to track the evolution of subroutines (say) from version to version as one's own skill and knowledge of a given domain grows.

In other words, reusability in the form of a library is also not the end goal.  You can kind of reconstruct the history of a concept in git.  Kind of.  I've never actually done it.  But it might be interesting to have some kind of index of code at (yeah) a semantic or descriptive level that explicitly makes it clear what it is supposed to do and how it reflects increasingly refined knowledge of the domain.

I'm having troubles articulating this.  Hopefully this flailing around will be enough for me to reconstruct the notion later.