Impulse Tracker open-sourced

Impulse Tracker was an influential piece of software in the 90's electronic music scene (and is doubtless still influential today, but isn't used as much, naturally). Its author just open-sourced the whole thing. It would be an interesting code understanding/exegesis target.

Generating mazes and dungeons

Truly fascinating and well-written article on maze/dungeon generation, with interactive JS illustrations. This is the kind of writing about programming I love. [hnn]

Really teensy ELF executables

Binary data parsing - well, reverse binary data parsing... or something. Cool article, anyway.

Introduction to Data Analysis

Online course material.

Remote controlling browsers

So a significant portion of "business things" that a workflow/business process system has to handle consist of things done in browsers.

Sure, sure, you can automate Web things effectively with a bot, but sometimes what you're controlling is a JavaScript application that, honestly, will only run well in an actual browser. It's a pain, but there you go.

One avenue has traditionally been IEMech (moribund at the moment due to OLE/COM complexity that has changed in later versions), but there are also different remote control solutions available for Firefox and Chrome.

Firefox's FF-Remote-Control is a great little add-on that works quite well. For the time being, therefore, Firefox is going to be my automated browser of choice even though Chrome is currently my actual browser.

For Chrome, the situation is somewhat different, as Chrome's security model doesn't permit an add-on to listen on a port. As a result, the Chromi extension hits a running server on localhost (the Chromix remote-control system). It doesn't seem as flexible as FF-Remote-Control, but I haven't spent much time with it yet.

So: for now, Firefox.

Rant

Rant is a language for random text generation. Looks pretty neat!

Fuzz testing

Fuzz testing is throwing randomly perturbed inputs at a given piece of software to see what breaks. I was entirely unaware of the state of the art of fuzz testing, though. afl-fuzz is a tool that watches the execution traces of its target while reacting to the input. It can synthesize a legal bash script from nothing, by watching how bash reacts to different byte sequences. (And it discovered that bash vulnerability that made everybody upgrade last month or so.)

To which I can only say: holy Toledo. I have seen the future.

It discovered CDATA sections in XML. Randomly. Against the expectations of its author, who says, "it's an example of the fuzzer defiantly and secretly working around one of its intentional and explicit design limitations". Evolution is weird. Almost magic.

It made a legal JPG from the seed string "Hello" - again, by noticing different execution paths taken in response to different bytes of input. Here are some test sets for graphics. Interesting stuff.

Breadcrumb

Just a note on progress, for later calibration of my past timelines: I've got Decl 2.0 parsing working rather nicely (still a few loose ends) and I have an excellent plan for integrating it into a notes application for literate programming. I think the combination will end up being something pretty powerful.

My first real target for transformational exegesis using this kind of tool will be Melanie Mitchell's Copycat - I want to get it converted to Clojure so it will run on something I actually own. But I'm also exploring various programming sequences and contests as a way of provoking thought about the actual writing of software.

Anyway, that's all pretty jargon-laden but it means something to me. At a later date I hope to circle back around and write about this stuff in more detail, but I'm not in that phase of the cycle at the moment.

Clappr: open-source media player

Here's a cool thing: Clappr is an open-source pluggable media player for the Web.

UFla Sparse Matrix Collection

A nifty set of real-world sparse matrices, with links to programming challenges and algorithms. Not to mention pretty pictures.

Ransom: the new spam?

So online extortion is a thing. And it seems that vigilante justice, the old-fashioned way, might be an answer. [hnn]

Corporate BS generator

Cute.

Euclidean Rhythm Generator

Kewl.

Language-oriented programming

Oddly, following the Wikipedia list of different programming paradigms to "language-oriented programming" led me right back to MPS, and a raft of fascinating articles by Martin Fowler about the notion of a "language workbench". [Here], [here], and [here].

Chief among the things that people seem iffy about in LOP is the idea that the stored representation is in fact no longer text (and what that does to version control) - but you know what? Decl is probably an ideal representation language for a DSL-oriented approach (one of the things I was struggling towards in the first iteration) and is entirely text-based.

So that begs further exploration.

Constraint programming

Wikipedia on constraint programming. I'm working through a mathematical modeling course and linear programming is a subset of this.

Back to basics - strings

Joel on Software on strings and algorithmic complexity.

Eco

Holier Toledo! Eco is a text editor that parses arbitrary languages on the fly and allows you to insert "language boxes" to embed other languages within them. The data structure actually saved is the composite parse tree, not the text, which is mildly alarming given the reliance of the existing programming infrastructure on text source code (although Laurence Tratt, the editor's promulgator, notes that Smalltalk has solved many of these problems).

This is really quite attractive. I can't think of a good reason it couldn't be duplicated in something along the lines of Padre, using Marpa.

JetBrains MPS

Holy Toledo - this is amazing! It's an editor/DSL integrated environment that allows you to compose your own DSLs into code in the editor, then autogenerate the output language when needed - through multiple levels of abstraction if necessary. Just watching the demo screencasts is making me smarter.

Anyway, this is kind of what I want to do, except, like the emperor in Amadeus, I find there are "too many notes". I need more simplicity. Maybe. Although damn. It sure is pretty. There's one embedded decision table - right in the C code - that gets translated into a C-like language with a "gswitch" statement and then further into straight C. That is tasty.

Binary patching on the fly

Binary patching is a cool notion (not the first time I've said that), but this is the first time I've considered that it might be done on the fly as a binary comes down over the wire. That's pretty freaking radical, actually.

Flood

Flood seems to be primarily an editor for solid shapes to be made using 3D fabrication - but to get there, it implements a visual programming language that also embeds JavaScript.

Which is so incredibly cool.