The point of macros
Posted in workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Feb 28th, 2007 No Comments »
Pascal Costanza nails the point of macros.
(and illustrates why lispers actually like lisp’s strange syntax so much)
Archive for February, 2007
First dynamically balancing walking robot
Posted in General, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly, ai on Feb 27th, 2007 2 Comments »
I find this sort of thing really exciting: Trevor Blackwell’s ‘Dexter’ robot finally walks!. There’s a video and everything!
From Paul Graham’s post:
There are of course [other] biped robots that walk. The Honda Asimo is the best known. But the Asimo doesn’t balance dynamically. Its walk is preprogrammed; if you had it walk twice across the […]
Multithreading links
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, concurrency on Feb 22nd, 2007 3 Comments »
First up, Ridiculous Fish’s article on shared-memory multithreading makes a good case for why testing often isn’t likely to find mt bugs.
This is one of those ‘how deep does the rabbit-hole go?’ kind of posts, and is well worth a read.
The characterisation of modern CPUs being vastly optimised for single-threaded code is one I hadn’t […]
Scheme development environment
Posted in General, programming, scheme on Feb 21st, 2007 2 Comments »
I recently had my work laptop nicked while I was in paris, so I’ve had to reconstruct my linux development environment on another laptop. That reminded me that I intended to document this stuff since I had to dig around a bit for it when I first picked up scheme a few months ago.
Things I […]
Transactional Memory is the wrong path to concurrency
Posted in General, workfriendly, concurrency on Feb 8th, 2007 2 Comments »
I’m on a sleepy late train home from London to Birmingham (trying to avoid the snow and inevitable rail problems tomorrow). This woke me up:
Patrick Logan says STM “…would be the most tragic turn imaginable for programming in the 21st century.”
Very wrong. And it is scaring me how shiny this thingy looks in so […]
Microsoft to support OpenID
Posted in General, OpenID, workfriendly, identity on Feb 7th, 2007 6 Comments »
Microsoft, Verisign, Sxip and JanRain have announced that they will all support the OpenID protocol in their upcoming products. Kim Cameron has the scoop (but then he would have, being the ‘Chief Architect of Identity’ at Microsoft).
Looks like we might have our web identity winner. Maybe, finally, this will be the year of web […]
