INS and DEL elements re-discovered and used for version control. HTML document's version
history kept within itself.
HTML pages as containing structure and storing their contents in separate files. Easier for everyone to deal with and splits up your page into logical pieces.
Martin Fowler wrote a brief article about composing regular expressions in order to make it easier to deal with individual "tokens" and to give them structure.
Someone over at Juice Analytics published a nifty little chart that uses Python and NodeBox. Each item in the chart is a bubble with a number. The idea is that the larger numbers have larger bubbles and are easier to see. Edward Tufte may have a thing or to say about this and would probably call it "chart junk", but let's assume it isn't.
While the visuals look cool, NodeBox only runs on Mac OS X at the moment. That just won't do! I'm running on GNU/Linux and I want some graphical goodness. I decided to convert it from the Python/NodeBox code to Processing. Processing is a visualization tool that is built on Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.
The code isn't perfect and there is a lot of ugliness in terms of processing the data, but I'll be damned if this doesn't run on 3 platforms. Okay, okay, it looks a little off-center. It's close enough and it shows that Processing can handle all sorts of visuals. Since this is Processing, you can just click here to view the whole thing instead of a static image :)
In Processing Hack Week news...this past week, I've received two replies to my requests for task lists from the various Processing derivative projects. One from the Ruby-Processing developer and the other from the Clojure-Processing developer. The other news is that the GIT-repo for Processing is coming together.
A long time ago, I wrote a blog post and some code that validates file uploads in Django. In the last week, it seems a lot of people have been interested in the post and since Django finally has a stable 1.0 release, I thought I would update the previous blog post.
On Friday I was bitching about the lack of websites that can import FOAF profiles. A lot of the popular ones like Twitter and LiveJournal can export them, but they don't seem to be able to import them and make use of the actual FOAF data. A portable file format only works when you can both import and export the data.
7 August 2008, A very small gathering of Lisp users at the LinuxCaffe. Abram showed the inner workings of the game Abuse which uses Lisp for almost everything, except the core (which is written in C, this is similar to how Emacs works). An interesting question asked was whether or not the Abuse Lisp dialect supported macros, it seemed that the custom "macros" were all coded in C and thus untouchable. Next, a crazy mod that turns the game into a game of Super Mario was shown.
The disadvantages and misuse of car, cdr, caaaaar, cadaddarr, etc. were also mentioned. The consensus is that once you're using cadr, caddr, what you really want to be doing is creating a structure or object. That way you can access things by a descriptive name. An example of why this is a good idea is given by xmls, an XML parser. It parses XML and turns it into a giant list, with the first element being the element tag name, the second element being a list of element attributes, and the rest of this list being child elements. This can be tedious to navigate through.
Libraries for Scheme were also mentioned. The drawbacks of the various dialects of Scheme are that the specification does not define even the basics of common ways of dealing with libraries. Because of this, when you switch Schemes, you have to re-discover libraries that do what you want. This is an old complaint of course.
Lisp images and program startup costs were discussed in relation to Perl, PHP and Smalltalk. Some Lisps have the ability to dump a memory image and reload that later on. This improves the startup time since libraries are already loaded and not re-loaded or re-compiled. I noted that there doesn't seem to be a culture of image-sharing in the Lisp community as there is in the Smalltalk community. One reason suggested for this is that some Lisps run on 64-bit architectures and others run on 32-bit, which means code needs to re-compiled anyway. Perl and PHP were said to have no way of image dumping and this is particularly problematic for PHP since it seems to rebuild things for each website request. (This may be incorrect or a non-problem)
Finally, I mentioned traits in Smalltalk. Traits are collections of methods that can be used by classes and overridden (or not). Eiffel seems to have something similar, as does Ruby with mixins. Here is the paper that explains the idea more fully[PDF].
Kenny Tilton, the man
behind Cells
and Theory Y
Algebra, asked
why the special variable *default-pathname-defaults* is
named that way. Pascal Costanza comes up
with an
answer and asks his own question in return,
Do you guys also worry about important problems?
Xach made some cool charts inspired by Tufte and stream graphs. The first chart shows movie box office data, while the second shows the version control activity of CMUCL and SBCL.
The charts were made using Vecto, a simple vector drawing library for Common Lisp.
This is a nice update for cl-cairo2 users. Now cl-cairo2 loads only OS-independent parts of the library, with the OS-dependent parts becoming parts of extension packages.
Lisp Quiz is inspired by Ruby Quiz which was inspired by Perl Quiz of the week. Ruby Quiz and Perl Quiz were weekly programming challenges, and Lisp Quiz hopes to do the same for the Lisp community. The first quiz tackles Minesweeper, having you design an algorithm that wins the game.
LispForum, launched on 27 June 2008, is another place for Lisp-related discussion. It is run by Dave Roberts, the blogger who is behind the Finding Lisp blog. They have added a new sub-forum for Lisp Quiz puzzles which are supposed to be similar to the Ruby Quiz puzzles.
What's interesting about LispForum is that it's new (almost 2 months old, only!) and it already has 296 members. There are already 443 posts about Common Lisp, though there don't appear to be many Scheme fans. So we have yet another forum to recommend to newbie Lisp programmers.
UPDATE: This post has been updated so the code will work with Django 1.0
While working on Clapton, the Django-based Content Management System (CMS), I had to write validation code for file uploads. This is needed because Clapton contains applications specific to media types such as documents which requires Word Documents, PDFs or OpenDocumentFormat files, and podcasts which requires MP3 or OGG files. But how do you guarantee that the right files are uploaded? By using Django's custom fields and newforms module.
A reddit user by the name of alanshutko stated what was necessary to make Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, and other non-mainstream languages more appealing to the average programmer.
Compare that with the types of simple programs we see in Perl and Python. "I have a bunch of files, and I want to rename them all according to some pattern." Common problem, easy solution. "I've got a log file full of email addresses, I need to strip them out from the log entries, remove duplicates, and add them to a database." Again, fairly simple, fairly small, really useful. When Haskell can compete on those types of problems, it'll be easier to induce people to learn it. (Same with CL, my fav language....)
So here is a Scheme program that does this. It is written to use MzScheme because that's the only Scheme I have installed in Windows at the moment. Thus, it takes advantage of PLaneT and the other libraries that come with MzScheme.
Hopefully this can convince others that Scheme is a good language for common tasks.
