A high school teacher who assigned her class to plan a terrorist attack that would kill as many innocent people as possible had no intent to promote terrorism, the school principal said yesterday.

police:

It was also illegal to be "reckless as to whether these documents may assist or prepare for a terrorist attack".

via bruce schneier

so ... terrorist use high school homework as a base for their plots? do they parse all homeworks for plot ideas? if so, i no longer wonder they're mostly raving lunatics.

If prostitution were a typical industry, it might have hired political lobbyists to fight against the encroachment of premarital sex. They would have pushed to have premarital sex criminalised or, at the very least, heavily taxed.

vice work if you can get it

tldr: prostitution > programming

also in this article:

This taught the monkeys another valuable lesson: crime pays.

In classic Microsoft fashion, we produced an inferior product and won the "best T-shirt of the Year" award.

readme driven developement

It's important to distinguish Readme Driven Development from Documentation Driven Development. RDD could be considered a subset or limited version of DDD. By restricting your design documentation to a single file that is intended to be read as an introduction to your software, RDD keeps you safe from DDD-turned-waterfall syndrome by punishing you for lengthy or overprecise specification. At the same time, it rewards you for keeping libraries small and modularized. These simple reinforcements go a long way towards driving your project in the right direction without a lot of process to ensure you do the right thing.

pretty!

This is the creative lab and interactive playground of Hakim El Hattab. Dedicated to the exploration of interaction, visual effects and technologies.

hakim.se/experiments

also: doctorJS

Doctor JS is a genius. He'll analyze your JavaScript code, complete with:

• polymorphism
• prototypes
• exceptions
• callbacks

try!

Jison takes a context-free grammar as input and outputs a JavaScript file capable of parsing the language described by that grammar. You can then use the generated script to parse inputs and accept, reject, or perform actions based on the input. If you’re familiar with Bison or Yacc, or other clones, you’re almost ready to roll.

jison

play play play!

What you see in the YouTube video I posted a while ago is a Java program executing a SWF. For FITC I added some more code and an OpenGL based Display List renderer. In other words: I wrote a Flash Player.

(...)

JITB is currently able to translate a subset of ActionScript code at runtime into Java bytecode and runs nearly at the same speed as native Java.

nice!

According to some sources, the wild haggis's left legs are of different length than its right legs (cf. Sidehill gouger), allowing it to run quickly around the steep mountains and hillsides which make up its natural habitat, but only in one direction. It is further claimed that there are two varieties of haggis, one with longer left legs and the other with longer right legs. The former variety can run clockwise around a mountain (as seen from above) while the latter can run anticlockwise. The two varieties coexist peacefully but are unable to interbreed in the wild because in order for the male of one variety to mate with a female of the other, he must turn to face in the same direction as his intended mate, causing him to lose his balance before he can mount her. As a result of this difficulty, differences in leg length among the Haggis population are accentuated.

wikipedia

On Fridays, the entire desk would often play an interesting game. Everybody chucked their corporate ID in a sack, and anted up something like $20-$100 (depending on rank). Then, the head trader would remove the IDs one by one from the sack, reading out the names loudly across the entire floor. The last ID in the sack got the entire pot. It was winner take all and no splitting the pot at the end. When there were only 20 or so IDs left, things got interesting: a mob formed, and trading started. People with IDs left in the sack sold their IDs to the highest bidder, selling out early and monetizing rather than risking elimination. Fair value for an ID is a simple calculation: if the pot is $2,000 and there are 10 IDs left, then the option on one ID is just $2,000/10 = $200. That’s not the way the market traded though: IDs would inevitably sell for a premium, and the closer the process was to a close (i.e. the smaller the number of IDs left) the higher the premium got on a percentage basis. Mentally, it seemed people were irrationally willing to overbid for a large payout, and the likelier the payout, the more they’d overpay. Also, there were structural forces at work: it was Friday afternoon in New York, and people wanted the cash to blow on the weekend. I bet that steak at Peter Luger’s tastes even better if it was bought with the trading floor’s money.

the rest is interesting and even more entertaining.

The Lost Quarter-Century in Data Compression

Huffman worked on the problem for months, developing a number of approaches, but none that he could prove to be the most efficient. Finally, he despaired of ever reaching a solution and decided to start studying for the final. Just as he was throwing his notes in the garbage, the solution came to him. “It was the most singular moment of my life,” Huffman says. “There was the absolute lightning of sudden realization.”

Tcpcrypt is a protocol that attempts to encrypt (almost) all of your network traffic. Unlike other security mechanisms, Tcpcrypt works out of the box: it requires no configuration, no changes to applications, and your network connections will continue to work even if the remote end does not support Tcpcrypt, in which case connections will gracefully fall back to standard clear-text TCP. Install Tcpcrypt and you'll feel no difference in your every day user experience, but yet your traffic will be more secure and you'll have made life much harder for hackers.

tcpcrypt.org

hmmm, hmmm. hummm. hrmhrmhrm. what would schneier do?

The main idea of "Inception": if you run a VM inside a VM inside a VM inside a VM, everything will be very slow

heavens, totally forgot about zwarwald!

long forgotten: the abominable charles christopher!

and lets have a look at digger.

It's important that code be dapper and well-dressed

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to handle concurrent requests to a server. Threaded servers use multiple concurrently-executing threads that each handle one client request, while evented servers run a single event loop that handles events for all connected clients.

To chose between the threaded and evented approaches you need to consider the load profile of the server. This post describes a simple mathematical model for reasoning about these load profiles and their implications for server design.

window.history.pushState("object or string", "Title", "/new-url");

HTML5: Changing the browser-URL without refreshing page

pear:

• PHP_LexerGenerator
• PHP_ParserGenerator

Its more formal name is digital tenovaginitis stenosans, which is ancient Latin for "electronic hand inflamed vagina without writing", which I believe is why most people prefer to call it Trigger Finger.

welcome back!