Swhack Weblog

Today (November 23), Buy Nothing - For Peace!

Last update: 2001-11-23 21:37 UTC
Nearby: RSS/RDF/XML version
Archives: Month, Year, Today

Archived Items

A Touching Photo

posted by Morbus at 2001-11-23 20:22 (permalink)

Speed of Sound Captured On Film

posted by Morbus at 2001-11-23 19:49 (permalink)

Graphical User Interface Gallery

posted by Morbus at 2001-11-23 19:44 (permalink)

Morbus: Tons of screenshots from various OS's over the years. Wonderful.

Maze generation

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 15:30 (permalink)

sbp: It's a-maze-ing
sbp: Sorry
sbp: """By the way: one of the students here, Robert Givan, has solved the maze for the truly persistent by hand. So it can be done. If you are as crazy as Robert is."""

Lightweight Languages Convention Writeup

posted by AaronSw at 2001-11-23 15:15 (permalink)

AaronSw: Ooh, with a keynote by Olin Shivers!
sbp: """Oh, and we found that you should pour liquid nitrogen into containers first rather than trying to make ice cream by directly pouring it into a mix of milk and butter. And that the ice-cream so produced is exceptionally tasty."""
sbp: References Scsh -- a Scheme shell

Psyco

posted by AaronSw at 2001-11-23 15:11 (permalink)

sbp: """From a practical point of view, Psyco might be an interesting starting point to make Python much, much faster [...]"""
AaronSw: Looks pretty cool. It compiles Python code to approache the speed of traditional compiled languages.

Adbusters: Buy Nothing Day

posted by AaronSw at 2001-11-23 14:43 (permalink)

The Creative Vulgarian's Lexicon: Special categories

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 02:14 (permalink)

sbp: Ooh, tav could use this as the basis of an .insult function for xena

Weird Stuff

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 02:06 (permalink)

sbp: So many links! aaargh!

White Hot Lesbo Action!

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 01:46 (permalink)

sbp: Kick-ass stuff
sbp: """I hate supermodels too. They have stupid accents. They smile at me like they want to fuck me. I mean, what do you think I'm going to think when you stare at 3 million people like you want to fuck them?
sbp: You're used, easy! Get out of my face. And, no, I won't buy your bloody Lucious Lashes Mabelline petrochemical-derived crap.""" - http://www.purplefrog.com/~thoth/philosophy/hate.html
sbp: lol! "I need a girlfriend. Nah, I just need a fuckable housekeeper." - http://www.purplefrog.com/~thoth/philosophy/playboy.html
sbp: Philosophy people always crack me up
sbp: """If you tell me that ``when Venus is aligned with Alpha Centauri you can tickle a hippo with garden rake and she will fart insulin'', I will say ``Great. What the fuck am I going to do with that information? Start a theme park?'' (Insulin-farting Hippo Land! Open once every two centuries!).
sbp: Even if it is repeatable in the broad sense of the word, it's almost, but not quite, completely fucking worthless. I'm gonna yank your grant and give it to a Hindu researching coal walking. At least we might commercialize that into firefighter training.""" - http://www.purplefrog.com/~thoth/philosophy/science.html

Things That Suck About JAVA

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 01:21 (permalink)

sbp: """This is one of the Great cons of computer programming. I can’t believe they would think they could pass this one off as a good thing. First, an interface does absolutely nothing for you (except force you to use an even bigger kludge, inner classes, to fix the original kludge). You are required to implement every method. Why? Half of the time these methods simply do nothing but I have to implement them anyway."""

Things I Want To Write About

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 01:13 (permalink)

sbp: Zooko's list of things to write down

Constructivism

posted by sbp at 2001-11-23 00:57 (permalink)

sbp: """“I can’t let the students surf the Web or play on the computer. That is like having 20 minutes free on Friday and telling the students to do whatever they want. If I do that, I am not doing my job.”"""
sbp: Concentrates on using technology when teaching, but has an interesting sub-thread exposing anachronistic teaching methods, and why they suck
sbp: As the quote above clearly demonstrates
sbp: Argues that drilling facts is not as efficient as providing problem sets, with a distinct slant to revealing a thread of relevance to a student's current work
sbp: They put it better: """Instead of concentrating on knowledge acquisition, problem-based activities allow students to develop a deeper understanding of the knowledge domain."""
sbp: Stop reading when you get to "Scenario 1". The fictional writing style made me want to throw up

Aaron Swartz and Sean B. Palmer
Run by the Daily Chump bot with a few modifications of our own.