One of my first projects to push to GitHub was my Emacs initialization files. Emacs is precisely as powerful as Neal Stephenson suggests, but I find that people are unwilling to use it because they find it difficult to configure to do what they want. I thought that I might help by not only making [...]

I’m a big fan of distributed version control for a lot of reasons, but sites like GitHub and BitBucket really strike at the heart of the issue: real coding should be a social phenomenon, if for no other reason than code is really about sharing ideas, and code should be addressed to human beings rather [...]

In computers, why is "easy to use" the metric everyone cares about?  I was listening to some Linux-inspired electro-industrial today at 5:50 AM on Jamendo (long story), and the vocal track started off with "I've found it a very very easy to use system." Forget easy to use.  No one gets into a Corvette or a [...]

My Gambit Scheme code is taking 500 times longer than the equivalent C program, and I don’t know why. So, there’s a really horrible way to spend processor time to calculate pi that involves taking the unit square and inscribing a circle inside it with radius 1/2.  You then partition the square into N partitions [...]

With a title like that, it’s not really clear where I intend to go with this post, but bear with me for a moment. A couple of years ago, I got into functional programming, initially with Common Lisp (only a tiny bit), and then Scheme and Scala, a pinch of OCaml, and finally Clojure.  One [...]

TL;DR version: Modern browsers need to learn a lesson from Emacs and keyboard launchers and provide an interface for tab-switching that is keyboard search-as-you-type based.  Firefox is the best browser to implement this on, since it is very extensible. The Extensibility of Firefox Mozilla recently hosted a Summer Design Challenge for 2009 that focused on [...]

Here’s the thing about using commercial (proprietary) software: you are not buying software, or even software-as-a-service.  You’re buying into an ecosystem.  Let me quickly provide examples, rather than pontificating endlessly. Take the iPhone.  I really like the iPhone.  A good friend of mine just bought a shiny new iPhone 3G S.  She was moving from [...]

One of Clojure’s biggest strengths is that it is backed by the JVM, and has good interoperability with the Java libraries.  When I needed to implement a simulation with events that should be executed in order of their timestamp, I was immediately tempted to use Java’s PriorityBlockingQueue, since neither sorted-map nor sorted-set supported two events [...]

Introduction When I program, I sometimes am fortunate enough to see beauty emerge from what I do. I love programming because of this, but, enthusiastic as I am about it, I find that it is very hard to convey the essence of what I see to others, which often means that they cannot understand what [...]

Just ran across (via Proggit) an interesting blog post about Core War, a game I played a bit with on Linux a few years back in which programs compete for dominance inside a virtual machine.  Very neat idea – you program an agent that will go and fight for you in a virtual world.  Cool. [...]