Versatile

The Antikythera Mechanism finds its way into the newest iPhone.

No comment

Well, just one: absitively terrifying. The story of Jake, Tom, and JDSL.

I hear that threads are good for eyebrows

Dave meets the Bobs.

For example, a network socket class implemented by Bob Eins—because socket.h was Not Invented Here, and thus not good enough—was namespaced as base::universe::posix::network::socket::Constants::IPV4. It was unclear what existed outside of the base::universe namespace.

Catching the bus

Temporarily unavailable for yesterday's link roundup: Maciej Stachowski uncovers a frightening edge case: Firefox poops out when handed markup with <font> tags nested 158-deep.

Another opportunity to go Conrad on someone else's code

Remy Porter and RJ reveal a regular expression that might be longer than the texts it's matched against.

Adorable napkin scribbles

Elementary math functions? Dance moves? Yes.

ᔥ kottke.org

Succulently bad

Today's post at The Daily WTF is in the CodeSOD category, but it's so gloriously bad that it's a candidate for CodeSOM, probably CodeSOY. The method in the snippet is attempting to detect whether a string contains a vowel, something that could be done with a regex in a line or two. Instead, after 73 lines of flailing about (including gormless multiline comments), HasAVowel() looks at only the first character of the string and returns the answers "yes," "no," or (!) "maybe."

Just one of the priceless comments:

    //because visual studio has put a red zigzag underneath the name of my procedure 
    //I need to return something always

We're in Leonard Pinth-Garnell territory here. Or, as my theater colleague Tim would say, "bad, bad, bad, and ghastly."

Quicker

A charming series of videos that visualize various simple sorting algorithms via Eastern European folk dance. Perhaps the Székely folk dance shellsort is the most lively, as well as the optimal algorithm. But using 4-1/2 minutes to sort 10 elements is still somewhat poky.

ᔥ kottke.org

A stopped clock is correct twice a day

Reminds me of the time I was asked in an interview how to optimize the path of an aircraft that had to make a bombing run: Ineffective Sorts. Though the idea of using Stack Overflow as input to a genetic algorithm is intriguing.

Spoiler alert: we drop the bomb

An adorable gallery of improbable Hollywood computers doing improbable things. The star of the piece is a decommissioned IBM AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central, part of the SAGE radar defenses of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era—you know, the times back when the operator's console had an integrated ashtray. Parts of the defanged AN/FSQ-7, Q7 for short and cute, appeared with O. J. Simpson, Woody Allen, and babealicous scientist Lee Meriwether—but not with Peter Sellars in Dr. Strangelove. That part was filled by an IBM 7090/94.

...we find it rather amusing that in the one movie where the AN/FSQ-7 would make perfect sense, you don't find the AN/FSQ-7.

At least it was one the scientific systems, not one of IBM's business mainframes.

ᔥ Bits

Links roundup

Lots of interesting material accumulating in my Instapaper account that I need to read and/or shuffle into my bookmarks repository and/or link to here.

• Swizec Teller and his commenters have been working on coding a Turing machine in JavaScript in as little source code as possible. (I was about to write "as compactly as possible," but optimization in space and time of this little beastie is a project for another day.)
• Man, I need me a Directive 1.
• Wonderful vintage video of LEO, Lyons Electronic Office, placed into service 17 November 1951. LEO was built, not by a business machines manufacturer, but by J. Lyons & Co., a large British baking firm and chain of tea shops.

  LEO was such a success that Lyons set up a commercial subsidiary to sell spare time on LEO to other businesses, including the Ford Motor Company, which used it to process the payroll for the thousands of workers at its U.K. plant. Later, Lyons also built entirely new LEOs and sold them to other blue-chip companies of the era. In total, more than 70 LEOs were built, with the last remaining in service until the 1980s....

• Peter Norvig gives a balanced appraisal of Christopher Strachey's "System Analysis and Programming," written for the September 1966 issue of Scientific American. In the original article (available online), Strachey walks through the process of analyzing, designing, and coding a program to play checkers. Unfortunately, Strachey probably never compiled (by hand: at the time, his high-level CPL language had no compiler, nor even a complete formal description) and executed his demonstration program, as it has typos and bugs. But the trick (borrowed from Arthur Samuel) that he uses to number the squares of a checkerboard is quite clever.

(Links via @NPRTechTeam, The Code Project, and others.)

5 pages

Sometimes a photo of a whiteboard isn't such a creative, cheerful thing. The horror! the horror! As clear as I can read, one of the tables in this query is called BEST_MURDER.

Do you think you can do better?

Via Chris Curtis, a sort algorithm that is constant in time and linear (i.e, zero) in memory: Intelligent Design Sort.

We all want to be B.A.

My scrum team for my new project has daily theme music.

Not to mention Rosalind and Grace

...you don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

xkcd offers Mother's Day wishes.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ...

Panel 3 nearly made me splurt my coffee.

O tempora

Alas, my scrum team, once named for a Saturday morning cartoon series that I don't remember, is now named Jedi Squirrels, in honor of a bit of internet-dispersed Photoshoppery (that also turned into a troublesome test case for the CMS).

Happy holidays

Seasonal wallpapers for your desktop or mobile, courtesy of Siteworx.

Not to mention shortening URLs

W (double U) has, of all the letters in our alphabet, the only cumbrous name, the names of the others being monosyllabic. This advantage of the Roman alphabet over the Grecian is the more valued after audibly spelling out some simple Greek word, like ἐπιχοριαμβικός. Still, it is now thought by the learned that other agencies than the difference of the two alphabets may have been concerned in the decline of "the glory that was Greece" and the rise of "the grandeur that was Rome." There can be no doubt, however, that by simplifying the name of W (calling it "wow," for example) our civilization could be, if not promoted, at least better endured.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book (1906)

Empirical observation

Gorsline's Corollary to Osborn's Law ("Variables won't; constants aren't."): Temp directories aren't.