Links published in October 2006

11 links published in this month. See also: all links published in 2006, latest links.

Real-Time 3d in JavaScript

A really cool hack.

(Via reddit)

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The Django Book

Read it and comment on it. They’ll be posting chapters sequentially.

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XML is not S-Expressions

Bookmarking for re-use the next time I’m drawn into this argument by a Smug Lisp Weenie.

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Fibonacci number program

Examples to use in a forthcoming post about optimizing the Fibonacci function in Python.

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Johnny Knoxville’s Letters to His Brother

P.S. Reshot the belly-flop sequence using a proportional dwarf. Lee was right; it makes much more sense now.

Just beautiful.

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My favorite Net things

Obviously a bit old, but still good. There’s a geekiness quiz lurking somewhere in this video, if only “how many of the lyrics do you understand?”

Just don’t try to watch it on dialup.

(Via The ZIWT Forum)

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Reinventing HTML

That was unexpected…

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The Heap

While reading Shaun’s new blog and watching the ninety-one-year progression of color changes, may I recommend listening to the live, ongoing performance of John Cage’s 639-year-long organ composition “As Slow As Possible”?

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Extra Legs Onto Adog

Classic humor. Some favorites:

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DomHelper - Create Elements using DOM, HTML fragments and Templates

Pardon me while I drool.

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Dynamic language, refactoring IDE. Pick one.

Yes, dynamic typing makes it exceedingly difficult to do automated refactoring. But at the same time, some of the supporting comments on this entry seem to miss the point. For example:

Has any ruby-python developer tried changing a method , class , property , package (if any) name in over 500 files in 2-3 seconds without breaking the code? to those people, if your answer is no, please shut up.

I would submit that most “ruby-python developers” would feel a bit strange if they found themselves managing a system where a particular object was referenced by name in five hundred different files. Sure, if you’re doing Java you need the equivalent of sixteen times the total printed volume of the Library of Congress just to, say, echo “Hello, $USERNAME” on a web page, but other languages don’t have that “feature”; one of the great selling points of the popular dynamic languages is that they’re concise, and so you don’t end up spewing thousands of files in most cases.

Which isn’t to say refactoring isn’t hard, just that the extreme use cases which always get trotted out in these debates are often apples-and-oranges comparisons.

(Via Tim Bray)

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