November 2008
1 post
5 tags
TeX in Inkscape.app on Mac OS X
If you’re looking for a way to use LaTeX from inside Inkscape on Mac OS X, grab [1] and copy textext.inx and textext.py to Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/extensions.
You’ll need pstotext and pdf2svg as well, both are provided by MacPorts.
Now you should have a “Tex Text” option under the “Render” selection in Inkscape menubar.
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[1] ...
July 2008
1 post
Attention and expectation
After sharing the intro song to Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters with friends via both a YouTube link and playing the DVD I noticed that friends who received the link and watched on their own tended to enjoy the content more than the friends who watched it from the DVD.
There are many explanations for this, but one possibility is that due to the poor quality of Internet media in...
April 2008
4 posts
Google's Outsourcing to You
The release of Google’s App Engine has caught the attention of many prospective startup founders [1]. While the feature list and comparisons to similar services are being discussed, Google’s intent is being overlooked.
Soon, any developer with a Google account will be able to develop and deploy an application that has access to Google’s resources. That is, a developer can...
March 2008
3 posts
4 tags
Stop drinking the cheap stuff
A recent post on news.YC on the decline of content quality got me thinking about the cause of what happened to Reddit and what’s happening to Hacker News. I saw unique, quirky content at Reddit become replaced by clichés and pictures of cats. And the transformation of news.YC from startup news to hacker news to prog.reddit++.
Overpopulation is a common diagnosis of the change; usually...
Databases, dimensions, and change
While working on a pet project, I was forced to make a decision about data storage. Being somewhat conservative and lazy I decided to (mis)use a row-oriented RDBMS for tagged data objects. That is, there is a table in the database where each row represents an object and I use relationships defined in other tables to annotate each object with any number of tags.
Yuck.
Google’s press...
Github →
As reddit to /., github to sourceforge.
February 2008
2 posts
3 tags
Arc burnout
Arc was recently released as an abstraction layer on MzScheme. Much has been said about the design philosophy and the lack of innovation.
The most significant blunder in the release of Arc is the absence of a packaging system. People are excited to be a part of the new community and share code that could wind up being in a standard library. There’s a potential chain reaction that will...
3 tags
Fringe Languages != FP Languages
In a recent post, a claim is made that functional programming has never been popular and never will be. More on that later, but how does he define functional programming?
The author states: “[D]ynamical type reference languages, which most functional languages are”. He also implies that Python and Perl are FP languages. His definition of FP languages includes all languages that...
January 2008
1 post
1 tag
“I think the future of software is in things designed like the Korean alphabet....”
– older rant by Zed Shaw.
December 2007
3 posts
1 tag
It's alive! ...almost
Spent this past week working on my site, dynamictyping,org. I was planning on storing log entries and related data in flat files but kept putting it off. Earlier this week, the not-so-novel idea of using some service to store posts and comments hit me.
Tumblr and Disqus are now managing my log content. I wrote a little library, cl-tumblr, to pull data via Tumblr’s web API. It’s...
Write it down, wear it around →
Came across this while searching for white boards.
1 tag
