Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

(but nobody else is any better.) Alex Stepanov: Notes on Programming course taught at Adobe, 2005-2006 [PDF] (This is the guy who wrote the STL.)

Scoble claims that Microsoft is a great place for Linux developers to work and that the kernel team is looking to hire some. Pardon me for being cynical, but this sounds like Microsoft is just trying to get some people to stop developing Linux. Sure, they’ll get some good kernel developers, but does anyone think they’ll let their new employees keep contributing to Linux in their spare time?

Despite what Java partisans will tell you, Java does not fully support Unicode. Unicode, since at least version 3.1 in 2001, defines 21-bit characters, and the surrogate pairs to encode them in UTF-16 have been reserved since 2.0 in 1996. Yet a Java char value is only 16 bits long, and a Java String consists of a sequence of characters. See anything wrong with this? The documentation for Java 1.4.2’s Strings doesn’t even mention this problem. Now, it’s always been handled by using UTF-16 to encode the strings, which preserves the data, but sometimes uses two chars to represent a single character. This means that the length() method returns a pretty meaningless result.

Java 1.5 finally admits that it has a problem and defines some new codePoint* methods to actually handle Unicode. This is a step in the right direction, but it only helps if developers actually use the new functions. Unfortunately, Sun has been lying that Java natively supports Unicode for so long that very few programmers are likely to realize that they need to change their coding habits. Sun doesn’t help by doing an incomplete job. They haven’t deprecated the old char-based methods and haven’t updated the CharSequence interface. And, of course, Sun employees need to stop claiming that Java has been based on Unicode since version 1.0.

I’m taking a class on DSLs this semester, and the first assignment was to write some trivial programs in Scheme. Haskell is so much prettier. I mean, just compare (lambda (x) (* x x)) to \x->x*x (the square function).

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Given a set of RDF triples, there must be a way to present the data in them. Of course, one can write a program to extract the data, but a DSL is likely to be more efficient. A very good DSL for transforming and presenting XML already exists, XSLT. Its output format is XML, which is what I want. Its input is represented as trees, which are very similar to RDF’s graphs. Thus, I think the RDF presentation language should be built as extensions to XSLT. In particular, I want to design a set of extensions to XPath that will massage an RDF graph into a tree-ish structure that XSLT can understand. I call these extensions RDFPath.

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The CSS Zen Garden is an illustration of how much can be done with just CSS. The HTML on the site is identical for all of the designs; only the CSS changes. Some of the designs are surprisingly pretty, so go visit even if you’re not a web designer.

I even hear that mnemonic looks different in IE and Mozilla/Opera/Safari.

If you’re using a Mac, you’re probably using iTunes to play music. As I discovered today, it doesn’t by default play Ogg Vorbis, but there’s this lovely Quicktime plugin which lets it do just that. iTunes, as usual, has some troubles importing lots of songs at once (haven’t they heard of threads?), but the songs play fine.

Also, if you’re using a unix and need to synchronize two directory trees, look at using rsync. Unlike what I thought, it doesn’t need a dedicated server. Instead it can run over a standard remote shell like SSH.