Smart Disorganized

A “Smart Disorganized” Tech Blog

  • Unicode

    OK. I’m an idiot. So here’s today’s BIG Unicode lesson; understand this and, maybe, half your troubles will evaporate. Unicode is NOT a “code”. No. Unicode is a kind of platonic ideal of which everything else is an “encoding”. ASCII is an encoding. UTF-8 is an encoding. That weird character set you got with Portuguese accented…

  • Updating node.js on Ubuntu

    Node.js in the main Ubuntu repo is fairly out of date. Here’s a useful page on installing the latest. Thanks Yodi Aditya.

  • Smallest Federated Wiki

    I can’t believe I haven’t looked more carefully at Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki. I did glance at it before, but am now making my way through the videos. Lot’s of absolutely perfectly pitched ideas working together.

  • HUD

    Personally, I’m looking forward to the new Ubuntu interface : HUD. Looks to me a lot like Humanised Enso (which I was a big fan of when I used Windows regularly)

  • Three.js

    Bloody hell! Three.js is cool. And CSG. What can’t you do in the browser these days?

  • Bret Victor's Code / Drawing IDE

    Excellent video I’ll have more to say and think about this.

  • Wat

    This is very funny. A survey of bizarre behaviours of non-things in Javascript.

  • Rails Off The Rails

    Seems like the same thing has happened with Ruby on Rails as happened with, say, Zope. Giles does a pretty good analysis. The key point is that as frameworks mature they start supporting legacy users and applications who, in turn, have different requirements and values from those looking for a quick way to build new…

  • Permutations with Python Generators

    Here’s something neat. I wanted to experiment creating different permutations of a collection of items. (In fact I’m working on some code for laying out shapes on a surface.) Prototyping in Python to get my ideas straight I came up with this neat generator solution. def perm(xs) : if xs == [] : yield []…

  • SpimeScript

    These days, I’m thinking a lot about 3D printers, desktop manufacturing and software to create physical things. Last year I did some art pieces using software to generate drawings for laser cutters and 3D printers, and I’m continuing along the same line. I want to move this stuff into the browser, and the combination of…

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