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wrlon A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene

Yeah, no problem. Drop me an email if you make it to Evoke.

wrlon A history of the Amiga, part 8: The demo scene

Well, don't sweat it too much. Germany has its fair share of parties too, and if you don't mind the trek to Cologne there's Evoke in August (http://www.evoke.eu/2013/).

wrlon The Making of “Turtles all the way down”

I was lucky enough to catch this at Revision. Phenomenal work, the 64k compos have been absurdly tough competition the past few years.

wrlon Live map of SF MUNI

If you can see the bus from the bus stop, it will probably arrive soon.

wrlon Dell support service can’t tell between a 720p and a 1080p display

I've got a circa-2009 Latitude E6400 that is still alive and kicking (save for the battery, but it lasted a solid ~3 years before it gave out).

I was really impressed and convinced that Dell had stepped their game up for good, but it seems like they've let things slip again.

wrlon Rust 0.6 Released

`Static methods no longer require the `static` keyword and instead are distinguished by the lack of a `self` parameter`

Man, am I the only one who really doesn't like implicit things like this?

wrlon Why Use Make

Waf is also much nicer for end-users, if you're the sort who distributes source packages. It mimics the "./configure; make; make install" sequence as "./waf configure; ./waf; ./waf install".

wrlon The Blink Protocol

This actually looks pretty cool. Disappointed to see that there's no reference implementation available as a library, however. Is there a plan to release one?

wrlon The "Clockwise/Spiral Rule" in C

It's a POSIX convention to indicate that it's a typedef.

wrlon Pragmatic Unicode

Do you realize all your questions are really low-level details that are entirely taken care of by default APIs in quite some languages?

Somebody's got to write those APIs. d0mine's questions are valid.

wrlon 21st Century C (new book)

Agree with meaty: make and knowing what you're doing is good.

Occasionally, though, my needs will be more complicated than what make can handle on its own (lots of compile-time options, for example, or lots of dependency checking), and in those cases I'll use waf. Waf is lovely and hasn't let me down, and it's easy to use for people who are used to the ./configure && make && sudo make install sequence.

wrlon Interview: Linus Torvalds – I don't read code any more

For what it's worth, we run into these FTDI panics with Monome devices all the time. I've called FTDI personally to discuss this with them (iirc it was about a year ago, and I'd been sending them panic reports for a solid 8 months before that) and they just don't seem to care.

No problems on Windows, and yes, the ftdi_sio module has been a part of the Linux source tree for quite some time (even OpenBSD has an FTDI driver).

wrlon Tips for C libraries on GNU/Linux

Especially with the authorship in consideration, I'd like to counter with "Don't embed an HTTP server or QR code encoder/decoder in your syslogd."

Glass houses, after all. ;)

wrlon Photos of Cabins

Beautiful because of the slow internet speeds I'd likely have to live with!

wrlon I fixed a bug in Python

Whoa, why the negativity? Dude found a bug in CPython, fixed it, and had his patch accepted. Regardless of whether he fixed the bug that you wanted fixed or not, it's always good to have more eyes and hands on a project, especially if people are getting involved for the first time.

wrlon A Very Unusual Camera That Emphasizes Time Over Space

Oh man, those "few shots" are beautiful. Do you have them in a higher resolution?

wrlon A computer that learns the rules of a game by watching you play

> PLAY CALVINBALL

Segmentation fault (core dumped)

wrlon Six Days without Food: Hacking Your Mind to Make Do with Far Less

True also, but you won't build muscle anywhere near as quickly because you need a caloric surplus to fuel the recovery from exercise (recovery in this context means "build muscle").

The body is a complex machine, and "calories in, calories out" is an over-simplified way of looking at energy usage and storage. I hope you didn't write off the T-Nation article just because it's a bodybuilding/musclehead website. There are actually some very good tidbits on why things that don't burn tons of calories themselves end up having a significant effect on weight loss. Of particular interest may be the effects that HIIT regimens have on EPOC.

For context, I have done both steady-state cardio and HIIT before and saw good results from both, even though I have always been of slight stature. Currently, I do Mark Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" barbell program, and, despite eating absurd amounts of food to fuel the increases in strength I'm making (generally eating at a 700-1000 calorie surplus), I have gained very little fat. It's like the T-Nation article says: the most effective weapon against fat loss is correct nutrition.

wrlon Six Days without Food: Hacking Your Mind to Make Do with Far Less

You are correct that sustained aerobic exercise burns more calories than an anaerobic activity such as weightlifting. The benefit of weightlifting in particular is that, by building more muscle, you are increasing your body's BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) because more muscles == more energy necessary to run them. This translates to your body burning more calories while at rest.

wrlon 2D Game Art for Programmers

Anybody know of tutorials aimed at a similar audience (i.e. programmers with little design background) but for GUI/UI elements/widgets?

wrlon What is your favourite C programming trick?

Array initializer syntax, particularly with ranges.

  static cmd_handler_t handlers[16] = {
      [0 ... 15] = handler_noop,

      [1] = handler_for_1,
      [3] = handler_for_3,
      [6 ... 8] = handler_for_6_through_8
  };

And suchforth. Very natural for parsers.

Particularly nifty is Jaremie Miller's js0n parser, which makes heavy use of this: https://github.com/quartzjer/js0n/blob/master/js0n.c

wrlon GitHub - Shiny new commit styles

I agree, the new commits use a different motif than the old ones and it definitely looks odd (especially on the code tree pages). Maybe this is the sign of a coming design refresh?

wrlon Chrome's Most Important Feature

My guess is that Chrome/Chromium is installed system-wide from a distribution package, and when you run it as a normal user you don't have write permission for updating it.

wrlon Windows Phones Down 38% Since '7' Launch

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that Nokia isn't betting the whole farm on WP7. They managed to drum up loads of interest in Meego with the N9 and I hope it's not the end of the line.

wrlon $1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet

Better false positives than false negatives. Generally, after testing positive for HIV, there are follow-up tests done to verify the result (usually with a different test from the first) and to check for t-cell count (to determine how damaged the immune system is).

wrlon $1 chip tests for HIV in 15 minutes, fits in your wallet

Usually, an HIV test doesn't test for presence of the virus itself; it tests for the antibodies your immune system develops in response to infection. The "window period" is the span of time between contracting the virus and the presence of detectable antibodies, which can be up to 6 months in some cases (though it's usually shorter). During this period, a person will test negative for HIV even though he or she is infected with the virus (and, worse, is contagious).

Newer tests have been developed that test for presence of the virus's RNA, shortening the window period to about 21 days (if I recall correctly), but they are more expensive and much, much less widespread.

wrlon Who's your SSH buddy?

What are you using instead of Twilio now?

wrlon Sendoid (YC W11): Finally, Sharing Big Files Isn’t A Huge Pain

what are you using as the server? it's my understanding that RTMFP was only recently reverse-engineered.

wrlon Using Twilio with Node.js

In addition to the raw XML generation done here, there's also node-twilio (https://github.com/sjwalter/node-twilio), which is IMO the nicest way to build Twilio apps on any platform.

wrlon New iPad is in production

You're just not familiar with the matter.