Out of Cheese

Apple updated its Unix Porting

Apple updated its Unix Porting Guide today, but it's still only useful for things other than porting the source code...and of course, porting the code is a significant part of any porting project. There's nothing in the book about poll(2), wide character support, thread safety, single-precision math functions, internationalization issues, or a variety of other issues.

I really wish someone would publish a comprehensive code porting guide for porting Unix code to Mac OS X. It certainly would've made my life a lot easier over the past year.

It's not uncommon to see

It's not uncommon to see stories about Internet filtering software filtering things that it shouldn't, but this is the best example I've ever seen. Eugene Volokh points to a Dayton Daily News article about the new web site for the Flesh Public Library in Piqua, OH. Named after Leon Flesh, who gave a large donation to the library 70 years ago, the library didn't really stand out until its director tried to call up its new web site on the library's computers. Their filtering software didn't look kindly on an address with "fleshpublic" in it and blocked the page. Oops.

Of course, the solution was to rename the site, not fix the filtering software. Oh, well.

Why didn't anyone tell me

Why didn't anyone tell me that Alexei and Laura have weblogs? OK, so Alexei mentioned his, but I'll admit to not believing that he'd stick with it. I'm happy to see that he's writing quite a bit of stuff there.

I found out about both of their blogs from Greg, who has somehow avoided starting his own blog. Hint to Greg: Google returns no results for "KooshBlog". It's clearly waiting for you....

Oh, and LiveJournal (which Laura is using) doesn't really publicize the location of its RSS feeds. That's annoying. A bit of googling led me to the right spot for her RSS feed. I'm not too happy with the result, though, since it seems that LiveJournal doesn't put anything other than the title of each post in the RSS content. I'm disappointed enough to only get the first two lines for each item from Alexei's Movable Type setup, but getting no content at all is far worse. Oh, well. Hopefully LiveJournal will fix that eventually.

Got a CompactFlash card sitting

Got a CompactFlash card sitting around? How about an old PowerBook 150? Turns out you can combine the two. Greg Ewing figured out how to get his PowerBook 150 to boot off a CF card. Put this one in the "largely useless but rather impressive anyway" category.

A Stanford professor and a

A Stanford professor and a colleague from Osaka Prefecture University recently discovered that Archimedes had at least a basic understanding of the mathematical concept of infinity. That's quite a surprise, since it means that infinity appeared in math prior to Newton and Leibniz and their calculus.

Of course, I can't help but wonder if this discovery will introduce a bit of advanced math into Ephebe.

Unlambda... "[is not] binary-oriented; as a

Unlambda...

"[is not] binary-oriented; as a matter of fact, it does not manipulate integers in any way. Other remarkable (un)features of Unlambda are the fact that it does not have any variables, data structures or code constructs (such as loops, conditionals and such like).

"Rather, Unlambda uses a functional approach to programming: the only form of objects it manipulates are functions...."

This is definitely the most interesting programming language I've seen since INTERCAL.