Now this is a supercollider. From a very interesting article titled, The Biggest Thing in Physics.

Brains

Unsolved brain mysteries. Good read. Particularly the point about the brain's handling of time, and the structure of the brain being like a large loopy dynamic network.

I have smart teachers

How about proving the correctness of the L4 microkernel? Turns out my current algorithms teacher was/is(?) the program leader of the group doing this work. "Logic of knowledge" anyone? Smart guy.

L4 verified
Open Kernel Labs
NICTA

In other news, my OO professor last session gets props I suppose for hitting the blog headlines for a paper he wrote with my tutor last session. Validity Invariants and Effects. "Design by contract" takes on a whole new meaning.

Kevin07

I don't know about you, but Rudd is making Howard look more and more outdated as the election approaches.

Kevin07

Sometimes I just need to write it. After the writing of it I often mysteriously lose the need to hit "Publish Post" or "Send". In fact, this post barely made it! How unlike me - one who so often clamours for other's approval.

We shoot.

So stop that. It's just a little black hole. A jagged ceramic edge. By the time I'd opened my program to gush my sensational revelations I'd lost it. That happens to me.



So we skipped across roads and dodged angry drivers grinding their teeth at us through wind visors. We had no where to go, but people watched us anyway; the way people watch manic showmen feeling their way over tightropes. What a rush girl.



You have these moments of euphoria where you think you've understood something implicit, something altogether bound in our universe. Then you have a bottle of Pinot and you can't write a single thing of interest. You have the desire, oh yes - but where is your revelation now man? What props do you pretend to be able to flourish in front of us? How are you going to revolutionize thought and human understanding again?



Phlegm is what is it. What a gangling word. A forlorn red headed kid crying in the rain.



I remember the hay barn and the cold iron, corrugated and rooted in Australian earth. The smell of goat shit and turkey feathers. What a pure and healthy aroma. And that mixed with the spice and sticky allure of the peppercorn tree. Old man peppercorn indeed. I'll write a story about this place one day.



Meaning is secondary to. Huh?

People tell me this is supposed to be important :)

Mac OS X Leopard receives UNIX 03 certification.

This is huge news. It shows that apple has reached the standard of a 1970s operating system.

Having worked with some Indian consultants I've come to believe that it's culturally ok to sniff, and not a polite indecisive sniff - a serious snorting, a nostril distorting rip. The monotony of it gives the sound a far-away quality, it distorts my appreciation of it, makes me think of a polite farting of the nose. It's humorous and silly, but simultaneously disgusting. My day is interspersed with them. My thought process is punctuated by them. I work to the rhythm of "the hoc". I think to the interruptive inhalation of streams of snot.

This wonderful instrument of ours...

Spam mash-up

SPAM mash-up. Natural language processing to process SPAM, and build an intelligible conversational snippet. Relationship to "normal" speech. What does the result tell us about ourselves?

Stephen Hawking's Universe EP6

Feyman

Hofmann's Potion

"As a matter of fact, I think intention is the bottom line in life anyway, for all of us, at any time."

It's July.

Hack a lil game or two

Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit - Cool!

Xerox/Apple/Microsoft and stealing TVs

A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox is a fun (and quick) read.

Using the Mac's built-in camera to auto scroll text I'm reading on the screen? Impossible! :D

Cocoa

I've been reading up on building Cocoa apps for OS X lately. I have a great idea which involves writing a free version of something like Spanning Sync. It's a great app, but I'll be buggered if I'm going to pay a yearly fee to use it! My app might not be as groovy, or as feature rich, but it'll work, and at the very least I'll use it. Also, I won't charge other people to use it, in fact it'll be open source so everyone can laugh at how badly it's written, or help me fix it.

Anyway, back to Cocoa - what a great application framework! I'm loving the interface builder, and connecting interface components to underlying code (and vice versa) using actions and outlets seems so natural and powerful. Considering how long this has been around (NeXT interface builder) this really must have been way ahead of it's time. Objective-C syntax seems quite clunky, but the fact that I'm not used to it probably has quite a bit to do with that. I have a lot more to learn about it's capabilities before I can make any kind of educated comment on that :) So far so good I say!

I'd recommend that anyone even vaguely interested in developing for OS X or just learning about OS X's application architecture check out the great developer resources available on the Apple Developer Connection website. It's really a very neat development environment. Very nice.

Useful/interesting links:

• Cocoa Application Tutorial
• Getting Started with Cocoa
• The NeXTonian

Web application idea

A framework to host screencasts of programmers at work, discussing their code and throught process as they go. How best to do that. But surely a great way to share information and knowledge, particularly about the act and process of creation.