January 2011
10 posts
“The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX...”
– Thomas Scoville, The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
How the first Gulf War brought modernity to India
I came across this article in an old Wired issue about how cable
and dish TV overtook India rapidly in 1990, when the first Gulf
War started. It brought back some memories.
For countless Indian city dwellers, January 1990 will be
remembered as the month when the world at large - long an impenetrable
nut - was finally cracked open. As US troops assaulted Iraq, the
satellite revolution struck...
How to Write a Twitter Bot in Python
For the purposes of this post, a Twitter bot is a program that automatically posts status updates to its account (we’re assuming the bot is associated with an account), perhaps also responding to @ messages sent to it.
I’ve wanted to write one for a while, just for the fun of it.
What we’ll build:
I’m hooking up the Twitter API to an Eliza program, so that when you...
Englsh Wtht Vwls
Could you read that title? How well can you read the following somewhat garbled text?
Evr snc the hbt of wrtng frst tk hld of me as a tngr, I knw prcsly why I did it, and why I did it so cmplsvly: to hdg agnst the trrr of hvng a trrbl mmry. Thgh stll yng engh to expct no sympthy, I cnstntly fl the brdn of ths hndcp. Cnfrmtn of it, and tht wrtng is its cr, I dscvr evry tm I pck up smthng I wrt...
“Ever since the habit of writing first took hold of me as a teenager, I knew...”
– Nathan Schneider, In Defense of the Memory Theatre.
From the Long Now Blog, a reference to a study of how we refer to given years over time, as revealed by the Google Ngram Viewer:
They found a general trend each individual year follows: a spike just before the year followed by a downward trending long tail as it recedes into history. They also, however, noticed a trend amongst that pattern: higher peaks with shorter tails.
When the team...
This quote from “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson still lights me up. Is there anything more glorious than a geek writing eloquently about his tools?
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is...
Text Input: The Next Frontier
The next big frontier for mobile devices is heavy-duty text input. As Tim Bray puts it:
Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can’t become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the...