Tab Sweep

Perhaps a little more all-over-the-map even than is usual: GPLv3 clarity, Functional Pearls, raina bird-writer, Java credits, framework programmers, and hacking my Canon.

What Alison Said · From Alison Randal, GPLv3, Clarity and Simplicity and is she ever right. I reviewed the last draft of GPLv3 and I should really go have a look at the latest, but I get a headache just thinking about it. Call me a wacko idealist, but I think that important legal documents should be human-readable, and on the evidence I just don’t think Eben Moglen and his friends give a damn.

FP Pearls · From the Haskell community, Research papers/Functional pearls; as CPUs get wider and wider, we’re just gonna have to bring some new techniques to bear to get the most out of them, and my bet just at the moment is that a lot of ’em are going to functional-programming techniques.

The Violence of the English Language · Wise and funny words from (but don’t click on the link yet) raina bird-writer. What happened was, I saw this amusing quote about English and followed links back and back and back and ended up at raina’s MySpace page. It’s BSFW (barely safe for work) and you might want to kill your computer audio before you head over there. But that quotation about our language is priceless.

Thanks, MR · Mark Reinhold’s Roll Credits!; yes indeed. It’s actually pretty easy for Jonathan and Rich to stand on the stage and say “We’re gonna open-source our Java code under the GPL” and bask in the wild applause, but it’s Mark and his troops who then had to actually, you know, open-source our Java code under the GPL.

Mark tactfully omits himself from the credit roll, but it totally wouldn’t be happening without him.

Framework Programmers · Assaf Arkin has The inevitable migration of framework coders and some would call elitist and, well, it is; but let’s assume he’s right, and there’s a large class of people who will use the frameworks we give them without looking too hard or diving too deep or wondering what’s under the covers. If that’s true, then it behooves framework developers to ensure that the Framework does the right thing most of the time. Which modern frameworks like Rails and Django are starting to do.

Hack Yer Canon · Hey, my A710IS can be hacked! I got it and tried it and it seems to work, except for Lightroom can’t read the CRW files it generates. Apparently you need a special CRW-to-DNG filter.

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