Xah Programing Blog Archive 2012-07
Perl Onion more and more looks like nether lips to me.
My elisp tutorial has been mentioned on Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309527
Thank you “jackhammer2022” for posting it, and all supporters, on twitter, Google Plus, email, and all those who have donated or bought my tutorial!
There's also some negative comments on Hacker News. If you like them answered, let me know! (comment, or post to Google Plus, twitter, fb.)
Fortress Wrapping Up
Language Fortress is closing shop. See: [Fortress Wrapping Up By Guy Steel. At https://blogs.oracle.com/projectfortress/entry/fortress_wrapping_up , accessed on 2012-07-20 ]
Note: Fortress is Guy Steel's language for parallel computing. See his presentation that shows parts of Fortress: Guy Steele Says: Don't Iterate, Recurse, and Get rid of lisp cons!
Best Video Codec for Screencast
Math Symbol as Function Name in Python 3. See: Unicode in Python
ELisp: Ways to Exit/Break a Loop
Lisp Syntax Readable?
See bottom: Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Lisp Notations .
when massive amounts of text scroll fast in terminal, certain inexplicable elation rises.
Most Sophisticated Malware to-date: Flame Malware
Wow, Flame (malware) .
- Most advanced malware to date.
- Likely nation-state sponsored.
- Create fake but valid certificates.
- hijacks Microsoft update.
- User level program can't even see it.
- Can record audio, screenshots, keyboard activity and network traffic.[6] The program also records Skype conversations and can turn infected computers into Bluetooth beacons which attempt to download contact information from nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices.
- Remotely controlled. Including a command to self-destruct.
- Target seems to be Iran.
Who wrote it? We did! (suspects: one of {Israel, USA, China}.)
The Conflict of Hacks: Unix Shebang vs Unicode BOM Mark
BOM mark is part of the Unicode standard. If a tech declares full support for unicode, support for BOM mark is necessary. (the story i heard is that Haskell compiler choked on BOM, and people are blaming Microsoft Notepad for adding the BOM. But the fact is, Haskell spec says it's source code is Unicode, thus choking on BOM is Haskell's fault.)
BOM mark is a hack, but so is unix shebang mark. BOM mark being a given, it wouldn't have any problem if utf-8 isn't invented. utf-8 is invented by unix guy Ken Thompson and unix fanatic Rob Pike largely to help unix world move forward to unicode. As it is, BOM mark conflict with the spirit of utf-8 (because utf-8 is meant to be ASCII compatible as is, yet BOM mark byte sequence isn't in ASCII.)
i read the link Thien-Thin Nguyen posted: http://www.utf8everywhere.org/. At first i find it very informative, but in the end i wasn't convinced in its opinion that we should all adopt utf-8 instead of utf-16. I think if one switch a attitude, that utf-8 is the hack that introduced all this problems, then many of their argument for utf-8 doesn't stand.
side note… about that site, it's Windows oriented. As such, they didn't explain many terms and Windows tech they use, for example, i have little idea what narrowchar or widechar they mean, nor of the many Windows libraries they mention.
also, the site is decidedly western-mind oriented. They forgot that in China, the encoding used is GB 18030, which has the same char set as Unicode but different encoding, and is also compatible with ascii. No utf-8 nor utf-anything whatsoever. Chinese web traffic are like half of the world's or something.
the site wishes utf-16 to go away. Windows, Mac, NTFS, HFS+ file systems, all utf-16, plus java C# etc. Though, the web (HTML, XML, CSS) are all utf-8. Neither are likely to go away.
For some detail about BOM, see: Unicode BOM Hack .