Programming

Someone made an unbelievably-beautiful Conway's Game of Life machine.

In CSS, easing is not just for transitions.

Very interesting size/speed/system call benchmarks for 'Hello World' in a number of languages. 'Hello World' might seem trivial and non-comprehensive, but the results are extremely surprising and enlightening.

Voxel Space: an interesting article about a major leap in 90s computer graphics. Lots of pretty pictures to help demonstrate.

I talked about De Stijl yesterday. Piet is a programming language whose programs can look like De Stijl paintings, although you can see from the samples that people have created all kinds of patterns, like the giant red circle that calculates an approximation of Pi, or the 'Hello World' that looks like the world.

Better network usage visualization for the console

Fun with Ruby

• Remember when Rosanne got Tom Arnold his own show? A very tongue-in-cheek ad for the show, followed by Stephen King advertising the new Dark Tower book.
• A Tumblr entirely dedicated to anti-Riker memes. Reading it through, I get the feeling that the maintainer doesn't actually hate Riker at all!
• On a related note, what are the chances that the new Picard show's secret plot twist is time travel and/or time travelling into the other timeline's past? Star Trek's last non-prequel was eighteen years ago and they've now got countless prequels-to-prequels. They seem pretty committed to being prequel-only at this point.
• In my opinion, the greatest - or at least greatest looking - web comic of all time is A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, which was active in the 00s. The illustrator later did the artwork for the game Braid.
• Some extremely brave scientists in India blog about researching King Cobra nests.
• The Ten C Commandments. Not to be confused with the Biggie Smalls song.

Q: Change the grammar to recognize decimal numbers such as 0.01, 5.21, or 10.2.

A:

"                                                   \
number   : /-?[0-9]+(.[0-9]+)*/ ;                   \
operator : 'add' | 'sub' | 'mul' | 'div';           \
expr     : <number> | '(' <operator> <expr>+ ')' ;  \
lispy    : /^/ <operator> <expr>+ /$/ ;             \
"

• Terence Tao: Almost all orbits of the Collatz map attain almost bounded values. I only made it a few pages in, but I feel privileged to share the same universe as this guy, and that conjecture.
• Weirdo the cat-killing superchicken.
• Sandi Metz, who is an excelling programming writer, once came up with four rules for object-oriented programming. I've been more-or-less trying to stick to them for a while now. Good or not good?
• I'm obsessed with movies that can be edited down to less than three minutes without losing any plot points or characterization. Someone managed do the same to the entire run of the Sopranos.
• Tom Hanks MegaFacts. Includes him rapping while doing a Harry Morgan impression??
• John Waters has been releasing a list of his favourite movies of the year every year for two decades. Watching these is a new life goal.

Q: › Change the grammar to recognise operators written in textual format 'add', 'sub', 'mul', 'div'.

A:

"                                                   \
number   : /-?[0-9]+/ ;                             \
operator : 'add' | 'sub' | 'mul' | 'div';           \
expr     : <number> | '(' <operator> <expr>+ ')' ;  \
lispy    : /^/ <operator> <expr>+ /$/ ;             \
"

• Need a book to read? Try Savaged by Systemd: an Erotic Unix Encounter. Amazon also recommended 'git commit murder'.
• Dynamic projection mapping is cooler than I could possibly describe in words.
• Yoda is supposed to be just a normal guy (by George Lucas).
• British TV in the 60s is completely inexplicable. Here is couple elderly, enthusiastic men playing a wacky version of Bye Bye Blues on a mellotron.
• The first step to building an irl holodeck. It looks really pretty.
• A JS library to generate graphs that look like they were cutely sketched by hand.

Q: Change the grammar to add a new operator such as '%'.

A:

"                                                   \
number   : /-?[0-9]+/ ;                             \
operator : '+' | '-' | '*' | '/' | '%';             \
expr     : <number> | '(' <operator> <expr>+ ')' ;  \
lispy    : /^/ <operator> <expr>+ /$/ ;             \
"

I try not to post too many videos in weekly links, which means I now have a huge backlog of videos. Enjoy.

• Deeply artificial trees. Super disturbing and you must click on it.
• Classic Taiwanese children's show in Minnan. The most impressive and dramatic puppet violence you will ever see.
• Ancient Clickhole Of The Week: Share This On Portugal’s Facebook Page To Let Them Know They Had A Good Run But It’s Time To Call It Quits.
• The Mellotron was an early 60s synthesizer with an eerie sound that was used in Strawberry Fields, among others. Watch this super interesting video where an awesome mechanical genius shows the inner workings of a Mellotron she repaired.
• Werner Herzog narrates a cute cat video.
• The world's largest Ocarina.

• Someone must have hacked the BBC news website, because they did two entire stories that weren't about tweets: Rod Stewart's cool-as-hell model train set and The Comedy Wildlife Awards.
• GNOME is refusing to settle with a patent troll, on principle. If you can, give them money before cokeheads use loopholes in legal systems to end the golden age of technological progress we are currently living it.
• I think Inuktitut is the most beautiful language I've ever heard. I used to watch the nightly news in Inuktitut, not because I understood a single word, but because the host's especially-beautiful voice was hypnotic. Here's a career highlight reel from when she retired.
• The 6502 is a legendary processor that was used in the NES, Commodore 64, Apple II, and countless others (not to mention close-derivatives). It's also still the best way to learn Assembly, because it is relatively straightforward. Visual 6502 Circuit Webapp.
• Ancient Clickhole of the Week: 6 Of The Biggest Differences Between The British Version Of ‘The Office’ And The Zapruder Film.
• Real places that look like drawings are an Internet staple, and I love them.

Q: Write a regular expression matching pit, pot and respite but not peat, spit, or part.

A:

# This works, but is a weird answer to a weird exercise.
/(^|res)p[io]/