PROGRAMMING

• My vote for most dramatic Buzzfeed-style listicle? 7 Omens That Herald the Dark Night of the Soul.
• Recipe of the week: Don't die in your forties enchiladas.
• Instead of posting Ancient Clickhole of the Week, I'm posting this because it made me laugh for ten minutes.
• Ken Thompson's Unix password.
• Brian Harvey, who has some truly amazing lectures and books online, hilariously explains why not to cheat.
• It turns out there's a big ol' online bird song database, so you can hear multiple examples of birds you'll probably never see or hear in person

Q: Write a regular expression matching strings of consecutive a and b such as ababab or aba.

A:

/(ab)/

• Have you heard of xlogo? If you use the X Window System, this is pretty neat.
• Ancient Clickhole of the week: These Elderly People’s Stories Of An Early, Unsafe Version Of Disneyland Will Terrify You.
• C gets a lot of shit on the Internet, yet still persists and thrives. Your operating system is running C code right now, for example. For all its cruft and quirks, there are just certain niches that C fills which languages like Rust unequivocally do not, no matter how many think pieces are written. It also requires discipline and planning. Here's a lighthearted Ten Commandments Of C.
• Incredible short film.
• A dog collar that converts all barks to emails.
• Valve is a company that went from rich to ridonculously rich due to a side project that was the product of their bizarrely relaxed organizational model. Their employee handbook is both interesting to read and very well-designed.

• The folks at V8 wrote a post bragging that their Javascript interpreter has almost caught up with front-end JS frameworks while sheepishly, begrudgingly admitting that, on the sorts of devices normal people actually access the internet with, resume-friendly JS feels like sucking cement through a straw. Unrelated to any of that is the hidden gem that it's faster to parse JSON than access a JS object.
• I didn't write about the Jeremy Renner app because how can you improve on perfection? After the dust settled, though, one of the good folks at Uproxx wrote a very good fancy think piece about it.
• In all her wisdom, Madcatlady has weighed in on the Game of Thrones controversies.
• Ancient Clickhole of the week: Powerful: A Barrel Maker Is Confronted By People Whose Lives Were Ruined By His Poorly Crafted Barrels.
• Oo, Indonesia
• Call out culture isn't new: How a 1991 billionaire lost a $10 Billion business in ten seconds.

• My favourite pop culture writer is Brian Grub, ever since 'Which Beatle has the Worst Christmas Song?'. Lately, he's been writing weekly rundowns and this one is a doozy. Read it slowly, take it in, absorb it.
• There are a lot of lists of top programming languages, most of which are written by cheesy copywriters. IEEE's annual report seems more or less accurate, although their Embedded seems a bit weird (Python? For embedded? Really? What a waste of hardware). They just released their 2019 report.
• For some reason, I type 'moo' a lot, unconciously. It's my default metasyntactic variable (along with 'apple' and 'banana'). I think it goes back to one of those 'intro to OO' things that uses farm animals as an example, that I read many years ago. Googling 'moo' lead me to this low-budget, NSFW slice of joy. This is all the good things that people used to say about punk rock but weren't actually true.
• Ancient Clickhole of the week: Don’t Worry, There’s No ‘Arthur The Aardvark’ Shit In This List Of Total ’90s Memories.
• I've read before that before the internet, people would copy entire games from magazines in machine code, assembly, basic or a mix thereof. It turns out that most of these - having no commercial value nowadays - have been made free on archive.org. Take a look at this insane insert.
• Speaking of low-level programming and retrocomputing, this short tutorial is not just a great introduction to 6502, but a good intro to assembly in general. I wish I had something like that instead of the spiderweby books I learned from.

• Steamed Dagoth Ur
• Hyper-Detailed, Picture-Filled Pre-War History Of The Ocarina
• Automatic Box Plan Generator
• banned.h
• Gut-wrenching: Italian Waiter Grinds Fresh Black Pepper Onto Daughter’s Grave
• Byrne's Euclid is a strange Victorian edition of Euclid using colours instead of letters. I'm not sure whether it's really easier for children, but it is interesting to look at. Some excellent person made a classy online edition.

Q: Write a regular expression matching strings of all a or b such as aababa or bbaa.

A:

/^(a|b)+$/