PROGRAMMING

• The first song ever synthesized by a computer was Daisy Bell. I had no idea the song's use in 2001 was a reference to that.
• Machine-generated music that is actually really good. A lot like what they would play at night on the local university radio when I was a kid.
• A few seconds from various Youtube videos with very few views. Surprisingly interesting.
• I like computer games but I'm happy to call myself a 'casual', because gamers are the worst people in the world in every way possible. Extra-hilarious gaming controversies.
• One of the entries about mentions a guy having objects thrown at him for playing Jiggly Puff. Here is his defence of himself. "People don’t like it when I pop off after victories, especially when they come via Jigglypuff, and they definitely don’t like the methods I use to win tournaments. But that doesn’t matter to me. Every story needs a bad guy. In some ways, the role suits me nicely. After all, as far as I’m concerned, my destiny has already been written."
• KC Green has created another webcomic, this one being a very NSFW gag strip. My favourite is the ASMR lady.

Q: Describe textually a grammar for decimal numbers such as 0.01 or 52.221.

A:

// Using the same system he's given us to describe decimals:
"                                             \
 digit   : \"0\" | \"1\" \"2\" | \"3\" \"4\"  \
         | \"5\" | \"6\" \"7\" | \"8\" \"9\"; \
 number  : <digit>+;                          \
 decimal : <number>+\.<number>+;              \
"
/* The URL example is essentially the same, but with a all the letters 
 * of the alphabet. The rest of the  questions in the chapter are soft
 * enough to be left to the interested reader. */

• Radio Finland has been running a Latin news service for 30 years. In Canada, they used to play it as about two or three in the morning. It was very neutral world news, with a charmingly disproportional amount of Finnish politics. They'd been threatening to cancel it for years and finally it happened. Some people are trying to continue it in their free time and I wish them the best of luck.
• I quit watching SNL in the Jimmy Fallon years, for obvious reasons. Now I'm finding out that - thanks to Jimmy Fallon - I missed out on all kinds of great gems, like Meet Your Second Wife.
• The standard C library has a simple reversible encryption function called memfrob which XORs a string with 42.
• Someone went through the effort of writing a graphical operating system in Common LISP. Can you imagine doing that?
• "The worst morale boosting gesture I've experienced"
• There's a gigantic culture of programmers with whom I have no contact whatsoever. I don't understand their lives, which seem gruesome and difficult and cursed, even though they seem endlessly optimistic and perfectly happy. It's like when you find out that a lot of poverty-torn developing countries have low suicide rates. In DOTNET, Math.Round opens the browser print dialog.

• A new client and a bad cold killed off Weekly Links for a couple weeks, but not its unconquerable soul. Pachelbel's Chicken.
• Sauron's Eye Dwitter.
• "This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine."
• Intentional and/or unintentional comedy gold mine: The Star Trek wiki has a page for breasts. It explains breast feeding and provides several episodes as citations.
• The Public Domain Review has an article about what 'x' is for. It's a shame that their site is almost impossible to navigate, because they publish some incredible stuff.
• I'm a bit late to the game, but someone made an incredible Apollo 11 webapp to commemorate the recent 50th anniversary.

Q: Why are there back slashes \ at the end of the line in the grammar?

A: C will ignore a combination of a newline followed by \, which lets you format long strings more nicely. An example:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
  /* If you count the spaces here and in the resulting output, there are
   * 11. The \ and the newline are dropped. */
  printf("this is line one \
          and this is line two\n");

  return 0;
}

this is line one           and this is line two

Q: Why are there back slashes \ in front of the quote marks " in the grammar?

A: So the C compiler doesn't mistake them for quotation marks which end the string.

Q: If _WIN32 is defined on windows, what is defined for Linux or Mac?

A: __linux__, and __APPLE__, not to mention __ANDROID__ (which is a type of __linux__, so something like __linux__ && !__ANDROID__ is possible).

Q: What does the preprocessor command #define do?

A: It creates a macro, which is to say, it let's you associate a word with an expression. Before compiling your code, the precompiler will replace every instance of that word with that expression. While most macros you see are quite simple, you can do pretty amazing things with them. See here for a detailed reference.

• The Best Of Mae West.
• A X86 Assembler in 256 lines of code.
• The Onion has been funnier than normal lately. Example.
• It looks like Google will not back down on neutering ad blockers in future versions. No surprise, as Google's main source of income (last I checked) was ads. Chrome's been getting slow as well but all my stuff is there, so no matter how good Firefox is getting (and it is), it's a real pain switching over...
• You only need a very small subset of Vim to be productive. Vim is so massive, though, that I doubt one person could actually learn it all. Oddball, useful Vim tricks.
• Jupiter's red spot is shrinking.