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March 14, 2007

Four Dudes Take on the World

Inspired by a LtU post I downloaded Vendetta and, poof!, two hours disappeared as I blasted an assortment of evil bots into space dust. Vendetta looked even more impressive when I learned that the guys who develop it number precisely four. Very inspirational!

Posted by Noel at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

It's Snow Time!

The Snowfort is “a repository of Scheme packages that are portable to several popular implementations of Scheme”. I think the developers of Snow have taken the correct approach by targeting the more featureful Scheme implementations, which share quite a bit of useful functionality in excess of R5RS. However, at the moment the packages look like they're written under the assumption the host Scheme has no useful module system, as the packages I looked at all prefixed their exports with snow-. The module system in R6RS should fix this, so hopefuly these annoying prefixes will go away.

There's snow business like snow business, snow business I snow...

Posted by Noel at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2007

Behold the Abominable Cow-thing!

The empirical hammer of science smashes the myth of the yeti, or at least suggests it is more closely related to ungulates than man.

Posted by Noel at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2007

Instant Business Model

Mark Hedlund writes:

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

So true, but note that it doesn't really matter if it has already been implemented. AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Jabber are successfull in the same market as ICQ (and don't forget IRC, still in use by many hackers). Facebook and MySpace are something like wall. The real lesson, I think, is that the basics of human nature are pretty constant. A lot of the examples above are about giving people a way to talk. It's not a novel idea, it's just the manifestation that changes.

Posted by Noel at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)