This site has switched over to the temp server. The original server will be powered down shortly. The move should happen sometime this afternoon. This post should appear on the new site but not the old. ;-)

Heard this riddle over a Mandarin Chinese radio station today: What kind of hai (sea or ocean) can't be swum in? Callers offered shang hai (Shanghai, duh), liu hai (fringe), huo hai (a fire), etc. The required answer was nao hai, meaning the mind. In English, the phrase "swimming in my mind" is fairly common, and refers to thoughts, emotions,...

The machine that hosts this site is moving to another data centre on Sat 18 Sep my time. I'm arranging for this site to be hosted temporarily on another server in the meantime. From my end there should be zero downtime, since the site will be running on two servers at the same time for a time. From somewhere out on the net, this site might be...

I think the default Squeak fonts are positively ugly. Change them (per the FAQ) and Squeak looks so much better: Here is more information on high quality font support for Squeak. BTW, I've gone back to using the wmx window manager. (The letter 'o' in the vertical window title text looked hideous before my upgrade to XFree86 4.4.) There isn't...

Just upgraded XFree86 to 4.4 via ports on my FreeBSD desktop. Here are my notes on the upgrade. Hopefully others may find them useful. First, building. Usually I try "make" within the port, before attempting "portupgrade", since the latter wraps "make" within its port database maintenance stuff, all of which is useless work if "make" fails...

» I can read C++ and Java but I can't read Smalltalk. » Reading Smalltalk. "But be careful! The minute you get an inkling of what this all means, you'll find it very difficult to continue to use whatever language you're using now... Bar none." » Reading Code, Idiomatic Lisp. » Idiomatic Lisp and Idiomatic Scheme. (From the...

Via Planet Perl, Curtis Poe asks, "Why not Smalltalk?" in the sense of, "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?" Followup comments lump Smalltalk, Scheme and Lisp together and bash them all. Choice quote: "One can read Learning Perl and have a basic grasp on the language in a very short period of time. I don't think the same can be said...

BlogShares "is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links." Sounds like fun. (Link courtesy of TaoSecurity.)

» The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository » Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Exact String Matching Algorithms, Charras and Lecroq. Animation by Java applets.

The Porter stemming algorithm "is a process for removing the commoner morphological and inflexional endings from words in English. Its main use is as part of a term normalisation process that is usually done when setting up information retrieval systems." Martin Porter's official home page for his algorithm lists implementations in C, Java,...

According to Ted Leung (link courtesy of Jarno Virtanen) "Lupy is much slower than either Lucene or CLucene." CLucene is a C++ port of Lucene. (I was thinking of Common Lisp when I mentioned clucene.) Clucene claims to be "faster than lucene as it is written in C++." These two articles by Otis Gospodnetic (linked from the Lucene site) introduce...

Jakarta Lucene "is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java." Lupy "is a full-text indexer and search engine written in Python. It is a port of Jakarta Lucene 1.2 to Python. Specifically, it reads and writes indexes in Lucene binary format." PyLucene "is a GCJ-compiled version of Java Lucene...

Just noticed that Google ads now say "Ads by Gooooooooogle". Is that in celebration of the number of zeros in their valuation?

I posted a followup on the topic of payment gateways and whatnot to some mailing list. Someone sent me this: > -------------------- Start SpamAssassin results ---------------------- > This mail is probably spam. The original message has been altered > so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future. > See...