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Video lectures from Daniel P Friedman’s 60th birthday are online. I haven’t gotten to watch many of them yet, but the video by Gerald Sussman was great.

Memorable quotes include: (these are paraphrases actually)

I don’t use Mathematica, I use my own stuff, but I don’t much care for Mr. Wolfram.

I read Arnold’s Classical Mechanics book. Arnold was a son of a bitch, look what he wrote in this footnote.

Minsky said that programming languages were a great medium for expressing sloppily formulated ideas. This is in direct opposition to the guys who want to talk to me about Type Theory all day.

Since the Ruby on Rails Manuals site seems to be permanently down, I created a zip file of pdfs of the website from the last version on the Internet Archive WayBack Machine as of June 2006.

There is also a handy cheat sheet for Capistrano that someone made.

Some amusing comics from the XKCD strip, found at Classic XKCD strips. I particularly like the one above. And it is true, check at Google Calculator. But what does it mean?

This was originally found via a Silicon Valley Patterns mailing list post about a programming puzzle at: Facebook for their engineering candidates.

The force arrests Chewbacca.

There are no words I can add.

(Via LA Times.)

Here’s a fun little puzzle, just to get the blog flowing again.

If a bottle with a deposit costs $1.10, and the bottle costs a dollar more than the deposit, how much is the bottle worth?

For the answer, run this ruby program:


puts "#{?i} pennies"


or, just look up the ascii value for ‘i’ and you have the penny amount.