Shut Up And Click It

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (via One Div Zero)

1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.

via james-iry.blogspot.com

Comedy gold.

“They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart.”

via www.youtube.com

Great song, great clip.

Hackathon VI

via officialblog.yelp.com

Highlights from my first Hackathon at Yelp. Make sure to watch the video (I’m in it!).

Little Boots — SHAKE

 

Little Boots is back.

Anil Dash: Facebook is gaslighting the web

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening. In this post I intend to not only document the practices which enable this attack, but to also propose a remedy.

via dashes.com

Once again, Anil hits the nail on the head.

(Anil... nail... hurray for anagrams!)

An open letter to the University of California regarding the UCPD's mistreatment of peaceful protesters

UPDATE: I've rewritten this into a petition at Change.org. Please go there and sign it to show your support!

President Yudof, Chancellor Birgeneau:

I am a recent graduate of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences program at Berkeley. I have always been proud to be a Berkeley alumnus, but as of last week I am ashamed to be associated with the University. Both of you you and your administrations are the ones who should be ashamed, though, as you have failed in your duties to protect the University's students.

The University of California Police Department's mission statement sets forth the goals of "[facilitating] the achievement of the academic, research, and public service missions of the University" and "the protection of individual rights". This is a far cry from UCPD's actions last week at Berkeley, where an arrested student asked about his Miranda rights and was told to his face "You don't have any rights", and this week at Davis, where a group of students sitting quietly on campus grounds were doused with pepper spray at point-blank range.

As a member of the UC alumni community, I can no longer remain silent on this issue. Forty-seven years ago, almost to the day, the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley, inspiring an entire generation with the ideals of free speech and open political debate. These ideals still inform the actions of students today; indeed, Berkeley's legacy as the home of the FSM is a large selling point to prospective students. UCPD's actions effectively mean the University has reneged upon this heritage of political activism.

As a EECS graduate, I am one of the relatively lucky members of my generation — my education at Berkeley has enabled me to secure employment in a fast-growing sector of the economy. I was planning to thank the University for this by donating to the campus this year as I have in past years. As of today, I have changed my mind. I am withholding my donation and will continue to do so until such time as UCPD and the University admit their wrongdoing and issue a full apology to all of the students and other members of the community they have harmed, and until a full investigation of how these atrocities happened has taken place and those responsible are no longer in the employ of the University or any position of authority over students.

Sincerely,

Sam Kimbrel

University of California, Berkeley Class of 2010

You can reach President Yudof's office at president@ucop.edu and Chancellor Birgeneau's office at chancellor@berkeley.edu.

Like, Python

 

  #!usr/bin/python
  # My first Like, Python script!

  yo just print like "hello world" bro

 

via www.staringispolite.com

Did you ever wish you could brogram in Python? Now you can!

The Apple effect on ISP traffic

via corp.sonic.net

This is why I love my ISP.

Alt text for iOS devices

Ever wanted to view alt text for an image in Mobile Safari? Here’s a handy JavaScript bookmarklet to do it:

javascript:for%28var%20imCt%3D0%3Bdocument.images%5BimCt%5D%3BimCt++%29%7Bvoid%28document.images%5BimCt%5D.onclick%3Dfunction%28%29%7Bif%28this.title%26%26this.parentNode%29%7Bthis.parentNode.insertBefore%28document.createTextNode%28%27%20%27+this.title+%27%20%27%29%2Cthis%29%3B%7Delse%20if%28this.alt%26%26this.parentNode%29%7Bthis.parentNode.insertBefore%28document.createTextNode%28%27%20%27+this.alt+%27%20%27%29%2Cthis%29%3B%7Delse%7Balert%28%27There%20is%20no%20title%20or%20alt%20text%20for%20this%20image%27%29%3B%7D%7D%29%3B%7D

To add this to your bookmarks bar, you can either drag the above snippet to your Safari bookmarks bar on OS X and then sync your iDevices (assuming you have bookmark sync enabled), or you can do the following:

• Bookmark the current page on your iDevice, and change the title when you save it to something like “Alt Text”.
• Copy the entire snippet as it appears above.
• Edit the bookmark in Mobile Safari and paste the snippet into the address field.

 

To use it, just tap the bookmarklet and then tap the image you want to see alt text for. The script will insert the alt text directly before the image in the page. Enjoy!

Based on the script I found here on Macworld’s hints site.

Com Truise’s “Brokendate”

via vimeo.com

Great 80s-retrofuturistic video for the lead single off of Com Truise’s new LP Galactic Melt.

I see references to Tron and Blade Runner. What else?