Category: Geek

CIRA, the Canadian Interney Registration Authority, is, as their “about” page says:

…a not for profit Canadian corporation that is responsible

for operating the dot-ca Internet country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD)

as a key public resource for all Canadians in an innovative, open, and efficient manner.

CIRA may carry out other Internet related registration activities for the Canadian community in a similar manner.

Ross

was running for position on CIRA’s board of directors and thought he

had enough nominations, which isn’t surprising considering his many

contributions to the field of internet domains in both CIRA and ICANN.

The dude’s forgotten more about domains than I will ever learn.

One day last week, two-thirds of his nominations just disappeared. Ross’ suspicion:

…a

person or person controlling a large block of votes purposely inflated

the amount of support for my nomination – which gave me a false

indication of my status in the process – and then withdraw that false

support minutes before the nomination process.

I am inclined to agree.

Ross has the details on his blog and the EFF’s Wendy Seltzer has blogged her take on the situation.

On The Farm, the Tucows programming-in-general blog:

• CocoaDialog

  – a command-line app that you can call from shell scripts / other

  command-line apps to display standard dialog boxes. Good for giving

  your interactive command-line apps a Mac-like UI with very little work

  on your part.

• Two articles on the book Higher-Order Perl,

  a book on writing Perl frameworks that generate functions. I point to

  both the book’s site and an interview with the author of Higher-Order Perl, Mark Jason Dominus.

• MySQL Cheat Sheet. SELECT * FROM MySQL_Reference_Material WHERE usefulness = 100;!
• Python Code Snippets for Nokia Series 60 Phones. Writing apps for these phones is easier than you think.
• Mac OS X “Tiger” Release Date — April 29th. Yeah, I’m going to be at my local Apple retailer that day.
• mir.aculo.us and prototype

  — one’s a weblog with some awesome JavaScript/DHTML code; the other is

  a useful library for JavaScript/DHTML apps. There’s also some mention

  of Ruby on Rails.

• Continuations for Curmudgeons. Quite possibly the clearest explanation of continuations I’ve seen.

On IndieGameDev, the blog for independent game developers:

• Mouse Ray Picking Explained. “There

  comes a time in every 3D game where the user needs to click on

  something in the scene. Maybe he needs to select a unit in an RTS, or

  open a door in an RPG, or delete some geometry in a level editing tool.

  This conceptually simple task is easy to screw up since there are so

  many little steps that can go wrong.”

• TheoWorlds Isometric Flash Game SDKs. Toolkits for building isometric games and chatrooms in Flash, a la Habbo Hotel.

In the Blogware blog:

• Ryerson Review of Journalism on Blogging and Journalism.

  A well known J-school’s magazine (produced by graduating journalism

  students) takes a look at the intersection of blogging and journalism.

Yeah, it’s all “Money for blogging and chicks for free” when you’re the Technical Community Development Coordinator.

But seriously, here are my most recent entries on the various Tucows blogs to which I contribute:

On The Farm:

• Last Developer Standing
• :wq (or: vi Reference Pages)
• Explaining Test-Driven Development to a Non-Techie
• Build Your First BlackBerry Java App
• EnginSite’s Development Tools
• NPR Interview with Donald Knuth
• Dwemthy’s Array

On IndieGameDev:

• Old School Electronic Game Dveelopment: The Mignon Kit
• Want to Work on the Next Spider-Man Game?
• Basic Particle Motion Simulation in C#

On the Blogware blog:

• Blogger Beware
• The EFF’s “Safe Blogging” Tips

On The Farm:

• Computer Programming Quotes
• Date and Time Calculation

On IndieGameDev:

• Crimes Against Mimesis

On The Farm:

• Hosting PHP Applications with IBM’s Version of Apache
• GoF Patterns in Python
• “We Had to Code Uphill! BOTH WAYS!”

And on IndieGameDev:

• What About Flash?

Update:

Had to take the file down temporarily as Blogware’s servers were

getting overloaded (we’re getting a bigger, faster one soon). I’ll let

you know as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video.

If you have BitTorrent on your machine, someone’s got a .torrent of the file at

http://chalco.dyndns.org/get/torrents/Simpsons_Couch.torrent.

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Charles Eames

has a saying that’s one of my favourites: “Eventually, everything

connects”, a statement that harkens back to an earlier saying by the

Buddhists: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe”.

One of Charles Eames’ best-known works is the film he created with his wife Ray, Powers of 10,

the classic 1977 film that looks at the relative size of things

from  microscopic to the edges of the known universe. Your

mathematical education is not complete unless you’ve seen this film.

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My friend Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson,

has a philosophy similar to Eames’: eventually, everything connects to

The Simpsons. More proof for this hypothesis appeared recently when the

Simpsons showed its best “couch gag” (the gag at the end of the title

sequence where they gather on the couch), in which they pay homage to Powers of 10.

It’s brilliant and you must watch it [10.3 MB QuickTime movie, enclosure]. I’ll post as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video!