1972 – Alain Colmerauer designs the logic language Prolog. His goal is to create a language with the intelligence of a two year old. He proves he has reached his goal by showing a Prolog session that says “No.” to every query.
From One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.
After visiting Gimme! a while ago and having one of their tasty triple ristrettos, I decided to pick up a triple basket and see if I could pull it off in my Rancilio Silvia at home. The basket arrived on Tuesday, so today was the first go round.
So far, it works great. I’m using ~ 17g of coffee and getting 1.5oz in about 30s. Very tasty and and nice controlled pour. I’m a convert.
If you’re interested in triples, there’s a good page over on Home Barista about it too.
Wow, a nearly 10″ screen, native PDF rendering, and all the existing goodness of the Kindle. Mandy really likes hers and this just looks amazing. Can’t wait to see one in person.
I’ve been using IRC for quite a while and have always had one niggling problem: when you lose your network connection, you miss out on everything that happens. This is fundamental to how IRC works; the server doesn’t keep track of what you’re missing, so you never see the missing things when you reconnect. This is a pretty common problem, so a number of solutions have been developed. Some folks run a client like irssi inside screen on a shell account which is always connected. This is great if you like irssi, but I tend to prefer native clients.
So, some enterprising folks have come up with an alternate system, commonly called an IRC bouncer. It’s an IRC proxy, originally used to allow folks without access to common IRC servers a way around the block or to hide the connection point of the user. They work a lot like the irssi + screen solution, in that you have a process running on some constantly connected machine that keeps your connection to the IRC network going. To use one, you set up the software and then connect your IRC client to it. From your IRC client’s perspective, it’s just an IRC server running as normal.
As time has passed, the bouncers have gained the ability to log what’s going on on the server. This is great, because you can connect and disconnect from the bouncer and never miss anything. A number of bouncers have this abilty (including IRSSI), but I’ve always found the implementation lacking. With most you have to manually ask for the log in some way, which makes it a royal PITA. Additionally, this is mostly spare time kick around software, so the configuration tends to be a bit… esoteric.
Well, I finally found one that just plain works. It’s called ZNC. Setup is a breeze, it supports SSL out of the box, and the playback buffers just work. Highly recommended if you’re looking for this kind of thing.
80 gigs is plenty. Geoff got one and apparently it is rather awesome:
AngryParsley: Sequential AngryParsley: Uncached Write 79.74 MB/sec [4K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Write 64.97 MB/sec [256K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Read 30.30 MB/sec [4K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Read 206.61 MB/sec [256K blocks] AngryParsley: Random AngryParsley: Uncached Write 65.81 MB/sec [4K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Write 66.96 MB/sec [256K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Read 9.49 MB/sec [4K blocks] AngryParsley: Uncached Read 177.63 MB/sec [256K blocks] AngryParsley: yeah, not bad for a laptop drive
Update: Apparently Joel Spolsky got one and loved it too. And there’s a good review of it on Anandtech. Also, the review reminded me of this piece on latency by an old colleague of mine.
