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2008-05-15
How to beat comment spam (for now, anyway)

I've always loathed captcha's, and they've gotten progressively worse. But I've noticed some blogs seem to do reasonably well with just a single static word, presumably because most spammers won't customize things for a single blog unless you get a lot of traffic.

I also have a soft spot for an ...

2008-05-13
Giant balls of typeless source files

Cedric posted this entry about an article by Steve Yegge called Dynamic languages strike back (it's slightly interesting, but nothing really new if you already like dynamic languages, though the section on trace trees is wel worth a read). Most of Cedric's comments were unremarkable, but this ...

2008-05-06
A brief introduction to Semantic Dictionary Encoding

I've read a lot of research papers over the years, but there I keep coming back to like Professor Dr. Michael Franz' doctoral dissertation: Code-Generation On-the-Fly: A Key to Portable Software (PDF).

I've been harping about Semantic Dictionary Encoding (SDE) ever since I first read the paper back in ...

2008-05-06
Unholy: Converting Ruby 1.9 bytecode to Python bytecode

_why is at it again...

I can't quite agree with myself if this is seriously demented or tremendously cool... (Yes, it's mostly only an idea, with only the barest hint of doing anything "useful", but anyway..)

...

2008-05-03
Writing a compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 6

Since we established last time that I'm going to blatantly steal stuff from Lisp, Scheme and friends (as well as from all over the place - I feel no need to be original with this project... Not until we're much further along, anyway), now is the right time to start introducing ...

2008-05-01
Software ICs: Reuse should not always mean inheritance or configuration

Inheritance or configuration options has a cost in terms of increased complexity that can in some cases with advantage be avoided by maintaining multiple versions of the component and adding new features to new branches instead of continuing to work on a single code base, in the same way integrated circuits ...

2008-05-01
How to sell and not sell a new programming language

"Everyone" that's geeky enough sooner or later at least toy with the idea of their own language (or like me write several half-assed toy compilers to test concepts - hopefully I'll actually see my latest one all the way through).

But what keeps amazing me is how new languages tends ...

2008-04-30
Customizing the Ruby syntax highlighter for x86 assembler

I wrote about syntax hightlighting in Ruby earlier. The Ruby Syntax library supports Ruby, YAML and XML out of the box. But it's also pretty easy to extend to handle other languages.

Since I've been writing my compiler in Ruby series and including a lot of x86 assembler, I ...

2008-04-29
When your Linux / iptables firewall randomly drops connections...

Yesterday our firewall at work started randomly dropping connections. It has probably happened a few times before, but been seemingly resolved before I had a chance to look at it.

Weirdly, some people in the office reported no problems, while others couldn't even get DNS lookups to work properly.

Looking at ...