Harry Pierson's Awesome "Practical Parsing in F#" Series of Posts

When I can shake some time free to actually learn F#, this awesome series of blog posts on "Practical Parsing in F#" is definitely something I'll revisit. Parsing is one of the better tasks for shaking free a large number of concepts about a programming language, since it invariably involves …

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UFO Drinking Game

When I was 10, this show was on Saturdays at 4:00 on UHF Channel 56. I watched the static-y, ghost-filled image on a black-and-white television with, I'd guess, a 17" screen that sat on a cheap aluminum rolling stand. I thought it was the greatest show ever. This weekend …

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Why The Mainstream Concurrency Model is Broken

Raymond Chen's psychic debugging of a deadlock is everything you need to know about why the mainstream model of concurrency (in which programmer's manually manage locks and can start their own threads) is fundamentally broken.

If you're a C# or Java programmer looking at this code, you might be tempted …

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Wondering if Subversion is Good Enough

For the past few years I've felt that Subversion was a "good enough" SCM system, but I am beginning to wonder about that. In practice, SVN hits bumps quite often, especially when doing things like moving files or directories. This is always easy enough for an experienced user to correct …

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Parsing Microsoft's "Emacs.Net"

Via Chris Sells comes \<a href="http://www.douglasp.com/blog/2007/12/27/EmacsNet.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this cryptic message from Microsoft's Doug Purdy:

We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as "Emacs.Net".

No more details than …

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iPhone vs. Kindle

A client bought me an iPhone for Christmas (more-financially-successful friend's instant reaction: "You aren't charging them enough.").

My reaction is that while it's an incredible gadget, it's a pale shadow of the Kindle when it comes to reading. I am dismayed by the number of people who say "Well, the …

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Ruby 1.9 Available

Ruby 1.9, which involves a number of significant upgrades, is now available. This is development code, probably not ready for use in upcoming sprints / development cyclese, but I will be downloading it if for no other reason than to experiment with its Fibers implementation.

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To Twitter, To Facebook, To Facebook Perchance to Slack? Aye, There's The Rub

A client bought me an iPhone for Christmas. It's a pretty darn slick gadget, although I doubt that I'll keep a phone plan on it (I'm pretty much either at home in my wifi bubble all day long and, when I go out, I'm often going to beaches and other …

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Software To Join A "Slightly More Fit" Peer Group

Were I to graph the calories burned per week exercising for group in my social network (were I to bother maintaining my Facebook page), it would create a normal distribution. This graph would probably correlate pretty directly to their perceived fitness and their enthusiasm for exercising. Within this group I …

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Acoustic Ranging With Cell Phones

BeepBeep is a high-accuracy acoustic ranging system for mobile phones. It supports Pocket PC phones running Windows Mobile 5.0 or subsequent versions.

I'm not even going to pretend to have the time to play with this.

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