Hacked out of a paper by Terence Parr

After condemning all CS "systems" research to the intellectual dustbin over fifteen years ago after finally passing my PhD comps [Don Knuth: "Well, sometimes you really hate a subject. For example, I decided I really hated Astronomy. I failed the first exam. I hated that, so I decided I would become the world's best Astronomy student, and would get the highest scores on the exams. So I did that." (Easy for him to say, I thought, but weirdly, on my last try at passing them before getting kicked out of Stanford, I did get the highest score. Message from DEK: "I see you passed with the highest score. See?")], I'm suddenly reading this stuff and finding it interesting. This is from the paper Enforcing Strict Model-View Separation in Template Engines, by Terence Parr, the author of the excellent parser-generator tool Antlr:
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I kept a few simple rules and tests in mind to evaluate entanglement [of views, models, and controllers]:

1) Could I reuse this template with a completely different model?

2) Could a [web] designer understand this template?

3) If it looks like a program, it probably is.

4) If the template can modify the model, it's part of the program.

5) If order of execution is important, it's part of the program.

6) If the template has computations or logic dependent on model data, it's part of the program.

7) The types are important, the template is a program.
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You'll find this paper has an excellent discussion of why having over-expressive templates inside HTML or the reverse (over-expressive templates driving HTML output) are both states of sin. Then some concrete proposals what to do to separate model, view and controller information [just those three words, "model-view-controller" bring on a tinge of the old nausea] in dynamic HTML page generation. By limiting the expressiveness of the templates and following some relatively simple, hard and fast compartmentalization rules to avoid the "entanglement," he's made it sound so simple.

I feel like I can see how people could build Flickr, Amazon, and other complicated web apps now. [Not that I want to, or have to, thank God].

The Ginternet

"This is huge. It's scary. They're not fooling around."

—Hunter Newby, chief strategy officer with carrier connection specialist Telx, on Google's telecom aspirations.

link (via langreiter)

Bruce writes

Dave is famous!

Andrew Wiles

It often comes as a surprise to non-mathematicians that we do place such a strong emphasis on originality. One common reaction is that mathematics has all been known for years; all we do is to perform calculations. This could not be further from the truth. Firstly there are many problems, old and new, that have not been solved. Secondly the creation of new mathematics enables us to dramatically simplify and clarify the old results. Calculus is now routinely taught in high school; however, in the seventeenth century it could not have been understood except by a very, very few eminent mathematicians in the world. This is not because people are smarter now, but because our language is clearer...

link

The shape of iPod nano

A question that's been nagging at me:

It's a very pleasing shape, and not just because it's small.

Anyway, those descriptions from the newspaper, inevitably saying something like —"as wide as a pencil"—they don't cut it.

Even Apple's own highly-crafted description doesn't satisfy:

>Call it astonishing. Unbelievable. Impossible, even. Then pick it up and hold it in your hand. Take in the brilliant color display....the pencil-thin iPod nano packs the entire iPod experience into an impossibly small design.

No. There's something else. What is it?

I just thought of it.

A Japanese gold bar!