SICM

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics is online.

IT Productivity

Robert X. Cringely:

Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that.

Trademarks

Cory Doctorow:

The marketing objective has been achieved, but just watch as the lawyers in the board room blanch at the thought that the name of the company is losing its capital letter and entering the public's unconscious lexicon of product-derived verbs.

Cruft-free URLs

Mark Pilgrim shows how to remove file extensions from URLs to avoid exposing implementation details in your permalinks.

Aligning Data

Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch has posted a great paper:

Data alignment is an important issue for all programmers who directly use memory. Data alignment affects how well your software performs, and even if your software runs at all. By understanding the causes behind alignment, we also can explain some of the “weird” behaviors of some processors.

URL Regex Generator

This page presents a program that generates a massive regular expression, based on the RFC grammars, for matching URLs. However, since URLs in the wild don’t necessarily follow the RFCs, a simpler regex is probably more useful.

ARIANE 5 Failure

This report is the result of a collective effort by the Commission, assisted by the members of the Technical Advisory Committee. We have all worked hard to present a very precise explanation of the reasons for the failure and to make a contribution towards the improvement of Ariane 5 software. This improvement is necessary to ensure the success of the programme.

Cortland

Here’s a new Cortland cartoon from Matt Johnson.

Hail to the Thief

Raena Armitage:

I’ve got an early birthday present from my auntie—it’s Radiohead’s lovely new album, Hail To The Thief. It’s ‘protected’ by the fabulous Copy Control technology, which caused my computer to skip, hang and eventually require a restart when I tried to play it. Oh dear.

DRM Music