Sight

I've been working on something similar -- based in fact on something similar I wrote as a teenager, before William Gibson ever wrote Virtual Light -- but this is pretty awesome.

Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.

A FAQ About "How To Create Your Own Freaking Awesome Programming Language"

I advertise this in my blog sidebar, and blogged it once or twice:



I've run into a couple misconceptions here and there on Twitter, etc., so I'm going to blog this quick FAQ. It's more a "frequently mistaken assumptions," then a true FAQ, though.

First of all, I didn't write it. It was written by a Ruby developer from Canada named Marc-André Cournoyer.

Jeremy Ashkenas read it before writing CoffeeScript, and the first version of the CoffeeScript compiler used this book (and I believe its code) as a starting point; however, the CoffeeScript compiler's been completely rewritten since then (at least once).

It's not a comprehensive overview of lexical theory and doesn't aim to be; its goal is to get you up and running as fast as possible. Like Jeremy Ashkenas, if you build a language with this book which people use and like, you will probably end up rebuilding its internals at some later date.

I also wrote a more detailed review.

Francis Hwang @ GoRuCo 2012: The Front-End Future

Francis Hwang - The Front-End Future from Gotham Ruby Conference on Vimeo.

Sarah Palin vs Moon Nazis

My Review Of Marco Arment's Review Of John Siracusa's Review Of OS X Mountain Lion

See the original here.

I'm going to make this brief, because I'm working on a short film, compiling an album from the music I've made over the past year, and creating a video tutorial series on CoffeeScript and Node.js.

Overview

Marco Arment recommends you read 24 pages (approximately 26,000 words) of detailed analysis about the difference between OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion.

Conclusion

This is why I never ever listen to that fucking guy.

Police Attacking People In Anaheim

Badass Goddamn Robot In Node.js

Given my previous experience in web development, a web interface was the only thing I was qualified to make. Luckily, a web interface has the advantage of working on pretty much any device with a web browser (including laptops, tablets, and phones), which means no specialized hardware is needed to control our robot. And given the recent development of websockets, we were able to control our robot in real-time from a web browser. Also, given that our robot is processing a wide variety of data asynchronously, an event-driven model makes a lot of sense, and this is exactly what node.js provides.

By the way, my Teaching The Robots To Sing video on web sockets and Node.js is almost finished, and it looks to to be the best in the series. I might even sell it as a standalone product.

Kung Fu, Dance, And Denial

Americans make martial arts movies, but Asian kung fu movies have an important advantage: in America, people sometimes dismiss kung fu as dancing.

Some Americans deny this, some Americans affirm it, but all American martial arts films operate on the assumption that dismissing kung fu as dancing would be reasonable in the first place.

Consider Asia's neighbor, India, and the role dancing plays in Bollywood cinema.

Consider Thai movies. Thailand's at the border of Asia and India, speaking extremely broadly. Thai movies structure their fight scenes like Hong Kong fight scenes, but they pace their fight scenes like Indian dance scenes.

American martial arts movies never embrace kung fu's role as dance, only as action; consequently, there are Asian martial arts movies where you can learn something from the martial arts themselves, but few such from America, because ignoring kung fu's role as a form of dance means ignoring its role as a form of communication.

What would it look like if American martial arts movies were movies which incorporated both dance and kung fu?

Imagine this:



Blended with this:



In this scene from Iron Monkey, Donnie Yen is beating the crap out of corrupt Shaolin monks who have helped a local governor to steal grain from the people who that governor, and those monks, are supposed to protect. The fact that he uses bags of grain as a weapon against people who have stolen that grain is intrinsic to the scene; it's equivalent to beating up corrupt cops with the money they stole.

Overtone In A Nutshell

Quick Intro to Live Programming with Overtone from Sam Aaron on Vimeo.

Dance Fu

This movie is definitely not for everybody, but I highly recommend it. Ultra-low budget, dancing equals kung fu, and extremely silly comedy.