The Mandelbear's Musings

A good day. I continued to be cheerful -- it's been a week now that my mood has been noticably above neutral. I'm told I should simply enjoy it and not worry about the reasons; I suppose the Centipede's Dilemma is a good reason for that.

I took a walk that was considerably shorter than usual, but also faster: fast enough for what I think was a decent cardio workout. I had to slow down toward the end, because I was definitely feeling it in the legs. The book Fitting In Fitness, which I finished a couple of days ago, suggests taking one's exercise in three 10-minute chunks instead of a solid half-hour. Hmm.

My weight was down, too, for the first time in over a week. Probably either the increased exercise, or the lighter-than-usual lunch (prunes and beef jerky). I'm not complaining.

(9:45) Almost forgot -- I got up and tried to distract a crying baby in the Kaiser waiting room while her mother was signing in. I was only partly successful, but had a nice little conversation with the mother. Fun!

Two insights. The first was that what I've spent on family members' air travel this month has been less than I'd been paying on my Honda (which I finally paid off a few months ago). The second, much geekier but more amusing, is that you can fit three SHA-1 hashes and some type information into a Twitter post with room to spare. So you can implement LISP.

(defun cons (a d)
  (let (c (concat "(" a "." d ")"))
       (post twitter (concat c "=" (sha1 c)))
       (concat "cons." (sha1 c))))

The definitions of intern, equal, and eval are left as an exercise for the reader.

The day's hot links are Linux Owns 1/3 of the Netbook Marketshare - Gizmodo, Memories of a paywall pioneer (from If You Make A Mistake With A Paywall, It Can Linger For A Long Time on Techdirt), Resources for Introverts & Fighting Loneliness, and The Eensie-Weensie Spider (TTTO "The Mary Ellen Carter").

If you're worried about HP7 spoilers, you might be interested in Sneakoscope, a Firefox extension that attempts to hide them from you. It won't protect you against spoilers in images, however.

(From docbug.)

KLone is a fully-featured, multiplatform, web application development framework, targeted especially for embedded systems and appliances.

It is a self-contained solution which includes a web server and an SDK for creating WWW sites with both static and dynamic content. When using KLone, there's absolutely no need for any additional component: neither the HTTP/S server (e.g. Apache, Netscape, Roxen), nor the typical active pages engine (PHP, Perl, ASP, Python).

KLone does everything, and does it fast and small.

KLone blends the HTTP/S server application together with its content and configuration into a single executable file. The site developer writes his/her dynamic pages in C/C++ (in usual scripting style: <% /* code */ %>) and uses KLone to transform them into embeddable, compressed native code with the native C/C++ compiler. The result is then linked to the HTTP/S server skeleton to obtain one single, ROM-able, binary file.

That's SNAil-based data transfer Protocol, of course -- it's done using a snail-pulled chariot with DVDs for wheels. Once you fill up the pipe with one snail per second, you get a sustained transfer rate of 37Mbps. Until you run out of lettuce, of course. And the latency is, um, considerable.

(from BoingBoing)