Dennis Ritchie passed away last weekend. He was one of the great minds in systems research and development, father of the C programming language, and one of the big contributors to Unix, both of which power the Mac on which I'm typing this, the iPhone on my desk, the Windows machine I use at work, the servers on which this blog is hosted, and much of the infrastructure both you and I use to connect to it.

Farewell, Steve. Thank you for all you did for the computer industry, for design, for music, for telephony, and for so many other aspects of our lives. You will be missed.

A few days ago I learned through Spaf that Gene Schultz had had a severe accident and was hospitalized. Later we learned that the accident was apparently caused by an earlier stroke that went unrecognized. Yesterday, October 2nd, during the afternoon, Gene passed away. I met Gene about 15 years ago while I was a grad student at Purdue. I met him initially at a couple of conferences, and later while he was visiting Purdue for some time.

on youtube.com via web-heads. There's probably a recall on these.

via gizmodo.com This is the stuff of Sci-Fi movies. Amazing.

via slipsum.com Awesome.

via blogs.discovermagazine.com Amazing illusion.

via youtube.com This is making the rounds, so I might as well contribute. Beautiful (and maybe not so hard to do - it's much like a dot-matrix printer, but printing from bottom up). I saw one of these a few years ago at the Motor Show in Geneva (at the Jeep stand), but it was much lower resolution and much less creative.

via airspacemag.com

Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple brew install tokyo-cabinet After this, configure --with-tokyocabinet, and then compile and install as usual.

Follow mode is a minor mode that makes two windows, both showing the same buffer, scroll as a single tall “virtual window.” To use Follow mode, go to a frame with just one window, split it into two side-by-side windows using C-x 3, and then type M-x follow-mode. From then on, you can edit the buffer in either of the two windows, or scroll either one; the other window follows it.

via youtube.com Beautiful video.

I just finished upgrading our Mac (my wife and I share it) to Lion. It looks very nice. This has been the OS X upgrade to which I have given less thought: purchase, download, backup, install, done. I think a lot of this has to do with the online distribution. We are used to installing things downloaded from the Internet without much thought (of course there are security considerations, but that's another topic).

Today I had my 2nd-Kyu Karate exam. I passed! This is my first exam after having abandoned karate for 10 years and coming back to training 5 months ago, so I'm very happy that it went well. Here's the "after" photo. I am the one with the headband (and yes, I am the oldest in the group other than my Sensei).

via Tweetbot for iPhone

As annoying as Outlook is most of the time, it has a few nifty features. For example, this notification: appears at the top of a compose window when appropriate. It is very useful because it appears if, while you are typing a message, another one comes into the same thread, thus reducing occurrences of "crossed" (and possibly conflicting) responses.

via blogs.discovermagazine.com Amazing short video. Make sure you enable HD, hit play, then pause, and let it download entirely before resuming, so you can watch it without interruptions. And make it full screen!

via blogs.discovermagazine.com Very nice video.

I hate this game. I hate it so much. I don’t want to play it. I hate playing it. I don’t enjoy playing it. But every day [...] I play it. I cry and I throw a tantrum and I complain and I hate it so much, but I play it. Go to hell, Andreas Illiger. You rich, genius son of a bitch. via log.maniacalrage.net My feelings exactly.

We had a few days of true rest and relaxation at the beach. Very very nice.

via youtube.com Scary and amazing. He seems so calm!

This time i’m going to talk about the basic components that make up a physics engine and how to put them together; this tutorial is aimed at programmers who have a basic grasp of maths and geometry but would like to step into the world of simulation. It is my hope that if, at the beginning of this article, you are able to code the physics behind the 1972 game Pong, by the end of the article you will be equally happy writing your own constraints to use in your own physics solver!

via commodoreusa.net I SO want one.

via baboonsguide.blogspot.com

via boston.com Another beautiful set of pictures from TBP.

via theatlantic.com Amazing. Looks like something from an Alien movie.

Please note: I am no longer using Windows nor Outlook, so unfortunately I cannot offer any help with problems you encounter using these scripts and techniques. Over the last few days I have been redoing my GTD-under-Outlook setup, based on the instructions available in the "GTD and Outlook" guide from DavidCo (I will write more about my setup later). One of the tricks the guide suggest is creating a mail rule on outgoing mail, which scans the message body for a special tag (/wf or *wf* are suggested) and automatically adds the message to the @WAITING FOR email folder.

Open Penetration Testing Bookmarks Collection via code.google.com

via talkingscience.org What a cool robot.