Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!
#checklist #peopleNames #programming
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
English spelling dictionaries in the format used by the built-in spell-check on macOS, amongst other things. Unlike the built-in dictionaries it permits all the spellings supported by the OED, including ‘Oxford’ or ‘world english’ spellings like ‘organize’ and ‘realize’.
https://github.com/marcoagpinto/aoo-mozilla-en-dict
via https://alleged.org.uk/pdc/2019/01/09.html
Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.
#metadata #peopleNames #programming
https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/name-representation/
Arial is a knock-off of designers’ favourite Helvetica which is ubiquitous because bundled with Microsoft Windows. Here’s a detailed history & critique by Mark Simonson
https://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-scourge-of-arial
Red bean: a zip file of web pages bundled into an Actually Portable Executable file that will run as a web server on any modern x64-based computer—Linux, macOS, or Windows. It can serve millions of static pages a second on quite ordinary hardware.
Justine Tunney’s Cosmopolitan Libc ‘makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.’
#C #CProgrammingLanguage #deployment #programming
https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
via https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1365487401812987904
Perseverance Landing Site from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg
Video: Perseverance Landing on Mars
Video Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech, Mars 2020 Mission Team
Whimsical 1959 Japanese animated short about a cat making a film with mice actors in a super-automated film studio.
#animation #anime #automation #Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EudgkAMJVss
via https://twitter.com/tinybirbsakuga/status/1331283529360166917
The new identity system for financial firm Robinhood includes commissioning these wonderful illustrations on the theme of the future in the style of French science fiction comics.
Slides & notes from a talk by Simon Willison mostly on his projects Datasette and Dogsheep aimed at streamlining the process of aggregating and publishing datasets and searching one’s personal data.
#data #Datasette #Dogsheep #Python #SimonWillison #SQLite
https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehouses/
Australian National anthem, Advance Australia Fair, has again been tweaked by the Prime Minister to better represent modern Australia.
What if everything on the Internet were real? Blog comic by Boulet
21st Century Wet Collodion Moon
Image Credit & Copyright: Mike Smolinsky
Australian-born programmer living and working in Oxford, England. He/him