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Don't miss the silicon retina cameras by Tobi Delbruck, used for the pencil balancer:

http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch


Pencil balancer in 2D, using very fast silicon retina cameras:

http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~conradt/Projects/PencilBalancer/

(The cameras: http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch )


This is a very interesting article, with technical details and amazing videos. You should submit it.


Saw a lecture by Tobi Delbruck at my uni last month and was really impressed by this application among others. Seems like some really interesting technology. Can post a link to the lecture recording (audio) if anyone wants it?


That'd be great!


http://www.deityproject.com/Delbruck.WMA

also of interest,

http://www.deityproject.com/Kuipers.WMA

Ben Kuipers takes us through his investigations to date on the subject of robotic cognition - using some very adorable footage of a "research student" (actually the students 2yo son) to show just how far we have yet to go. Focusses on the "grasp" function of human object interaction. Bit slow in places as it's just audio and the slides were important, but could help someone find further information.

Sorry for WMA, it's the native format my dictaphone uses =S

There is another up there for linguists - Geoff Ketland discusses his notion of language as platonic solids... I found it VERY interesting stuff.

Note: I'll keep them up for a week or two in case anyone is interested, but I'll be using the domain for something soon, so can't provide permanent links.


It has a search function.

I has example code and comments. Just like http://php.net did and which gave it enormous popularity and ease of use. What the docs don't explain a comment or an example clear it up.

The clojuredocs author knows the site needs to become even better. I thank him for what the site already delivers.


With Google Chrome and other browsers reading PDFs directly inside the browser, there isn't much point for scribd as an embedded reader.


... but a certain precision of thought that is easiest to teach just by teaching students to program.

Thank you, you have just pointed out a likely cause for my improvement in writing scientific papers. I learned how to program.


The actual letter from Prof. John Sedat and others, UCSF:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...


Regarding the "if thr wr any", and the rise of Haskell and Clojure, I wonder whether such caveat applies any longer.

As for content of the Python IAQ, I've enjoyed learning about two python idioms I had never known possible:

1. The ternary conditional operator:

x = <result> if <test> else <alternative>

2. Using or to assign an alternative value when the first is False or None

x = <option> or <option>


Incidentally, most C-style-syntax languages have a ternary conditional operator, and I use it quite a lot for things like building strings, very small conditionals, etc.... When used correctly, it can improve readability and expressiveness quite a bit.

x = <test> ? <result> : <alternative>

Some times for slightly more complex expressions, I'll put them on separate lines so as to have a very compact if/else structure.


It's worth noting that Peter himself mentions that most of the ternary tricks he describes are not very readable and wouldn't be considered Pythonic.

   Beautiful is better than ugly.
   Explicit is better than implicit.
   Simple is better than complex.
Personally I'd hate to see something like that in any real-world project.

   (test and [result] or [alternative])[0]


Depending on the language, it could be an idiom.


As pointed out in the OP, there are actually quite a lot of ways to simulate the ternary operator in Python. An interesting one is (result, alternative)[test]. If result and alternative are functions you could write it as (result, alternative)[test]().

And for desert: I love this syntax:

  if 0 < x <= 100: pass
For more info see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/394809/python-ternary-ope...


"..and the rise of Haskell and Clojure.."

Is there any real world evidence of said claim, outside geek-fetish bubbles like HN ?


Meta: interesting that you think HN will exist in a recognizable form by 2028. 18 years ago, the web looked very different. I wonder what will we call "web" in 2028.


How do you mean? People still used browsers to make requests over http, didn't they?

Actually, I guess there was a lot of text-based interaction going on, come to think of it. Telnet, etc. Hm.


I still telnet. So much fun!

Wish gopher's were still around. I was thinking of using a gopher to do a blog with.


I've heard it is still around. Never knew how to use it myself.


Try: telnet nethack.alt.org


Fantastic read. One sample:

" It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable."

(The Anna Karenina principle, in other words.)


Just for completeness, in case someone doesn't know about it, the Anna Karenina principle (first time I've heard it called this) refers to the first line of the Tolstoy book of that same name:

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/shared/WebDisplay/0,,489...

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'


From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle:

The Anna Karenina principle was popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel to describe an endeavor in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure. Consequently, a successful endeavor (subject to this principle) is one in which every last one of the possible deficiencies has been avoided.


Thanks for this! I actually read the book, I should really have remembered this...


GTK is trying to get there. Gimp was ported to MacOSX GTK--haven't checked in a while the state of the port. The Inkscape dev team at least has high hopes that GTK will become stable for MacOSX.

http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/


I disagree with GTK, and I recommend Qt. I use several GTK apps on Windows and they don't look native. Furthermore, GTK has some deeply ingrained usability issues - such as the close button - that they bring to all platforms.


I love Qt, and much prefer working with it to Cocoa, but Qt on OS X is ugly and doesn't feel particularly native. I can usually recognize a Qt app as soon as it starts up. It still gets the job done in the cases where elegance doesn't matter (i.e. we have a tool for optimizing query parameters that has a Qt GUI that we just use internally), but for places where it does, it's better to go with Cocoa.


This is why Steve Jobs is against ALL cross platform development. Because it's going to be a lowest common denominator. At the same time, advancements on the platform are not going to be taken advantage of. Any new features in OSX would go unused - because it's not in the lowest common denominator. As a Java dev, I have to say he has a good point there. I just wish Objective C didn't suck so much.


Which close button are you talking about and how is it inherent to GTK?


I'm guessing the close button on dockable floating windows.

Is there an implementation of GTK that doesn't run via X11 on the mac? Gimp/Inkscape are lovely software on Linux, but using them on the Mac drives me insane. They're "meh" on Windows.

I concluded a while back that the only decent way to do GUI programming properly was to develop multiple native frontends for the platforms you want to support. Everything else seems to produce crap.

I haven't found the ideal runtime/language for this yet, though. The C family is an obvious candidate but is a little more low level than necessary for desktop apps. .NET/Mono seems promising, though I do worry about having to distribute the Mono runtime with apps. Plus, people seem to have an irrational fear of it (though probably not end-users).


"I concluded a while back that the only decent way to do GUI programming properly was to develop multiple native frontends for the platforms you want to support. Everything else seems to produce crap."

This +100. Qt is OK-ish if dev resources are a bigger concern than platform integration, Gtk is not even remotely integrated with the platforma (well except in a Gnome desktop where it basically is the platform), and all the other attempts like wxWidgets, Tcl/Tk and the hundreds of smaller projects/products don't even come close.

Anyone developing desktop software who want to make his application feel 'native' to each platform has to make various frontends, with each platform's native UI toolkit. It takes some careful design but it's not all that painful, really.


> Is there an implementation of GTK that doesn't run via X11 on the mac?

GTK-OSX is supposed to do this, but I haven't been able to get it working.


What about Qt? It looks good for me, although I never tried on a mac.


I've been very satisfied with Qt on the mac. I've ported a couple of linux applications I use. They are not as good as truely native ports (MacVim is clearly more of a "mac" app then any Qt built application), but it gets basic things like menu bar at the top and shortcuts using command instead of ctl right.


It's meh. Not as bad as GTK+ by a long shot but still a far cry from native applications. And OSX users generally don't like non-native applications (for a number of reasons)


Nothing, Nokia has come along way with it. It the latest (Qt 4.7.0) they are slowly getting things closer and closer to native look and feel. There are carbon and cocoa versions for the mac. The Cocoa version obviously integrate better than the carbon version will. There are also Qt classes to integrate Qt based widgets into cocoa based containers etc. Is it perfect, not even close. Is it pretty darn good, yes.


Here's an example: I use WorkRave to remind myself to take breaks. If I open the preferences dialog, I can close it by pressing Close, clicking the X in the corner or pressing Esc. No matter what I do, my changes are saved.

In Windows the guideline is to use Ok & Cancel buttons while most of the GTK apps I've seen use just a Close button. GIMP is a mixed experience: most dialogs have both buttons while others just the close button.


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