Web Developer 101: URL rewriting for beginners

Through the flurry of hardware releases, architecture and roadmaps, we occasionally stumble upon a delightful morsel of raw ingenuity that does nothing less than astound. Today, that morsel comes to us in the innocuous form of the Apple I BASIC cassette tape.

These cassettes are extremely rare, given that there were only 200 Apple I computers released, and less than 100 are known to exist. To make matters worse, not all Apple I computers came with this prized cassette tape. This tape contains the first piece of software that Apple ever sold.

In 2002 someone produced an audio recording of the BASIC tape being played back. A simple algorithm was created to analyze the waveform on the Atari, convert that to binary and run it on an Apple I emulator. They dumped the output of the emulated BASIC and released it to the public, where others continued to modify the code to correct what were perceived as errors. The only dump of the tape that can be easily found includes these changes, which gives us cause to question the accuracy of the code.

Assembly language blog Pagetable recently took another stab at the project by analyzing the original and unmodified WAV recording with new tools. With Audacity, custom conversion code and a HEX editor, Pagetable has produced the world’s first certifiably pristine code of software that was written to magnetic tape more than 30 years ago.

What a fantastic and outrageously clever project.

Sitepoint’s Kevin Yank asks the question: Did Rails sink Twitter?.

If you use Twitter, there’s a very good chance you see “Something went wrong. Reload the page and try again” or similar messages quite often. Twitter experienced explosive growth this year, but it is clear that their backend is not up to the task. Multiple times a day, I myself get Twitter errors.

Twitter is arguably the world’s largest Rails application. However, Kevin Yank believes that poor planning on the developers part, and bad decisions regarding the overall design philosophy of Twitter are responsible for their issues, not necessarily Rails itself. He believes that if Twitter was developed as if it were a CMS instead of a messaging services, that would explain the issues that are blossoming now.

It’s an interesting article, but begs the question: How do they fix it?

I have never seen anything like this: web version of Keynote (Apple’s slideshow app). About.

This guy developed an iPhone app to turn the iPhone into a remote touchpad for a PC. iPhone as remote for HTPC!

I’m replacing my current sequentially organized one with this catagoricaly organized one.

Randall Munroe, the author behind the webcomic xkcd, has developed a bot in the official xkcd IRC channel that automatically kicks people if they don’t say something original.

‘Are there any girls in here?’ Kick.
‘a/s/l?’ Kick.
‘:)’ Kick.

In 2008, where the standard intellectualism can pass for a Mad Lib (Think: “The top [number] tips that [insert task of dubious value]“, “ZOMGBBQWTFSS#”, or “[copy BoingBoing], [paste into blog]“) it’s great so see someone placing value on valuable personal expression.

That, and how many times can you hear “I’m in ur ________, _______ing ur ________”.

via ebiquity

Programmers have hailed the productivity of Ruby and Python, due to automated memory management, simplified syntax, and unsurprising programming methodology. A new language, creatively known as “D” hopes to bring these enhancements to C and C++. I’m no programmer, but it sounds fairly interesting.