bbq

It's hard. Somehow I knew about it and did not go. Anyway, I happened to see it because I follow Alex Miller on twitter (@puredanger) & some others on Twitter. In addition to Lambda Jam, Alex organizes (at least) Strange Loop and Clojure/(West, East).

It's surprising just how many conferences are put on. I learned about some more from the Lisp in Summer Projects page[1].

TL;DR: dig into the community(ies) of conferences you're interested in. You'll still miss some.

[1] http://lispinsummerprojects.org/

The user might just hit refresh and keep going. Your customer will just go.

Yes, and it might be instructive to mod one of Sparkfun's boards - for which they often post the sources.

This was a nice touch. Caught me off guard at first but I understood immediately. Good work.

I wonder if the economics will allow for an hacked battery market. Perhaps organized crime goes around with batteries lying about their age to make some $$$.

Maybe HTTP is simply missing the INVOKE verb for executable documents.

> I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that mathematical constructs are part of the universe.

What if there are 0 universes? Does 0 exist without any universes?

Great execution on every level. Incredible work.

That's not true. Yes, it's worth considering outside of the JVM if being on the JVM means your application isn't interactive enough (startup speed doesn't matter for long running, fire & forget tasks).

At the same time, splitting your application into a client/server architecture is not a hack but an engineering decision. There are times when this decision is natural e.g. Music Player Daemon (MPD)[1]. For most CLI applications, there's no clear benefit (but the general approach has no clear downside either - the code overhead of this approach can be brought very low).

Certainly, in a production application you would want to secure the messaging channel (Nailgun doesn't).

[1] A music playing server: http://www.musicpd.org/. Some of the clients happen to be command line: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients#Command_Line_Clients

Well, that would do it. =)

If the startup slowness is your problem, look into Nailgun: http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/

If that's not your problem with the JVM, what is?

This looks great! It's getting more and more usable.

It would be nice if, when a computation is running in the instarepl, the computation indicator would display inline e.g. with the previous result - perhaps graying the result out?

How would I go about implementing this myself? Or is LightTable reflection not yet publicly available?

It seems like these things would be easy to get around by opening the message, disconnecting from the Internet, snapping a screenshot, and installing the app. Sure, a PITA, but digital is forever.

Settings are for microwaves. Computer-based tools should be reprogrammable. Still, the tool should be easy to configure for the 80% case.

very cool! What's on the road map for Moonbase? Clearly, there are some very interesting things you can do here.

Particularly, I'm interested in the node & connection model. Any chance we'll see custom nodes (followed by sharable nodes, modules)? At the very least, custom equation nodes would make entering math easier and then you wouldn't need to provide a node for all math functions. Notably, `exp` is missing (would be nice to have damping in animations - and then expose the time variable).

At any rate, this makes for a very interesting platform!

Awesome, great work. I'll have to play around with this later and dig into the source. I'm looking forward to that - I'm just beginning to dive into this area.

What are your thoughts on implementing reversible patterns?

As jrockway mentions, the ATMega does not have a power regulator. That would be inefficient as regulators work by dissipating excess energy as heat. So, even if the chip had onboard regulators to limit the combined current draw of the output ports to 200mA the chip would still be susceptible to overheating.

That said, I'd guess the weak link that puts the 200mA limit in place is not actually in the I/O circuitry but is how much current can safely be drawn by the I/O pins when the chip is otherwise fully utilized - peripherals and CPU both consuming max power.

It's quite interesting:

    I built a layer of clojure code on top of the JNI bindings to get
    an entirely functional interface to vba-rerecording. This
    interface treats state of the emulator as an immutable object, and
    allows me to do everything I could do with the lower level C
    interface in a functional manner. Using this functional code, I
    wrote search programs that take a particular game-state and try
    out different combinations of button presses to get any desired
    effect. By combining different styles of search with different
    initial conditions

Now I might get stuck reading the author's blog all day: http://aurellem.org/

The Cortex project they having going is stellar and there are some great examples of Clojure-java interop.

Taken at face value, Dropbox's indicator is particularly interesting:

> ChenLi Wang, who runs the growth team at Facebook [sic: Dropbox?], said that the leading indicator of an engaged Dropbox user is when they put at least one file in one Dropbox folder on one device.

Basically - the leading indicator is any use at all. The other business' all had, relatively, a much higher threshold.

This is probably because Dropbox is immediately useful and stupid-easy to use.

Of course, it's hard to take this at face value since we don't know how everyone is defining an engaged user (and each definition isn't directly comparable to the other services' definitions).

Why try to game the application process? Just be extremely [capable, passionate, grit-ful, and inventive].

Way to blow it =)

How can the government serve the people if it can't sustain itself?

This is cool and, I believe, a good strategy for many things.

> If Redis isn’t available, for whatever reason, we could rebuild the gaps from the canonical data in Mongo. We’ve never had to do this.

I'm not sure this is so straight-forward.

So, this is a guest post by Sqoot hosted by togo.io, who owns the redistogo.com. Can anyone explain redistogo.com's pricing? I understand the value in not running your own service dependencies, but the redistogo.com prices seem really high to me. I was under the impression redis is fairly easy to manage. What kinds of operational tasks does redistogo.com perform for a redis instance that would warrant such high prices?

An interesting way of implementing this may be to flip the responsibility of 'translation'.

Here the git client includes logic to speak (translate to) ftp - which is great for this purpose.

What if you could say: `git push fleet master`

where fleet is a remote that translates git-speak into a deployment.

I realize - this is simply an imitation of Heroku. But, it may be interesting to flex git in this way: a code change protocol.

This and the recently discussed codeq could yield some very interesting possibilities.

Fostering is a great word for the attitude we should strive for.

> MIT's attitude is revealed through these "tricks".

Precisely.

MIT's behavior is the projection of its attitude. Through inertia, MIT aligns its participants' attitudes to various approximations of the overall attitude.

Or, the overall attitude is the reduction of the participants' attitudes.

How would you summarize MIT's attitude?

What can organizations generally do to help cut down on "logistical hurdles to overcome"?

MIT makes available to all free printing and shuttles.

What can organizations generally do to help foster the sharing of information?

MIT encourages collaboration and their professors are accessible.

Of course, simply applying these tricks to an organization is doomed to fail. To do so would simply be to create a cargo cult.

What matters is the attitude with which you approach your organization. Your attitude is what drives the organizational experience.

Great work! Looks like Github has a big area for improvement, though.