Greetings,
here we again at the end of another week. They seem to melt away like sugar cubes in coffee, I’m sure it was Monday yesterday. The week has been spent revising system architecture agin and again and again, and switching from one algorithm to another. I hope that your weekly tasks have been interesting and productive. The reality of computer work though is that it can be slow and then suddenly everything falls together. And there is that magical moment where you glimpse perfection. Soon afterwards something will fall apart more often than not and you are reminded that there is no such thing as perfection 
Without further ado…
Cult stuff:
boustrophedon n.
[from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists’ techspeak and typesetters jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and moving-head printers. The adverbial form `boustrophedonically’ is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).
Please send:
Waterproof bluetooth speakers
– for you know, when you’re swimming under water.
Star Trek Tricorder – your very own tricorder, no joke.
Twike Human-Electric Hybrid Vehicle – I have wanted one for such a long time!
8-bit geek shoes – please let me have tetris trainers!
Lexeme of the week:
Playpen: This is where programmers work.
“Dave is in the playpen”
Code of the week:
>>> import cPickle
>>> x = cPickle.dumps([1,2,3,"ratsj"])
>>> y = x[:18] + “?” + x[18:]
>>> cPickle.loads(y)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<input>”, line 1, in ?
ValueError: insecure string pickle
(by Hans Novak)
Geek tweet of the week:
“I have my own query lang which is designed to wrk against graphs but I may implement query rewriting 4 rdb support” (@communicating)
Time sink of the week:
Oh wow! Hi CJ. Came by way of David Harry’s site – read a few of your guest posts and decided to read more because I love reading about SEOs with a scientific approach (particularly those SEOs that write about AIR).
Even more awesome, read you’re a fellow Sydney-sider!
But what inspired me to comment was…Hexxagon! I remember playing Hexxagon in the early 90s via a trusty Asian pirated CD filled with cheap games.
I look forward to reading your tweets and blog posts!