The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one of the most ambitious and influential surveys in the history of astronomy. Over eight years of operations (SDSS-I, 2000-2005; SDSS-II, 2005-2008), it obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars.

It is hard not to dream about exploring space when you see what Sloan has to offer.

An asynchronous web server written in Emacs LISP

Elnode is an asynchronous web server written in Emacs LISP.
Emacs has had asynchronous socket programming facilities for some time and a few years ago asynchronous TCP server sockets were introduced. I couldn’t quite believe that no one had written an asynchronous webserver with EmacsLISP before. So now I have.
When I started looking at actually doing this I intended to knock up just a silly demo. But the more I got into it the more it seemed to me that this could be an important addition to Emacs and that, sometimes, an Emacs LISP async web server could actually be useful.

(via nic)

Managing bibliography references with JabRef

JabRef is an open source bibliography reference manager. The native file format used by JabRef is BibTeX, the standard LaTeX bibliography format. JabRef runs on the Java VM (version 1.5 or newer), and should work equally well on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Addendum: 2019-09-24

JabRef continues to be an excellent bibliography manager.

Using BibTeX as the master database and JabRef to populate, manage, and export from it has been really nice. The key has been letting Emacs manage the keys and sorting.

DSLs are still fun

Now the popularity of DSLs may have waned, but the fun surrounding them surely has not.
A while back James and I looked into implementing a DSL for modeling insurance products in Java that worked really nicely:

  • built on top of Java we’ve full access to all its goodies like the libraries and object system and containers
  • integrates with Eclipse to get code-completion and error-reporting and intelligent-debugging
  • open-source so we can tweak and bug-fix as needed

If that is your cup of tea, you might have a look at this super awesome tutorial on implementing a brainf*ck interpreter on top of the Racket programming language:
http://hashcollision.org/brainfudge/
Basically you get all the power of what Racket has to offer as a language, its libraries, it’s IDE, and the great users.
The article is sort of funny in that the first version of the DLS was deemed “too slow” at 37 second vs 16 second for the version running on the PyPy interpreter; so the author went about optimizing it with all sorts of tweaks that are might be inappropriate for an entry-level article, but for bragging rights… dropping its benchmark speed down to 1 second.