Matthias Felleisen and the PLT Team win the ACM Karl Karlstrom Award

Presented annually to an outstanding educator who is: appointed to a recognized educational baccalaureate institution; recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies, or effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of the ACM. Those who have been teaching for ten years or less will be given special consideration. A prize of $5,000 is supplied by the Prentice-Hall Publishing Company.

Via Matthias via ACM via Shriram.

Chicken: the transition to hygienic macros and a real module system is complete

With the most recent commits (4.4.4), chicken is now consistent in the way core forms are handled. There are no hard-coded special forms and everything can be redefined, reexported and modified on import. Syntax may now also expand into module forms (if at toplevel, local or nested modules are still not available and not strictly necessary).
So, the transition to hygienic macros and a real module system is hereby complete…

— Felix

Re-enabling RSS tag feeds with the Feedburner Plugin

Most of us WordPress users who are using Feedburner to track our feed subscriptions are using the Feedburner Feedsmith WordPress plugin to make it all work. Unfortuantely that plugin remove the ability for folks to subscribe to RSS tag feeds directly from your blog. In this article, the author explain how to re-enable this feature.
In the function 

function ol_feed_redirect()

change this

is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&

to this:

is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && !is_tag() &&

Basically you are just telling the plugin that if the URL has a tag argument, it should let WordPress handle the feed rather than Feedburner.
(via the ocamlcore.org team)

A Philosophy of Cool for Non-Living Things

Cool can come from what a [thing] is or what it does. But at the core, Cool is about purity of expression, of material objects being infused with human energy, creativity and insight to make them more than just the sum of their parts.

— Mark Hoyer, WHAT IS COOL?, Cycle World 2/2010
I love Mark’s take on cool; from motorcycles to programming languages, it still makes sense. It makes me think about how great it is to be alive, living, in the present. It is a gift.

Keywords added to MIT-Scheme

I’ve [Joe Marshall] added `keyword’ objects to MIT Scheme in a way that I hope keeps everyone happy. A keyword is a self-evaluating symbolic token, much like a symbol, but it never needs quoting because it can never mean anything but itself.
The reading and printing of keywords is controlled by the variable *keyword-style*, which can be #f or one of these symbols: cl, dsssl, srfi-88, both
If *keyword-style* is #F (the default), then there is no way to read keywords, and they are printed as #[keyword foo].
If *keyword-style* is ‘cl, then tokens with a leading colon are considered keywords and keywords are printed with a leading colon. Symbols with a leading colon are printed with vertical-bar quotes
and you can create symbols with leading colons by using vertical-bar quotes.
If *keyword-style* is ‘srfi-88, then tokens with a trailing colon are considered keywords and keywords are printed with a trailing colon. Symbols with a trailing colon are printed with vertical-bar quotes and you can create symbols with trailing colons by using vertical-bar quotes.
‘dsssl is a synonym for ‘srfi-88
If *keyword-style* is ‘both, then either syntax is acceptable for reading, but the cl syntax will be used in printing. (Putting a colon on both ends would be weird, so don’t.)

(via MIT-Scheme-devel)

Windows XP RunAs feature is horribly broken

Switching back to Windows XP from the Mac has been educational. Along with learning a lot more about Cygin than I had ever known before, I’m discovering new features-to-be-avoided in Windows XP. Here is a biggie: “Run As”.
Windows allows you to execute programs with another user’s credentials. You are probability thinking “Simple right?”. Well, it isn’t. Using this feature seems to consistently corrupt the RunAs-ed user’s profile. Corrupted profiles seem to be a mysterious thing with little to no way to fix them; creating a new profile is basically the only solution. In my case I restored from a nightly backup (because I know stuff like this is bound to happen on Windows). My takeaway:
Disable RunAs on Windows!
Here is how.