I’ve been a fan of Lua since the early 2000s when a friend introduced it to me, even though I never got around to finding the time to properly learn and use it in production stuff. We have discussed about using Lua as a scripting language to allow for downloadable bundles that would extend AthensBook/ThessBook functionality (or fix bugs, or provide dynamically determined personalised features etc., but that never happened until now, due to licensing restrictions by Apple) for ages. Codify is an unbelievably cool app that leverages lua to provide a simple programming environment for the iPad. Combined with the general appeal of the device, the lack of third party, scripting programming environments for it, the ease of programming and use of Codify and the excitement of using such great hardware, I feel that Codify might be the Logo/Basic equivalent for this generation of children between the ages of 5-10, a great introductory platform for programming and an amazing tool for everyone else. And at $7.99 I think it’s a steal. You might want to use a bluetooth keyboard for it though; typing code on the on-screen keyboard seems like a horrible horrible nuisance.

JBQ’s writings on Dennis Ritchie’s death find me in total agreement and are worthy of a citation. dmr was a legend and his contribution, concise as meaningful, simple yet immensely powerful, has — and still does — shaped computing (and much of modern life) as we know it. C may not be ‘modern’ anymore, it may have been relegated to systems programming, high performance libraries and embedded computing for the most part, but it is still an immensely powerful tool, a foundation upon which countless other technologies have sprung since the late 70s. UNIX, once considered a dying breed still powers, in the form of Mac OS X and Linux, the vast majority of smartphones, most servers connected to the internet and numerous other devices, from printers, to desktops, to routers.

It is hard for a non-technologist to comprehend dmr’s contribution as it is for a technologist to overstate it.

Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they’re created, it’s impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that’s involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy’s law says that they simply shouldn’t possibly work.

For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all.

[...]

That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs’ death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie’s: Steve’s influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis’ was much deeper. On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can’t imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie’s influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.

In one of the latest commits, Ubuntu Mono, the monospace variant of the Ubuntu font that has recently been included in the distribution, was added to the repositories.

Ubuntu Mono is a relatively nice looking monospace font that borrows quite a lot from Consolas, but adds its own distinctive touches that make it fit better with the Ubuntu font family. I have been a member of the beta testing group and have seen it for a while now, but I never quite found the time to properly look into it.

Sadly, while the roman script looks great already, the Greek script suffers from some poor design decisions. Chief among them is Gamma (the capital gamma) which was clearly designed by someone totally unfamiliar with the Greek language and script. Gamma in Ubuntu Mono features a bottom serif that is totally distorting the perception of the character. It is unlike any other modern font I’ve ever seen and I feel is doing Ubuntu Mono a disservice (it has certainly rendered the font unusable by me as long as it looks this bad).

In an effort to remedy this, I have opened a bug in Launchpad, Ubuntu’s bug reporting system. You can find the bug, #867577, here. If you have a Launchpad account, use Ubuntu (and/or the fonts) and would like to see Ubuntu Mono fixed for Greek please subscribe, add your comment and/or contact those responsible to help them realise how their effort is being ruined by a few badly designed characters.

Recent developments on physically accurate, unbiased raytracers — and more to the point, GPU powered raytracers that provide near real-time, interactive manipulation of fully textured and shaded models and environment — promise an unmatched workflow that makes the creation of super-realistic images and animations very easy. I won’t write much about the technologies behind them, but I think the video below is a great example of some of the things that become possible for a single person using commodity technology and hardware — in this case Blender and Octane Render (one such raytracer), especially given how much of the lighting setup and performance trickery, that would otherwise be absolutely necessary, are ‘handled for free’ by the renderer.

You read this right: this is a ‘full-fledged’ PC emulator written in pure Javascript. It can boot linux. Amazing stuff, let’s hope we get ‘readable’ source code sometime soon.

Guardian.co.uk is switching from Java to Scala. I’m surprised it took so long and that other Java shops are not following en masse — it could be because of how different and esoteric Scala can be, especially to Java programmers. The linked infoQ article contains an interesting discussion with the Guardian folks.

Programming enterprise web applications (or anything, for that matter) in Java is painful for anyone mature enough to have experienced the wealth and breadth of tools out there, given how primitive, verbose and unproductive it is, and how much it caters for the lowest common denominator of a programmer. That’s not to say that Scala is the best choice for everyone, let alone those not starting from scratch, but given the Guardian’s existing infrastructure and systems, I guess that it’s the best choice they could’ve made.