Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Programming

Combining del.icio.us and Google Reader using Yahoo! Pipes

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Some of you have perhaps noticed (and maybe used) the links and the RSS icons I have at the top of this page. Until yesterday, clicking on “My bookmarks” brought you to my del.icio.us page as I use del.icio.us systematically to bookmark interesting web pages as soon as I come across them.

I also use Google Reader a lot. In fact I currently have 113 subscriptions in it which basically means that I read hundreds of posts daily. Google Reader also has a bookmarking feature which I use a lot but unfortunately only adds the entry to my Shared Items (i.e. not del.icio.us)

This means that I bookmark interesting pages using two distinct services. I’ve used Yahoo! Pipes to combine the two using this pipeline:

And voilà:

Have fun!

Linus: Trial-and-error with feedback rocks!

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Someone said that Linux was progressing only through sheer luck… And this make Linus Torvalds react:

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.

Linus was referring to the open source development model (have you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar? You really really should!) compared to the classical corporate model of software development.

And, of course, he is right.

Learning part of CS does not make a CS?

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I came across an interesting article called Should Java be banned from schools?.

The most interesting part were the comments. One of them rang a bell:

Also, no CS study is complete without some messing with machine level instructions, compilers & interpreters, algorithms, etc. Forget about learning a language: a good CS student must be able to design and build language + tool set from scratch. Here’s a CPU manual, go implement language foobar for it. Don’t come back until its compiler can bootstrap itself.

The problem is that many so-called universities don’t teach all this stuff. These second rate universities are popping up all over the world. They’re called universities but they are just processing mediocre programmers into cubicle occupying, php/Java/VB hacking zombies.

There is a lot of truth in that. Discuss.

PS: My favourite anti-Java article is The Perils of Java Schools – mind you, I like (and teach) Java…

PPS: The above image shown Emacs, my current Erlang IDE. I teach Erlang to my Concurrent Programming & Parallel Processing students.