I am Matthew Broderick: computer hacker! is 99¢ this week on iTunes. Is Apple reading dinosaur comics?

CouchDBX: “unofficial binary release of CouchDB for Mac OS X that comes with a double-click-and-start wrapper application.” Very nice! Especially since the Erlang MacPorts package is totally broken right now. Or, it will probably install if you selfupdate then clean erlang and then upgrade erlang -hipe. Obviously!

Waffle, shocked: “I just read about the new US (AT&T) iPhone plans, which mixes the regular vigor of vendor-locked subsidized phones with the good-old American fucked up tradition of thoroughly brain dead ways of charging and accounting for usage.” And don’t forget that U.S. advertised cell phone rates are about $10 lower than what you actually pay, because Benjamin Franklin said “A penny spent on taxes doesn’t count” … right? Scandinavians are frequent critics of the pricing sleights of hand that we allow businesses to perform, as this one crisply points out in response to a Times article about cheap foreigners not donating enough money to our poor waiters: “I am used to a world were prices are final and not a starting point for a calculation.” We’re used to a world where the only Palm Pilot app that got any use was the tip calculator.

Software Engineering Ionesco: “You know how Bruce Schneier uses the term Security Theatre to describe measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer? I am going to start using the term Process Theatre. I trust you can grasp the meaning immediately.”

Scalajorp: a JSON-RPC implementation written in Scala.

Scala implicit conversions: “You can read all sorts of amateurish criticism of this language construct on various websites, but I plan to show why they are a necessity to the language being useful (in the intellec­tually true and meaningful sense—not in a ‘Java’ ‘pragmatist’ sense).” Whatever, implicit also pragmatically rules. It does boring chores for you simply because the code would not compile without doing them. How could that not rule? It’s like if you just decided to walk outside without getting dressed, but because that wouldn’t compile you end up wearing some default outfit before you get there. Sure, you have to be careful in setting up the default outfit, but that is no reason to hate on an awesome feature. Also there is some theoretical reason implicit is important it has something to do with Haskell and monads.

Hey everybody, you’re allowed to not use REST now, as long as it’s in private. This indulgence comes too late for some services, but we’ll all sleep better knowing RESTitecture police have called off their bedroom raids. { earlier }

Never stop programming: “Former software engineer and dotcom CEO, Jess Jessop, 54, has lived with his two sons in a converted school bus for the past four years, three of them in Santa Barbara. He says the parking scheme is a ‘life-saver.’”

That’s no moon: “the weirdest creature to come out of the iPhone 2.0/3G launch paraphernalia is the iPhone Configuration Web Utility (Mac, Windows). It is a Rails app using SproutCore, downloaded and installed on your local machine. It literally starts a server on port 3000.” Adobe: The sassy new Mexican import that’s made out of clay. { previously }

Let freedom ring! “There are approximately 552 applica­tions that made the iPhone App Store launch. There are seven tip calculators.” Ha ha. Somebody should make an application that tells you how much an iPhone costs in different markets, with all the taxes, fees, and future obligations included. That is, if the problem is solvable in polynomial time.

The RESTitecture police, who communicate ‘@’ each other in parsimonious ‘tweets’, have a badge. This is almost as disturbing as the new FISA law. { previously }

Let them metaprogram: “Does anyone doubt that democratizing the written word—through education and especially Gutenberg’s invention—has been a force for good?”

New Wicket milestone: ”Component is no longer generified.” This is a good thing for app code written Java, to keep its wordiness in check. Scala, not so much, but the generic IModel still opens up a lot of doors. { previously }

SandstoneDb: Simple ActiveRecord Style Persistence In Squeak. Doesn’t run on top of a relational database. Is ‘opinionated’, e.g. “You can make a career just replacing spread-sheets-from-hell with simple applications that make people’s lives easier without ever once hitting the limits of a single Squeak image (such was the inspira­tion for DabbleDb), so don’t waste your time scaling.” Sassy. But will they someday cave to societal pressure to capitalize that B like orthographic sellout CouchDB?

Vicious Scala academics attack kindly Java salaryman.

Graceless failures: “It’s a way for those of us experimen­ting with Scala at Twitter to share our discoveries with each other and help out the community in the process.”

Web development with Wicket, Part 2: Reducing and re-using code. “While small-scale code reuse is often impractical in a traditional Web rendering path, Wicket’s ambitiously object-oriented rendering engine fosters sharing of both user-interface logic and layout among pages.”

New tricks for old dogs: The Rabbit Will Die in Java

If only there were a way to prevent free software from executing in the service of those who so despise the ‘freetards’ that write it. Tears of despair would fall upon iPhones no longer able to browse the freetarded internet thing. Sad! Elsewhere: yes.

WAR! “thanks to the recent iPhone 3G jailbreak and a third-party proxy application, cre.ations.net has figured out a way to (sort of) tether your iPhone 3G and use your laptop via the 3G network.” Everyone loves all you can eat digital buffets, because conference rooms full of telecom execs just can’t seem to come up with a reasonable price for a byte of data (not knowing scientific notation would be their first problem). But, pretty much everything that sucks about the iPhone stems from telecoms’ need to not have the unlimited data stream pimped. (Okay the iPod touch disproves this theory but still.) What if! Someone calculated the median data usage for the iPhones out there?! Then you would divide $25 by that number and there’s your freaking data rate! Math! Then the median customer would save $5 a month (plus tax, yay) while more intense users would pay using more (this is known as ‘fairness’, in pre-consumer-rabies cultures) and the phone company would make more or less money depending on the distribution. But then there would be no reason for Apple to control your computerphone, so never mind. Back to the trough everybody!

And since a programming weblog should occasionally post about programming and not the stupid diephone, just look at this crazy in-progress translation of Dwemthy’s Array into Scala. It’s not done but it’s getting a little awesome.

One benefit of producing an open application runtime—a retronym we now require, thanks to the crazy ones deciding to invert the tired old paradigm of users that control their computers—is you don’t have to spend so much time putting down software you’ve arbitrarily excluded from it. You can just let users sort it out for themselves. { via }