Hi, Quite a lot this time, so I'll keep them brief...
Terry, what was that program Paul was noisily playing with; the signal generator thingy. Is that public or something internal to work? Astro, a file manager for Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.metago.astro "Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language designed as a "better Java" -- building on top of the Java virtual machine (JVM) and maintaining strong interoperability with Java, while at the same time integrating functional programming along with Java's object-oriented programming model, cleaning up what are often considered to have been poor design decisions in Java (e.g. type erasure, checked exceptions and the non-unified type system) and adding a number of other features designed to allow cleaner, more concise and more expressive code to be written." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_%28programming_language%29 "Xtend is a little language that compiles into idiomatic Java source code. You can use any existing Java library seamlessly from Xtend (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten Java code. It's the CoffeeScript for Java." -- http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/ An explanation of #golang's interfaces from the perspective of a Python programmer. http://jordanorelli.tumblr.com/post/32665860244/how-to-use-interfaces-in-go A quick video introduction to the hexaflexagon. Tim brought a `back of the envelope' one along last night. https://plus.google.com/109197758463316568589/posts/1AM3Md56fUS A Milkman's wallet. Grabs notes simply placed inside it. I suppose the milkman had one because he was mainly collecting lots of notes on a Saturday (interrupting _Swap Shop_!). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6qhHfNJac Photo of how a Rubik's Cube fits together internally and details of the six screws in older models for adjusting the springs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_cube#Mechanics A clear explanation of one way to solve Rubik's Cube. http://www.wikihow.com/Solve-a-Rubik%27s-Cube-%28Easy-Move-Notation%29 A quicker, 27.65 second, blindfolded, way to solve it; give it to Marcell Endrey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cw1DSZbESM InMaps from LinkedIn Labs will graph one's connections, showing the connections between them and forming clusters. Handy for seeing which of your connections could be connected but aren't. Unfortunately, it doesn't show order-2 connections; that would tell me whom I'm not connected to that are connected to by several of my connections. (One may want to untick the "Share" box and limit the sign-in to one day.) http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/ Signing into Chrome syncs your bookmarks, settings, etc., into your Google account so they appear in Chrome on all your devices. http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165139 The simple clean bookmarking site delicious.com started to go down the tube when Yahoo! bought it, never to recover. Pinboard looks like a good, non-free as in beer, alternative with lots of extra features, like archiving all your tweets for searching. "One dude in his underpants somewhere who has five windows open to terminal servers" -- _The Economist_. http://pinboard.in/tour/ The shell didn't use to have much built in, that's why expr(1) and test(1) exist in a bin directory. Then someone, it smells like a Berkelyism, decided `if [ ... ]; then' looked nicer than `if test ...; then' so the `[' hard-link to test was born, along with some confusion; `man ['. Today, test is built into bash but must still behave like its arguments had been parsed as if for an external program. IMHO the newer `[[' syntax in bash is to be preferred wherever possible as it parses differently causing fewer gotchas for the unwary. Counting seconds from 1970 in a 32-bit signed integer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem#Solutions Details of how many large web sites are structured to run at that scale. http://highscalability.com/start-here/ Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: ???, ???day, 2012-11-?? 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue