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The Register reports that Google’s at work creating a custom desktop Linux distro based on Ubuntu. In other words, they’re possibly doing what people have been speculating for a couple years now.

From the Register article:

Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for.

It’s possible that it’s just one of the toys Googleplex engineers play with on Fridays, when they get time off from buffing the search engine code or filtering out entries about Tiananmen Square.

I, for one, hope that they are going to make this something they release as a Google-Linux system. Ubuntu is pretty sharp as it is (regardless of some issues that I had with it on my desktop, but I know that some of my experiences are atypical), and if anyone has the resources to make it a viable general-market alternative to Windows, Google does.

For awhile I had hopes that IBM would do something like that, but apparently they aren’t interested in that (OS/2 left too many scars, maybe?).

Senate confirms Alito for Supreme Court.

Not to much to add to this story except to say… Good!

The Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL) is a programming language which intends to make computer programs read like, well, Shakespeare.

The specifications are entertaining, to say the least. All variables need to be declared in the opening section “Dramatis Personae”, and they can’t be named just anything; they should be named “Hamlet” or “Ophelia” or some other Shakespearian character’s name.

To really see what they’re getting at, here’s an excerpt from the section on how to express constants in SPL:

Any noun is a constant with the value 1 or $-1$, depending on whether it’s nice or not. For example, “flower” has the value 1 because flowers are nice, but “pig” has the value $-1$ because pigs are dirty (which doesn’t prevent most people from eating them). Neutral nouns, such as “tree”, count as 1 as well.

By prefixing a noun with an adjective, you multiply it by two. Another adjective, and it is multiplied by two again, and so on. That way, you can easily construct any power of two or its negation. From there, it’s easy to construct arbitrary integers using basic arithmetic, such as “the sum of $X$ and $Y$”, where $X$ and $Y$ are themselves arbitrary integers.

For example, “the difference between the square of the difference between my little pony and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little codpiece”. Substituting the simple constants with numbers, we get “the difference between the square of the difference between 2 and 4 and the cube of -4”. Now, since the difference between 2 and 4 is $2 - 4 = -2$, and the cube of $-4$ is $(-4)^3 = -64$, this is equal to “the difference between the square of $-2$ and $-64$”. The square of $-2$ is $(-2)^2 = 4$, and the difference of 4 and $-64$ is 60. Thus, “the difference between the square of the difference between my little pony and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little codpiece” means 60.

As you see, this way of writing constants gives you much more poetic freedom than in other programming languages.

I think that it would be a bit of a nightmare to have to program anything (can you imagine a GUI app?) in SPL, but you have to have a bit of respect for a programming language with the goal of giving you “poetic freedom” in writing constants…

Reddit pointed the way to not one, but two repositories of computer science quotations this morning. I’m a big fan of quotations, especially if they’re educational, inspiration, or funny — and if anyone is still bothering to quote someone, chances are it is at least one of those three.

The first is a Quotations for Learning and Programming, and contains a large alphabetically organized set of quotations.

The next is a plain text file called quotes.txt, with no discernable organization, but with predominantly humorous quotations. My favorites:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
– Brian W. Kernighan

and

I had a nightmare once in which I a had convinced a friend how wonderful C++ is. A while later he came back., and he was mad.
– Robin Rosenberg [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1fYEA-pz-21%40gated-at.bofh.it]

I‘m sitting in a local coffee-shop with free wireless internet (Northern Espresso Cafe, Blaine, MN on 109th Ave; great place!), and doing a little homework.

I just didn’t feel like setting up emacs, but I emerged mit-scheme and found that using tabs in gnome-terminal, you can get the same functionality that I’ve been using emacs for, without emacs. Keep in mind, all I’m really doing with emacs is switching back and forth between a file buffer (whatver.scm) and a scheme buffer.

Gnome-terminal (the default xterm on the GNOME desktop) allows you to have multiple tabs, each with their own bash process. So, all I did was start mit-scheme from one tab (it starts with the command “scheme”), then open a separate tab and write a “Hello world!” file in nano (pico-clone text editor) to test it out. (”Hello world” programs are essential computer science projects.) Save the file, go back to the tab where scheme is running and do (load “hello.scm”) like you normally would, and as long as you saved your file in the same directory that you started scheme in, you’re all set.

Not that there’s anything wrong with emacs, but I simply don’t use 99% of the features it offers, and I like the simplicity of nano.