Mayan Hacker's Calendar

Reposted from the Noisebridge mailing list:

Are you looking for a new, more enlightened calendar to replace the stodgy and patriarchal old Gregorian? Considering a 13-month lunar but can't stand the seasonal drift? There's never been a better time to switch to Maya. With a convenient 20 day month, plus easy designation of periods when the portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolve, it's the calendar everyone's talking about.

http://modernhacker.com/mcal

After this year, you may never need another calendar again!

TechCrunch SF 11: Hackathon Roundup

A few notable hacks at TechCrunch Disrupt, currently ongoing at the Concourse in San Francisco.

FAGicon is Tetris in your favicon, by some weird Russian dudes. How does it work? I don't know, but it does. Try the link on HackerNews.

eccube is a very trippy Processing.js game which interacts with music (via the Echo Nest API), from the good folks at Bloom.

WeatherChecker adds weather to your Google Calendar. Did you know WUnderground has an API? More weather mashups are afoot; I can feel it in my little toe.

Germanita was the only hardware project at Disrupt, by yours truly and co-hacker Erik Swedberg. It implements the DMX protocol with an Arduino to drive lighting from a web application, based on music analysis from Echo Nest.

(It turns out we were following in the footsteps of local design personality Ben Cerveny, who developed a project called UrbaNode with some folks in Amsterdam to drive DMX from JavaScript. Great minds think alike!)

BridgeWater Disrupt was not in the Hackathon, but nonetheless a very cool project by two guys from the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund. Not only is it a virtual market for trading "shares" of presenting startups, but it offers an API for writing automated trading agents.

nwm is a tiling window manager based on dwm, written (and scriptable) in JavaScript. Why use any other language? Also not officially presented as a Hackathon hack, but a great hack.

There's a writeup about hackathons in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, whence the photo above. Happy hacking!

Google Sets Experiment: Cities 1337 & L4m3

Google has recently decided to terminate their super-kewl Google Sets service, a "mechanism for quickly and efficiently generating lists of items given one or more example". If you've never played with it before, we'd say give it a try as you may not get another chance. Here's an example of a recent experiment we ran on Sets using one of our favorite topics: cities.

Two cities where your editor has had a lot of fun are San Francisco and Berlin. Conversely, we've always found Brussels to be particularly boring and unpleasant, and have been cautioned by many folks to skip Dallas if possible. We used Google Sets to generate this list of cities which fit the first category but aren't in the second:

• barcelona
  
• paris
  
• são paulo
  
• shanghai
  
• taipei
  
• tokyo
  
• toronto
  
• zürich
  

Except for Taipei and Toronto this squares pretty well with a list of cities we'd like to spend time in. Contrast with the list of Brussels- and Dallas-like cities:

• atlanta
  
• boston
  
• chicago
  
• cleveland
  
• columbus
  
• frankfurt
  
• houston
  
• washington dc
  

What can we infer from these lists? Whatever it is we like about SF and Berlin can hopefully be found in Barcelona and Zürich as well - be it art, technology, or general excitement. Maybe these cities were all on Damien Hirst's last world tour, or hometowns of Roboexotica participants. Conversely the second list looks like places people are because they have to be (no offense Boston, but outside your universities you don't have much going on). A first guess might be these are all cities with major airports where people go to get a connecting flight to somewhere good.

If you're interested to help build an open source replacement for Google Sets, please contact us through the website or email EmbeddedLinuxGuy [at] GMail [punkt] com. We are especially interested in folks who want to work with machine learning, text processing, and large databases. Which, according to Google Sets, means we're also looking for "natural language processing", "data mining", and "fun".

Points for Style: Synchronous I/O in JavaScript

Thanks to developments in the evolving Mozilla JavaScript standard, it is now possible to use I/O paradigms from 1982-era ROM BASIC in the browser. You can skip this tediously technical article and try it yourself (Firefox 2+).

Chaos Communication Congress

The Modern Hacker is in Berlin for 27C3.



Check out a sampling of tomorrow's festivities.

12:45 From Robot to Robot

14:00 JTAG/Serial/FLASH/PCB Embedded Reverse Engineering Tools and Techniques

17:15 USB and libusb

20:30 Desktop on the Linux... (and BSD, of course)

21:45 Cognitive Psychology for Hackers

Roboexotica 2010

Roboexotica is the premier festival for cocktail robotics, held annually in Vienna, Austria. Robots from all over the world compete in such categories as cocktail serving, cocktail mixing, "smoking culture", and human-robot interaction.

Alison Sampson enjoys a perfectly tuned cocktail at Roboexotica 2009

Festival co-organizers Monochrom, known for their highly technical and artistically literate pranks, have selected none other than your editor as this year's artist in residence (Kunstresidenzler). For the remainder of 2010 we will be submitting stories daily from Vienna, Berlin, and Poland. Tune in tomorrow for our review of the food at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Welcome to Modern Hacker

Welcome to the first lifestyle magazine for the Modern Hacker. The Modern Hacker is a true Renaissance Man: equally at home discussing Dungeons & Dragons, minimal spanning trees, or terminal color schemes. He draws on both the classics and the contemporary, from "Common Lisp the Language" to "JavaScript: The Good Parts". Part cartographer, part philosopher, part mixologist: just a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.

Thanks for reading and please enjoy our publication.



some hoopy froods