Well played, Pragmatic Programmers, well played.

The inaugural issue of PragPub, an electronic magazine for programmers edited by Michael Swaine, former editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, has a cameo appearance for LOLCODE.

(originally via Gruber)

Paul Lamere, a blogger for whom I have long had much respect, has outdone himself with a long look at the recent 4chan hack of a time.com poll.

At the core of the hack is the work of a dozen or so, backed by an army of a thousand who downloaded and ran the autovoters and also backed by an untold number of others that unwittingly fell prey to the spam url autovoters. So why do they do it? Why do they write code, build complex applications, publish graphs - why do they organize a team that is more effective than most startup companies? Says Zombocom: “For the lulz”.

Amen, brother.

Just minutes into April 2nd, I discover that Google has introduced LOLCODE language search. Nice.

(via NetworkWorld)

Parry Gripp is a brilliant, mad genius. Anyone who rocked to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's theme tune at any time in the past twelve years already knows this. Lately, he has been building his reputation as the Mayor of the Internet by creating such musical hits as ”Hamster on a Piano,” ”Fuzzy Fuzzy Cute Cute,” and the below “Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom” song:

I came across the above video, and knew I had to remix the music using my latest project: a script that created automatic, parameterized random re-edits of a song. It lead to a potentially limitless number of variations, most of which are actually less annoying than the original:

I wrote up a full explanation of how I did it on my personal site. It tries to get across some tricky computer and music concepts in a non-technical manner.

But why do I bother posting it to this site? I mean, other than the fact that it's a mashup of a cute, popular internet meme?

LOLCODE helped me create it. No, I didn't code it in our favorite esolang, but the process of designing LOLCODE got me thinking about fluent interfaces: code that when you read it, just makes sense. While the below code might not have the same enduring qualities as CAN HAS STDIO?, it's definitely motivated by the same desire to create code that anyone can read:

  beats = song.analysis.beats
  first_beats = beats.that(fall_on_the(1))

I didn't create the open-sourced Echo Nest Remix API, but I have contributed parts that might make it more fun to code. If you want to learn more about Remix, I have also written a semi-technical overviewof the API, as well.

And if you want to share the remixes, you can get the embed codes at the bottom of my explanation of the remixes, or point people to an OpenTape of the songs.

More LOLCODE-related news soon…

Variations of this joke get passed around all the time, but this one was special. LOLCODE joined the ranks of Lua, Ruby, and Erlang as the languages of the moment worth comparing.

LOLCODE would be Pastafarianism - An esoteric, Internet-born belief that nobody really takes seriously, despite all the efforts to develop and spread it.

Nailed it.

The whole piece is worth checking out, but I just couldn't resist quoting the highlight here.

I recently learned of a lot more developments in the LOLCODE world.

First off, congratulations to Dale, Brendon, and Carlos, winners of the N-Squared LOLCODE Challenge. Achievements like this give me hope for the next generation.

Secondly, Adrian Tsai provided a C++ LOLCODE interpreter for Windows. I haven't had time to investigate fully, but it sounds promising.

Also fresh off the blogosphere is a Ruby-to-LOLCODE code translator that works via Ruby's abstract syntax tree. (Also available on github.) It reminds me more than a little of Patrick Michaud's talk on using Perl6's Parrot to do a similar thing. But that doesn't dampen my delight, because I love this sort of hack.

I'm going to be taking a bit of a holiday, so things on the site and forums might be a bit quiet from my end for a while.

HEPPY HOLIDAYZ!

If you haven't heard the news, the folks behind ROFLCon, a watershed in LOLCODE's life, have teamed up to do another event, this time in NYC. Alexis Ohanian, of the big hands, the OLPC Laptop Auction, the LOLCats panel, and an obscure news aggregation site, is the host this time, and it looks like it's shaping up to be another nice event.

Check out the news: if you can be in New York on January 24, 2009, then try to do so. (LOLCODE won't be there, sad panda.)

Airships are funny. Dirigibles cast as flying LOL-Manatees are somehow magic. I caught Aaron Muszalski's flickr set of BaLOLoons, and thought it was great. However, co-conspirator Meredith Yayanos went one better and blogified the concept at DRGBLZ.com.

(Thanks to Simon Willison for pointing out the blog/site.)