Don’t Fear the Assembler

Grok Headline matches for Don’t Fear the Assembler

Another ’honor’ victim:
Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by
mother

Another ’honor’ victim:
Daughter, raped by brothers, killed by
mother 11/18/2003 10:21 AM
practical approach to the 'family honor" business .. should read this horrifying story

azcentral.com/news/articles/1114HonorKilling14-ON.html
track this site | 8 links

’The War Has Started’ --
Allied troops in firefight in/near Basra

’The War Has Started’ --
Allied troops in firefight in/near Basra 03/19/2003 10:46 PM
article at This Is London, .. has already begun .. Evening Standard .. More Shots Fired .. It Starts .. First

track this site | 18 links

What’s in Howard Dean’s
Secret Vermont Files?

What’s in Howard Dean’s
Secret Vermont Files? 12/02/2003 01:54 AM
Dr. Dean in High Gear .. unlikely admirer: .. MSNBC Reports: .. great lengths .. (*)

msnbc.com/news/999347.asp
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Assembler JVM

Assembler JVM 05/06/2004 07:09 AM
Asm2class 0.0.4 (beta) released

Geek Conferences: Nothing to Fear but
Fear Itself

Geek Conferences: Nothing to Fear but
Fear Itself 02/16/2004 05:37 AM
Is the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference elitist? This question seems to be stirring up the blogosphere, and causing lots of good people who I read and like to throw verbal bricks at each other. I thought that as someone who is clearly not a member of the blogging elite, I might have a useful perspective to offer. Is the conference elitist? Of course it is - and no, it isn't. Both are true. It is elitist in the sense that it requires interest, knowing that the conference is going to happen, and being able to come up with the large amounts of time and money to attend. This rules out a very large proportion of the world. However, if someone is motivated and willing to rough it, it is possible to attend the conference for a lot less money than the standard cost of the conference and swanky hotel. In my case I found cheap late night flights on Southwest, stayed in a very cheap hostel (though not as cheap as the hacker loft crash pad), and got a free pass to the conference by writing and asking Tim O'Reilly nicely for one -- I saw other free passes being given away via the Wiki. So the money doesn't have to be the huge barrier it seems like at first, but attending does require a bit of luck and or chutzpah, geographical proximity, and being willing to stay in considerably less than stellar accommodations. The conference can also feel elitist because so many of the people who attend know each other. Many of them have long-standing professional, technical and personal ties (and ongoing feuds). If, like me, you are somewhat reticent by nature, you don't have ties to lots of people at the conference, and you don't have any particular product or idea to promote, it can be easy to feel intimidated or like an outsider surrounded by insiders. For instance, one day of the conference I ran into Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Micah Sifry and Scott Rosenberg at a cafe next door to the conference. I read 3 out of 4 of them regularly, I respect their work a lot, and I would have enjoyed sitting at their lunch table and listening to them talk. Did they invite me to join them for lunch? Of course not, no more than I would invite a random stranger I saw...

"american assembler"

"american assembler" 05/05/2004 03:49 PM

Mas PIC16C84 assembler

Mas PIC16C84 assembler 05/24/2004 07:51 AM
BETA version

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.15

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.15 02/10/2004 12:08 PM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

Flat Assembler 1.50

Flat Assembler 1.50 12/16/2003 03:15 AM
A super-fast and extremely efficient X86 assembler.

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.18

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.18 06/02/2004 03:31 PM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

Assembler Laboratory

Assembler Laboratory 02/07/2005 01:57 AM
it's alive

Flat Assembler 1.56

Flat Assembler 1.56 09/27/2004 10:57 AM
An extremely fast and efficient x86 assembler.

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.8

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.8 12/07/2003 09:28 AM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.10

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.10 01/10/2004 04:34 PM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.2

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.2 10/30/2003 10:22 AM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

Flat Assembler 1.54

Flat Assembler 1.54 08/05/2004 08:29 AM
A super-fast and extremely efficient X86 assembler.

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.9

Mad Builder PDF Assembler 1.0.9 12/10/2003 06:41 PM
A utility that provides an easy way to merge PDF files.

asxa: Assembler for XA Microcontrollers

asxa: Assembler for XA Microcontrollers 11/15/2003 08:59 PM
New Release: asxa-0.0.50

Crasm: A portable assembler

Crasm: A portable assembler 08/16/2004 10:41 AM
Back in 1987 Léon Bottou wrote a portable assembler, called crasm, for the 6800, 6801, 6803, 65C02, and Z80 for AmigaOS. According to a recent Freshmeat.net accouncement the code has been ported to Linux and is available as Free Software licensed under the GNU GPL. A crasm Source Forge project has also been set up for the software. It's not unusual even today to see robots using some of these older CPUs, so this assembler could come in handy for robot builders.

NASM - The Netwide Assembler 0.98.36
(Devel)

NASM - The Netwide Assembler 0.98.36
(Devel) 03/14/2003 06:11 PM
80x86 assembler designed for portability and modularity

ATasm: 6502 cross-assembler

ATasm: 6502 cross-assembler 11/12/2003 06:48 PM
Beta version of ATasm 1.05 released

The American Assembler - States With
Higher IQ Vote Democrat

The American Assembler - States With
Higher IQ Vote Democrat 05/06/2004 12:10 AM
american assembler .. Proof!

americanassembler.com/features/iq_state_averages.htm
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Libraries Have Nothing to Fear [about
RSS] but Fear Itself

Libraries Have Nothing to Fear [about
RSS] but Fear Itself 07/14/2004 01:32 AM

Fear of RSS

"However, whether or not to use RSS on your site should no longer be an option. I believe it has become a necessity if you wish to compete with others in your industry....

For many users today, bookmarks have become useless since we have too many of them. Bookmarks allow for information overload just as easily as RSS does, but the difference is that RSS allows updates through all that information overload. A bookmark gets hidden, but if you update your site then the RSS feed will reflect that and tell the reader its time to view the content....

With the plethora of sites around fighting for the mindshare of your readers becomes essential. Why lessen your chances by not including a RSS feed? That opens the gates for everyone else to increase their readership. RSS feeds create more opportunities and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages." [BusinessLogs, via del.icio.us/tag/rss]

But I can tell that it’s about the
same thing

But I can tell that it’s about the
same thing 03/14/2005 04:38 PM
One of the common feature requests we get for NetNewsWire is to handle this situation:

Say you’re subscribed to several Mac news feeds. Then one day Microsoft updates Office for Macintosh, and each feed includes a news item about it, so you have several news items about it.

You only need to read that particular piece of news once. So why not make it so NetNewsWire detects that these are all about the same thing, and mark them as read automatically once you read the first one?

Here’s why:

Consider these two news items, ripped from today’s headlines...

MacMinute

Title: Microsoft Office 2004 update released
Description: Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) has posted Office 2004 for Mac Update 11.1.1, which includes improvements to Excel add-in calculation, increased PowerPoint and Word 2004 stability, additional support for device drivers and enhanced appearance of imported graphics...
Link: http://www.macminute.com/2005/03/07/office-2004/

MacCentral

Title: Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac updated to 11.1.1
Description: Microsoft Corp.'s Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) on Monday announced the release of Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Update 11.1.1. The update includes improvements to Excel add-in calculation, improves stability for PowerPoint and Word, adds support for new device drivers and improves the appearance of imported graphics.
Link: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/07/office/index.php?lsrc=mcrss-03 05

They’re about the same thing

Both items are obviously about the same thing. You can tell by looking, instantly, no thought required.

But computers aren’t that smart. How does a piece of software know that these two are about the same thing?

The titles, descriptions, and links are different.

There are many of the same words—but you really don’t want your aggregator to start making guesses here. Imagine two completely different stories, but each one has “Apple iTunes” in the title. “Songs on Apple iTunes Music Store now free” and “Apple iTunes sold to SixApart” are not the same piece of news.

What’s the solution?

Artificial intelligence would be helpful here. But we don’t have that.

One possibility would be a new kind of link element—an external link element that is meant to identify the source of the story. For instance, if you go to the full version of the above example news items, both of the stories include a link to the same page on the Microsoft site, a page about this update to Office.

Were that link to be included in the feed, with that item, as a special link-to-the-source link, then an aggregator could know that the news items were really about the same thing.

One nice thing about this is that it’s likely that the folks at MacMinute and MacCentral would pick the same link. They wouldn’t have to coordinate, it would just work. (At least in this example. It wouldn’t always be so clear-cut.)

The bad thing about this idea is the potential for abuse—or just plain laziness. What if people make the link-to-the-source link just a link to http://apple.com/ for any story about Apple—you’d end up with stories that are not about the same thing being marked as read. Nuts.

Another problem is that you still might miss something interesting. Say MacX posted a basic news report, but MacY posted a lengthy piece with interviews and and all kinds of goodies. You wouldn’t want to miss MacY’s report—but you would, since it was marked as read when you read MacX’s news item.

In other words, I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s worth thinking about.

Cat on a Mac, we’ve got snow

Cat on a Mac, we’ve got snow 01/07/2004 03:11 PM
Sheila posted some pictures: Papa finds a new place to sleep; il neige.

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7

What’s New in NetNewsWire 1.0.7 12/23/2003 04:58 AM
NetNewsWire

ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire107.php
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I don’t care how you

I don’t care how you 04/09/2004 04:10 PM
I don’t care how you read my content; I just want you to read my content. If you want to read on the web, fine. If you want to read it through email, fine. If you want to read it through RSS, fine. It doesn't matter! I'm not here to sell a delivery vehicle; I'm just here to tell people, “Hey, this is what’s going on in the world.” When syndication just so happens to be one of those ways, a stronger way, a better way, of getting information out there, then, yeah, I’m going to have to proselytize because no one else is really doing it. They’re getting caught up in the politics or they’re just talking about RSS as kind of, like, you know “Oh, well, we’re doing this,” but they’re not really evangelizing it, and there are very few RSS evangelists out there....

Welcome to the ‘new’ Web,
same as the ‘old’ Web

Welcome to the ‘new’ Web,
same as the ‘old’ Web 04/09/2004 03:59 PM
CNN on newsreaders: “Hang on to your hats boys and girls, because your experience of the World Wide Web is about to change, possibly for the first time since Mosaic...”

RatherBiased.com | News | What’s
New

RatherBiased.com | News | What’s
New 09/19/2004 11:43 AM
RatherBiased

ratherbiased.com/news.html#48
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CamelBones - What’s New in
1.0.0-beta1

CamelBones - What’s New in
1.0.0-beta1 04/04/2005 01:47 PM
CamelBones 1.0.0b1: “This new approach is a huge improvement over the old proxy-based bridge, and makes a number of things possible with this new version that could not be done previously: Support for Cocoa Bindings, NSDocument-based applications, Custom NSView subclasses.”

I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio

I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio 02/14/2004 05:17 PM
I’ll be on Inside Mac Radio sometime today between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. Pacific. (That’s in just a few minutes, at the time I’m writing this.)

What’s coming in NetNewsWire

What’s coming in NetNewsWire 04/20/2004 02:14 PM
The next release of NetNewsWire is going to be a big upgrade, perhaps bigger than you were expecting. (And it will be a free upgrade.)

There are lots of new features. What follows is a partial list—I’m leaving some surprises.

(Also: NetNewsWire is in private testing. If you’re interested in helping test, please send me email. We have a great group, but there’s always room for more.)

Browsing in place

One of the most common feature requests we get is to be able to open links inside NetNewsWire, so you don’t have to jump out to your browser. This is there—and it’s an option, so you can still open links with your browser if you want.

We jazzed it up a bit and added tabbed browsing. (It even remembers your tabs between runs.)

Searching

Searching works as you would expect, with a standard search field in the toolbar. It searches as you type.

Persistence

There’s a setting for how long you want to keep news items. There’s a global setting, but you can also set it at the group level and for individual feeds.

Flagged items

You can mark items as flagged. They get a little flag icon, and there’s a special feed that shows all your flagged items. Flagged items are kept permanently (or until un-flagged).

Activity window

A new activity window lets you know exactly what’s happening in the current download session. You can cancel the entire download or cancel individual items.

At the same time, we’ve provided a much larger range of options for concurrent downloads, so that you can better tune NetNewsWire’s refresh speed.

Per-feed refresh settings

Some feeds you want to refresh often, but other feeds you want to refresh every four hours, or once a day, and so on. You can now set all this on a per-group and per-feed basis. Settings inherit, so you could set your Macintosh group to refresh every two hours, but then have some feeds inside that group that refresh more or less often.

You can also set feeds that don’t refresh at all. (This was a surprisingly common feature request—people want to save feeds sometimes but have them not refresh.)

Synching

People who use multiple computers will be able to synchronize their subscription lists and the read/flagged status of news items between two copies of NetNewsWire.

Smart feeds

There are two main approaches you can take—either filters (as in email apps) or smart feeds. We went with smart feeds. You can create smart feeds that show headlines from other feeds. It’s much like smart playlists in iTunes or smart groups in Xcode.

Scripted feeds

You can write AppleScript scripts or shell/Perl/Python/etc. scripts that return RSS or Atom. Scripts can take parameters or not. These scripts can do whatever scripts can do—I expect some people will write screens-scrapers, but you can also use them for things like watching a drop folder on your hard drive or monitoring log files and so on.

Search engine feeds

You can subscribe to searches at Blogdigger, Daypop, and Feedster. You just tell NetNewsWire what to search for and choose your search engine.

Feeds that haven’t updated

We get a lot of requests for different subscription management features—but the most common was to find out which feeds haven’t updated in a long time. You can now see all feeds that haven’t updated in n days (where n is a number you choose).

OPML subscriptions lists and groups

You can export your OPML subscription list with groups intact, and you can import OPML files with groups.

Atom feeds

It reads Atom feeds. If you’ve been using the Atom beta, note that we’ve fixed a bunch of bugs (most notably the bug where summaries-only feeds appeared as title-only feeds).

Surprises

I haven’t mentioned some little things (like favicons in the Sites Drawer, an Errors window)—but I’ve also left out a few big things. As I said above, if you’re interested in helping test, just send me email.

Steven Frank’s tip for improving
your RSS

Steven Frank’s tip for improving
your RSS 01/18/2004 06:02 PM
Steven Frank has a great simple tip for improving your RSS: subscribe to your own feed (or feeds).

What if your feed appears weird, or doesn’t appear at all, in NetNewsWire? Validate it. Ctrl-click on the subscription and choose Validate this Feed. (Yes, this command should also be in the main menu. In the future it will be.)

It the feed is valid, but NetNewsWire does something strange, then let us know about it: it’s mostly likely a bug.

But if the feed is not valid, you have a few options for fixing it:

1. If you’re running your own software, then you may have a bug to fix.

2. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you’re using a customized template or script to generate your feed, check your work.

3. If you’re running someone else’s software, but you haven’t customized anything, report a bug to the person or company who created your software. Be sure to include the URL of your feed, so they can validate it too and see what the problem is. (Important: be nice. Software has bugs. Most developers are conscientious and work hard at fixing bugs.)

Ranchero Software: What’s New in
NetNewsWire 2.0

Ranchero Software: What’s New in
NetNewsWire 2.0 09/23/2004 07:50 PM
2.0 (beta) version of NetNewsWire .. what’s new in 2.0

ranchero.com/netnewswire/whatsnew/netnewswire20.php
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Why I’m switching to Mailsmith and
SpamSieve

Why I’m switching to Mailsmith and
SpamSieve 01/07/2004 03:09 PM
I’m switching from Apple Mail to Mailsmi th and SpamSieve.

I had grown increasingly unhappy with Mail back in the Jaguar days. Performance was a big issue, but there were also user interface issues—the big one being that I couldn’t navigate the mailbox list via the keyboard.

Another issue was that the spam filter was getting less and less effective and I was dealing with spam by creating filters again. There’s no way I want to go back to that world. (I spent five years in Eudora creating spam filters by hand.)

But I decided to stick with Mail for a while, since Mail would be updated in Panther. And when Panther shipped, there were some nice improvements in the new version of Mail, but it didn’t specifically address my problems.

And then performance got worse. Even just checking mail became this long process. At first I thought it had to be the server. But then I downloaded the Mailsmith demo—and checking email was quick.

I also downloaded Eudora and gave it a shot. I had used Eudora for many years in the classic Mac OS. But I didn’t really like it in OS X: something about the look of it these days just rubbed me the wrong way. Just a personal taste thing, I’m sure.

So I used Mailsmith some more—and I found I liked it. It was faster than Mail. It’s very scriptable and customizable—for instance, I wanted to give some of the menu commands the same keystrokes that I was used to in Mail, and I could. Mark as Spam is now shift-cmd-J in my copy of Mailsmith.

Two other wonderful features of Mailsmith: it does not display HTML email and the text editing engine comes from BBEdit. But the very coolest feature may be SpamSieve.

Simply put: it catches my spam far more accurately than Mail ever did. Mail never came close. That’s the main thing SpamSieve has to do it, and it does it.

But it goes beyond that—you can see statistics on how well it’s doing. You can look at and edit the blocklist and whitelist. (Not something I’ve had to do, though.) My favorite of these extra features is the Show Corpus command. It shows you the words SpamSieve has seen, how often they’ve been in spam vs. good messages, and what the spam probability is. This fascinates me.

For instance, the word “terminate” has appeared 13 times since I started using Mailsmith. It has appeared in spam 12 of those times. Another for instance: any email sent to webmaster@ranchero.com has an 89% probability of being spam.

SpamSieve is a generous piece of software, in that it does its job very well but then gives you the extras that make it fun. And it’s written by Michael Tsai, another small, independent developer with a weblog.

Watson’s Life Coming to an End,
Soon

Watson’s Life Coming to an End,
Soon 09/23/2004 09:46 PM
Dan Wood: “There’s been some discussion on the Watson Users’ email discussion group about the future of Watson and where Sun is going. I am sad to say that it looks like Sun doesn’t seem to be focussing on getting the port of Watson released any time soon.”

This is sad: Watson is cool. But we’re looking forward to hearing what Dan is working on next.

Adriaan’s State of the API address

Adriaan’s State of the API address 12/17/2004 06:34 PM
Adriaan Tijsselling: State of the API address: “In the end, though, it still depends on the blog system developers and how far they want to go in supporting and (properly) implementing the Atom API (without resorting to poor hacks).”

I agree with pretty much everything Adriaan says in this post—and especially the part about not “resorting to poor hacks.” Until you’ve tried to write a weblog editing client that works with a bunch of different systems, you have no idea what a pack of spiders are the various implementations.

Adriaan talks about having a weblog editing API “wrapped in a consistent, tightly-specified, well-documented IETF-controlled XML format and internet standard.” Right on to that.

An additional hope of mine is that, at the same, the API doesn’t take a computer scientist to implement. If it’s difficult and complex, both Adriaan and I will handle it, yes. But the thing to remember is that there’s a ton of creativity and interesting ideas in the scripters and hobbyists out there, and they’re not going to tackle stuff that just takes too long to see any results. That’s one of the reasons that XML-RPC and RSS have had success—they’re so easy to get started with. And that’s worth remembering.

It’s a Multi Language World

It’s a Multi Language World 03/22/2005 05:12 PM
James Duncan Davidson: “I’ve heard rants before about how Java is the best damn language out there and that every piece of functionality should be implemented in Java. And I’ve heard the rants taken further and say that the one thing that Company A (or B or C, but usually A) to make themselves more appealing to developers is drop everything else but Java.”

MacWorld and ‘shareware’

MacWorld and ‘shareware’ 11/17/2003 07:46 PM
The Rogue Amoeba folks write in Macworld, “Shareware,” And The Future about how it can be difficult to get your software reviewed in MacWorld unless you’re a large software company.

NetNewsWire has been reviewed in MacWorld, but that doesn’t take away from the good points made in this article. (And the article also points out that MacWorld has made progress in this area with its new capsule reviews.)
Grok Description matches for Don’t Fear the Assembler
GrokA matches for Don’t Fear the Assembler

Don’t Fear the Assembler

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: