Tags: vab

Enigma machine / Tom MacWright / Observable

See how an Enigma machine works …and interact with it.

Letters to be encrypted enter at the boundary, move through the wire matrix, and exit.

Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software — Brandur Leach

Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:

Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.

The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.

Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.

Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web

The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.

Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?

BMWSportTouring Forums: Space Shuttle Processing: Rarely seen by the general public

This photoset of a space shuttle' journey from assembly to launchpad is bringing back memories of that behind-the-scenes glimpse of Cape Canaveral I was lucky enough to enjoy. Thanks again, Benny!

movabletype.org: Welcome to MTOS: the Movable Type Open Source Project

This is the secret I've been keeping ever since I visited Six Apart a few weeks back: Movable Type is going open source.