Archive 16. December 2009

Making light - Wouter Brandsma received a Ricoh GXR with the 50mm macro module as a test unit and is currently trying it out.

Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code from Plurk - first Microsoft is caught stealing GPL code (and now releases the questionable tool itself under GPL, which will surely please them) and then Microsoft is caught stealing code from Plurk (and first has to shut down the service). Quite funny, wasn't Microsoft the company that always got so worked up about others using their code illegally? Hmm ...

Widefinder 2 with Clojure - Tim Bray's Widefinder2 project is slowly delivering very interesting results, here an article about how to optimize Clojure so that the performance beats the best Scala and Java solutions so far (where the Java version can of course catch up trivially, as most performance-relevant things in this version rely on Java libraries). A nice example of how you can bring low-level optimization into Clojure for the things that are really important for performance, but still keep the good high-level mechanisms of Clojure for the rest of the code.