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St. Louis Startup Scene

Lots of new resources coming in to promote a St. Louis startup scene. Tying together some threads: Arch Grants is a new program to give $50k grants to create startups in St. Louis! Cool program. Here’s a story about it. Startup Weekend is coming to St. Louis this weekend (Jan 27-29th) – it’s a great opportunity to find others interested in creating companies. And finally, the new... [Read more]

Strange Loop: The Plan

Some musings on previous Strange Loop years and the plan for 2012. Strange Loop 2009 I started Strange Loop in 2009 with the thought that I could put together a local conference and surely I could find (heck probably knew myself) a couple hundred people in St. Louis that would go to a one day developer conference. I planned it in one of my favorite movie theaters in one of my favorite areas of St.... [Read more]

Language criticism

I read @codahale’s “leaked” assessment of Yammer moving some code from Scala back to Java with great interest today. I post about it somewhat hesitantly because it is a private thing that became public but I have lots of thoughts and I need to dump them somewhere. I am going to write this quickly and it will likely be twice as long as it should be. Sorry. First, I think there is... [Read more]

Clojure and Processing

I had a great time at Devoxx this week – many thanks to Stephan and crew and whoever is making all this delicious beer here in Belgium. During the end of my Cracking Clojure talk I showed a screencast I did where I progressively build up a solution to Conway’s Life in Clojure. The end solution is completely stolen from Christophe Grand‘s elegant solution – I just filled... [Read more]

Improving Clojure’s docs

There was an interesting conversation today on #clojure about various aspects of Clojure documentation. This is not a new topic I thought I’d goose it a little more publicly. There are docs in several places (this is incomplete, but most easily found): clojure.org – “official”, first-stop, very small editor set dev.clojure Confluence – wiki, editable by many but less... [Read more]

SPARQL datasets and named graphs

I’ve been working on understanding thoroughly how RDF datasets used in SPARQL 1.1 are defined and how named graphs and GRAPH graph patterns are evaluated. I have based this write-up solely on the SPARQL 1.1 specification (mostly section 13) and intentionally not on how existing SPARQL engines or stores actually work. Datasets When evaluating a SPARQL query, the query is answered in the context... [Read more]

Processing class #2 – interaction

I taught the second week in my Processing class for kids this week. Last week we focused on learning the x-y coordinate system, drawing simple shapes (ellipse, rectangles, triangles) and colors. This week I wanted to cover the basics for how users can interact with Processing. We started with a simple circle and I talked about how this is Processing just drawing a single image on the canvas: size(300,... [Read more]

Clojure/West – a new conference

It is with great pleasure that I am announcing a new west coast Clojure conference: Clojure/West (@ClojureWest). The announcement is here. The first Clojure/West will occur March 16-17th in downtown San Jose, CA. Future years may occur in San Francisco or other west coast cities with robust Clojure communities (Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and LA come to mind). This year I put a premium on finding... [Read more]