Beej's Bit Bucket

Some links to enjoy:

• Insanely deep fractal zoom in HD. If you’re not on drugs, this relentless exploration of the Mandlebrot Set’s periphery will make you feel like you were.
• A quick overview of OGRE 3D, a neat free 3D engine.
• A potentially interesting way of patching Python on the fly for asynchronous I/O; I didn’t pursue it, but it seems like a not-bad idea on the surface.
• The Soundex Algorithm, a not-so-complex algorithm for categorizing words by their sounds. Good for finding words by sound.
• Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms. Seems like one of the more approachable essays.
• Quick overview on making threadsafe functions.
• ACM Programming Competition World Final Problems for 2010. I participated in the contest a couple times back in school, years ago! Was never on the winning team, though, sadly.
• Bugfix for Phoenix, a 1980 coin-op arcade game.  Retro-awesome.

More links:

• How do we kick our synchronous addiction? Some talk about asynchronous coding, contains a clean JavaScript implementation and mentions Erlang.
• Creating a toy virtual machine with PyPy. The PyPy project is pretty cool.
• Visualising Sorting Algorithms. An approach different than that of Wikipedia, and I think maybe more clear.
• CopperLicht, a 3D JavaScript engine that uses WebGL. Looks cool, but none of my Linux browsers support WebGL, apparently.
• Design 0.101 for Programmers; just a tad to help you through the day.
• Excerpt from the Case Study of  The Space Shuttle Primary Control System. Story of an all-systems lockup in the Space Shuttle simulator and how it was debugged. No software impresses me more than the Shuttle’s.
• My Favorite Liar; “One of my favorite professors in college was a self-professed liar.” Kept the students well on their toes.
• Mnesia: A distributed database rooted in concurrency. Nice little intro to Erlang’s built-in database.