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The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

This looks very obvious in hindsight, but I am sure not many would have thought about this. This guy uses the HL's source engine to produced a model of the Kaufmann House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution.

Links: the HL map for Kaufmann House and a walk through available here

If you use Bloglines and you have not been seeing any updates from Reddit on it then try to get your reddit feed from this rssmix feed. I have no idea why Bloglines is not showing updated feeds from reddit.

I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote

My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

I discover wonderful things through webcomics. Today, I was reading this comic, where I saw a mention of Miyamoto Musashi. I checked out his wikipedia entry, where a I found a link to his book The Book of Five Rings and that is what I am reading now.