Beam me up, Lang and Appleyard
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MIT scientists perfect the use of light beams as a tweezer-like tool for manipulating microscopic objects.
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A composer and koto player reinvents an ancient Japanese stringed instrument by way of an Apple G4 PowerBook and tightly focused beams of light. By Alexander Gelfand.
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Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several 'shortcuts' from O'Reilly and Addison-Weseley.  I love this format.  For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page "book".  The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome.  The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value.  October marks the beginning of Apress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails.    Apress also has Practical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer.  Now, on to interview news!
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Queue submissions being scarce, I suggest we all submit limericks for consideration.  Mod up your favorites.    I'm no poet, so I'll submit a favorite of my childhood:    There was a young woman named Bright,  Who traveled much faster than light    She set out one day  In a relative way    And returned on the previous night.    I'm afraid I don't remember the author.
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others jostle for bragging rights. Also: Speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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âItâs an improvement on an already stellar computer,â says Katherine Boehret (The Wall Street Journal), referring to the new iMac. âThe keyboard is radical-looking. Itâs much flatter and sleeker than typical desktop PC keyboards. I found it easier to type with.â Boehret goes on to explore iLife â08, âI quickly picked up on how to use the new features in iPhoto and iMovie, thanks to unintimidating, self-explanatory icons.â She continues, âMy video camera was instantly recognized when I plugged it into the iMacâ and âin just about 15 minutes, I created a short movie.â Boehret concludes, âThe new programs in iLife â08 are a pleasure to use, and the new iMac is a great way to experience them.â
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Still listening to this classic Dead song.  And writing about it on Twitter... It's an MP3 that I ripped from the Mars Hotel album. Which I bought on CD many years ago. I've listened to this track about 1000 times. When I play it it puts a smile on my face. Because Cucamonga is a place with no pride, imho.  It's a joke, kind of like Truckin makes fun of New Orleans, a town that done the Dead wrong, once, a long time ago. Now if it were on vinyl I would have wore it out a long time ago. I'm sure there was a copy of the song on the disk Apple stole from me. There you have it RIAA. You can go after Apple. I'll support you because they stole from both of us. They have no right to listen to PofC. I imagine Steve Jobs and Phil Shindler sitting around smokin a doobie listening to Phil Lesh sing, thinking "Dave has good taste in music." BTW, Cucamonga is a suburb in southern CA. Near Ontario. Probably very non-descript. Might have been interesting 70 years ago. And that's your bedtime story for Saturday, boys and girls. Have a nice day, don't hit your brother (or sister) and be nice to the sitter!
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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1. "T is for Trespass" by Sue Grafton
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And recapture some valuable screen real estate and a portion of your sanity. defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YESkillall Dock Screen shot. Thanks to Mark Johnson for the tip.
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More remarks on the Apple CEO's controversial speech on teachers unions and education reform. Plus: Links to our  most popular blog posts.
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Piers Cawley has the latest from the Perl 6 mailing lists. The perl6-compiler list discusses grammar bootstrapping, the Parrot people debate namespaces again, and the Perl 6 Language list ponders the freshly updated Synopsis 5.
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Last week, Mauricio Fernandez announced a new Ruby to OCaml bridge that he&#8217;s working on, called rocaml.  With the growing interest in functional languages in the Ruby world, this seemed like the sort of thing I needed to talk to him about, so I sent off a quick set of questions, and this is what I heard back1.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans has posted his look at the Phrasebook series from Sams Publishing covering Javascript, MySQL, Apache, and, of course, PHP.   I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn't been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I'm going to talk about books 4 in one review.   He looks briefly at the contents for each of the books, pointing out specific areas they seemed particularly helpful in. He doesn't recommend them to someone trying to learn the language right off the mark. These are, as their title implies, just clips and handy snippets of information to help you get to where you're going. You have to know how to get on the road first, though...
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In a quick post to his blog, Lukas Smith notes his support of the recent announcement of the PEAR elections.   I am confident that both of the proposals will help in improving collaboration in PEAR, mainly because they basically provide the same organization we used to have for all of PEAR (which worked great in the beginning), now for categories of related packages.   He reasons that, since PEAR is such a huge project, it needs this kind of approach - a method to the madness - to help keep the project on the right path.
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Comment is free: Timothy Garton Ash: Spain struggles to find new words while Kosovo seeks a song of its own. La Marseillaise shows us how it's really done
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Designer James Carpenter understands the poetics of light and material, working with architects to enhance public places. Fourth in a series profiling this year's MacArthur 'genius award' winners. By Kari Lynn Dean.