I just heard about the goings on at YAPC (yet another Perl conference) Europe, 2008, in Copenhagen earlier this month. Patrick Michaud gave a lightning talk on LOLCODE in Perl 6's Parrot. Not only did he give a great overview of LOLCODE (v. 1.2), he gave a live demo of code translation from Perl (and, potentially, other languages) to LOLCODE via Parrot.

I've embedded the video here, and unlike previous offerings, it's short and sweet, at under seven minutes. Alternatively, download it and check it out at your leisure.

Wow. Thank you, Patrick (and Simon and Will and everyone in the Perl 6 community)!

A couple months ago I learned about an up-and-coming company with the intriguing and inviting name of LOLapps. They've fleshed out their web site a little bit since then. More to the point, they're trying to recruit while while being obliged to tell next to nothing about their company. In any case, I suspect what they do is Seeryous Bizniss, at least more serious than some previous job postings.

They're looking for a project manager, a community manager, and software and network engineers, so if you're looking for a new opportunity and want to increase the LOL quotient in your life, I suggest taking a look at lolapps.com. I have my theories about some things they might do, but it would be irresponsible to speculate here. I do note they keep a presence on Facebook….

Godspeed, LOLapps. We need more lulz in the world.

I've long held a strong fascination for Twitter in conjunction with LOLCODE. Twitter was pretty much the first vector for people to hear about LOLCODE on its first day, before Reddit and Digg struck. I also thought that LOLCODE would make a good language for a bot running on Twitter: if people could access it via SMS, and it looks close to TXT SPEEK anyway, it could be a compelling combination. That never materialized, but the idea stuck around.

My latest project has been a music recommendation agent for Twitter. Yes, Twitter bots are so 2007, but I'd like to think that recom.me brings something new to the table by giving user queries some persistence. Not only does the bot react on Twitter, but it creates a permanent URL on its own website.

If you like music and have some tolerance for Twitter, please check the user @recomme out, and send it a band name or solo artist. It should respond within a couple minutes with a list of other, similar musicians worth checking out. Respond again with “more” (or, if you prefer, “MOAR”), it'll send a few more artists to consider. I designed it to be easy to use via SMS at, say, the record store.

If you're not on Twitter, you can still explore a sample query, or read more at the about page.

This is just an early preview version of the site. Thanks to the awesome guys at The Echo Nest, whose APIs are behind the uncanny recommendations, recomme should soon be able to learn about your tastes and customize its recommendations for you.

P.S.: We're in the final hours of the LOLCODE Back-to-School sale. I have no idea when Spreadshirt will offer such a good discount again.

Photographer Michael Woodward caught a snapshot of a great vanity license plate this weekend. I know it's light on news, but I had to share.

(Yes, I know about the discrepancy in spelling. Too AWSUM to pass up.)

OBTW: Only a few days left in the 25% off back to school sale!

Photographer Michael Woodward caught a snapshot of a great vanity license plate this weekend. I know it's light on news, but I had to share.

(Yes, I know about the discrepancy in spelling. Too AWSUM to pass up.)

OBTW: Only a few days left in the 25% off back to school sale!

Some of you will already have come across this political commentary from the Guardian, highlighting some of George W. Bush's adventures in China during the Olympics.

Seeing this go through a mainstream (not technology) editorial flow (even if it appears to be online-only) seems to mark a new point in the development of LOLCats. I've known the Guardian Technology folks to be very hip to all things LOL, but this is mainstream coverage that goes beyond “Oh, look at those wacky geeks and their wacky humor.” It pretty much assumes you know what image macros are, or at least will find them funny on their own. LOLCats are entering the vernacular.

Step two, then, in LOL world domination would be a book. A little bird tells me that's coming, too…

Onceagain, we prove to be the #1 online source for information on LOLCODE jobs. A Columbus, Ohio, web-based startup has a Craigslist posting looking for:

a Senior LOLCode Developer, preferably with at least 3 months experience developing LOLapps. Please send a resume, along with links to any web-based LOLapps you have developed.

I love fostering an environment where three months experience means “Senior Developer.” Hey, you never know what making contact might lead to…. If you do get the job, tell them Adam sent you.

And seriously, I'm happy to list other LOLCODE-related job openings sent lolcode+jobs@lolcode.com.

One of the reasons I moved the LOLCODE store from CafePress to Spreadshirt was the ability to offer shirts for lower prices. (The other reason, the much higher quality of printing, is something I'm even more grateful for.) I'm really glad, then, that Spreadshirt is offering a formidable back-to-school discount: 25% off two or more items from the LOLCODE store. (Shipping costs are excluded from the discount.)

Simply click through to the store, and apply the coupon code “SCHOOL308” before checkout.

This offer runs through August 25th.

LOLCODE as a lingua franca to rival XML marches on… Email marketers MailChimp have not only implemented a LOLCODE API for access to their backend, but have also released an interpreter to take advantage of the API. It introduces some interesting concepts to handle passing data via LOLCODE API calls. It's something to consider until we have our own equivalent to JSONP or the like. (Bare eval()s? DO NOT WANT!)

Check out the forum post or the Google code site for more info.

Well played, 'Chimps. Well played.

LOLCODE as a lingua franca to rival XML marches on… Email marketers MailChimp have not only implemented a LOLCODE API for access to their backend, but have also released an interpreter to take advantage of the API. It introduces some interesting concepts to handle passing data via LOLCODE API calls. It's something to consider until we have our own equivalent to JSONP or the like. (Bare eval()s? DO NOT WANT!)

Check out the forum post or the Google code site for more info.

Well played, 'Chimps. Well played.

LOLCODE as a lingua franca to rival XML marches on… Email marketers MailChimp have not only implemented a LOLCODE API for access to their backend, but have also released an interpreter to take advantage of the API. It introduces some interesting concepts to handle passing data via LOLCODE API calls. It's something to consider until we have our own equivalent to JSONP or the like. (Bare eval()s? DO NOT WANT!)

Check out the forum post or the Google code site for more info.

Well played, 'Chimps. Well played.

Hey all. The venerable ICHC has a job posting for a .NET superstar developer.

We’re looking for a Full-Time .NET Developer/Superhero with a passion for coding with expert .NET expertise. You will make the intarwebs a better tube for millions as we develop some amazing tools and features (we’re more than just a blog under this fur!). We offer flexible hours, a fun work environment, health benefits and freedom from the tyranny of spelllcheck. (Plus free cat pictures!)

I've seen for myself what a serious business ICHC central has become, and it sounds like an excellent opportunity to take a job with some serious LOLs behind it.

Found amongst my referrer logs earlier this week: Robert Synnott's LOLCODE Pretty-print facility. It's a good reminder of our LOLCat heritage: similar to the LOLCat RSS feed reader, it renders the lines of code as cat macros (apparently via Common Lisp: parens represent!)

Pastebin it's not, but it's a highly appropriate means of syntax highlighting!

This past weekend I attended the BBC's Mashed08 hack day event, in a slightly more professional guise. The creative and hacker energy there was palpable, and it was good fun to be around.

There were a good number of projects that made me laugh in recognition. Not directly presented, but clearly a product of the weekend, was a Python port of Dave Dribin's LOLspeak that we've discussed here previously.

Another sly grin crossed my face as I saw Team Bob's award-winning entry. Although not directly LOL, long readers of the site will recognize Bob Dylan, who once carried the message of the LOL on this blog. The effect created, as Dylan highlighted arbitrary keywords from the newsreader's script, was ROFL-funny. The video has appeared on Vimeo and the creators have posted details.

Also carrying the message of the LOL was the team who did a mashup of BBC News and translated the subtitles to LOLspeak. AWSUM.

I performed a little hack, which I'll have to document on my own blog later. Finally, I got to shake hands with Doctor Who #7, Sylvester McCoy:

P.S.: Don't forget the LOLCODE contest ends in just under a week!

On a slightly more serious note, I notice Joe Gregorio's interesting observations on the ascendancy of virtual machines in the professionalization of scripting languages:

So by now everyone should have seen the SquirrelFish announcement. And MagLev. And you've [seen] Steve Yegge's presentation, ”Dynamic Languages Strike Back”…
All of those things on their own are interesting, but what's more important is that we're talking about them all at the same time. There's real research going on to produce faster VMs and that research is being applied to real scripting languages today. What we are priveleged to witness, something that wasn't happening a year ago, and will probably be complete in another year or two, is the professionalization of scripting languages. There was a time when you could whip out a parser in lex and yacc, stitch together a naive VM and throw it over the wall and you'd have a new scripting language. Those days are coming to a close and in a few years (if not months) you won't be able get traction with anything unless it does direct threading, is register based, has generational GC, does peephole optimizations, does trace-folding, does type-inferenced inline caching, etc….

It's a good read, and anyone interested in the language-geek aspects of LOLCODE would do well to think on it. I'd like to think that LOLCODE is either the thin end of the wedge of that interest or a popular protest against the tendency towards powerful scripting languages.

Oh, and sorry to those of you who saw some chaos on the RSS feed. There were a couple of bumps in the server migration, but it looks to be better now.