Bag of Beans

Wired has a great series of articles on the new season of Futurama, and the story behind it.

Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he’s watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom’s most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can’t-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.

• Futurama Is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In
• The Geekiest Show on TV
• The Original Futurama
• Gallery: Behind the Scenes of Futurama

Check out this list of codes that are still unsolved. No doubt anyone who breaks one of these will ensure a place in history.

Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist James Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia, in the United States. Since its dedication on November 3, 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears. It continues to provide a diversion for employees of the CIA and other cryptanalysts attempting to decrypt the messages.

• Link (via Neatorama)

The DejaVu fonts are based on the Bitstream Vera fonts, and are a set of nicely designed fonts that are released and being improved upon under an open source license. Of particular interest for programmers is the monospaced font, which makes code editor listings much more readable, especially when compared to the ancient Courier New. Among other advantages, it has the important characteristic that lowercase ‘L’, capital ‘I’, and numeral ‘1′ characters are visually distinct, as well as capital ‘O’ versus numeral ‘0′. Bitstream Vera was one of the first things I installed when setting up a new development environment, but from now on I will be using DejaVu.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Vera Fonts release 1.10. Its purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development (see Authors). The family is available as TrueType fonts and also as third-party packages.

• Link
• The Coding Horror blog has some articles (Programming Fonts and Revisiting Programming Fonts) comparing quite a few programming fonts using screenshots.

Here’s another impressive homebrew computer. It was built with more than 200 ICs, and has similar capabilities to the original 8086 processor. It was recently demoed running a port of Minix 2.

Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn’t use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There’s a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.

• Link (via Slashdot)
• Article at LinuxDevices.com.

Related:

• Viktor’s Amazing 4-bit Processor
• Programmable Z80 Microcomputer