Links: June 24th

I’m a little late this time around.

  • PyPy’s developers appear to have given it a boost and it’s now 50% faster than CPython in some tests. ‘Course, this is development code only, but I think it’s pretty impressive for what essentially mounts to a self-hosted Python interpreter.
  • The German Tank Problem, explained. Yeah, it may be a pointless read for some, but I found it to be rather fascinating–and I’m not a math guy. This is the kind of real world stuff they ought to use in schools.
  • Smashing Magazine has a fascinating article on 10 UI design patterns you should be paying attention to. It’s definitely worth a read for those of you with a knack for design. (I’m not exactly one of those types, but this is definitely worth a read for self-improvement. I know I’ll be putting these tips to good use in the future.)
  • Besides the notion of China having a lottery, there are stranger coincidences when dealing with impressively large populations. If true, that has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve read.
  • I couldn’t quite get the latest version of Py2EXE working without totally trashing distutils every time it attempted to run. I have found a suitable replacement called PyInstaller. It seems to work well and with minimal fuss. I like it. Oh, and you can bundle packages for most operating systems (though, I’d suggest looking at Freeze for *nix-specific distribution). I’m not sure how well it handles .eggs, though.
  • Ever been curious about the release timeline of different web browsers including some you may have never heard of? Take a look at this chart on Wikipedia.
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