Two remarkable pieces of writing in the blogosphere today, both ending up in the instant classics section of their respective categories.

The first one is a tutorial style piece exposing the inner life of a search engine. A simple full-text search engine in 200 lines of Ruby. It's concise, it's clear and after reading it anyone can write a simple search engine. If only all things in the world of code were explained that well.

The second one has been linked from all over the place, including some A-listers, so this probably doesn't come as news. But it's so good it deserves all the attention it can get. Socrates takes on WS-Mumbojumbo: The S stands for Simple.

Oh man. Oh man oh man oh man. Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. WHY WASN'T I INFORMED EARLIER. aptitude install uqm!

It's been 14 years, and it still rocks. The good thing is I don't actually remember any of the plot.

There's now a new version, 0.5, of Caboodle available. Caboodle is a Planarity knock-off for GNOME. No changes beyond making it work again in Ubuntu Edgy (seems the Cairo — or at least cairo-ocaml — API has changed a bit during the last year.)