This week I learned...

• Net-casting spiders spin small webs which they hold in their long, spindly legs and slap down on unsuspecting insects. Amazing.

• In OpenGL, textures are applied after lighting has already been applied to the colors of whatever material you're drawing. So once you get a material to look the way you want, if you then try to put a red spot on it, using a texture with some red parts and some transparent parts, the red parts aren't affected by lighting. It looks really dumb.

  I think the fix is to draw the polygon twice, applying the “decal” in a second pass. But to do that, you have to actually do things right—turn off depth-buffering and sort all your polygons. Blah.

• OpenGL contains a lot of stuff that now seems quaint, like stippling. And support for 8-bit graphics modes.

• Many CPUs (including, for example, PowerPC) don't have an instruction for the integer “modulo” operation, the one spelled % in C and Java. (This is mentioned in the HotpathVM paper; I must have skimmed past it the first time I read it.)

• To decode g++ mangled names, pipe them to c++filt! Actually, Waldo told me about this last week. It helped me figure out some puzzling linker errors (you know the sort— “undefined symbol ??XZ13Frz__F21Z6K9__”).

• A good merge sort is faster than quicksort for real-world data. You can easily take advantage of certain kinds of pre-existing order in the array. Timsort is a merge sort implementation that takes that idea and, er, runs with it.

• Python's list.sort() is strangely wasteful when you use the key= named parameter. It allocates a separate, reference-counted temporary object for each item in the list. (It should allocate a single temporary array.)

• Maintaining a Mercurial queue containing large patches to a project is about as hard as maintaining a fork.

And a bunch of stuff about compilers that isn't really interesting.

According to a coloring book we bought for the kids, the black spots on a strawberry are not seeds but tiny fruits that contain the seeds. Wikipedia does say that “from a technical standpoint, the seeds are the actual fruits of the plant, and the flesh of the strawberry is modified receptacle tissue.” Appetizing! But I still say if your strawberry has black spots on it, don't eat it.