Phillip and his creation: the roving party.

The Hopworksfiets is a custom built bicycle bar.  This cargo bike has it all: space for 2 kegs, inlaid wood bar, sound system and a rack to hold a stack of pizzas.  It was custom built by Metrofiets (makers of cargo bikes) for Hopworks Urban Brewing, both in Portland, Oregon.  This thing is a real beauty, and a clear shoo-in for the Hall of Awesome.  Read the whole scoop on BikePortland.org.

I do wonder how stable it is with the weight of two kegs on a two wheeled bike, but Metrofiets seems to know what they’re doing.  Regardless, I would love to cruise around Oakland on this thing.

(Hat tip to my friend Bill Richardson for pointing this out to me.)

The first inductee is the Lua programing language. Lua is a lightweight, fast, powerful scripting language designed to be embedded into other applications, though it stands on it’s own as a scripting language quite well. It has a procedural syntax that is easy to learn, and uses associative arrays to enable the construction of complex data structues. While the language is not fundamentally object oriented, a clever system of extensible semantics provides the tools necessary to construct first class objects.

The runtime is written using only features available in ANSI C, so it’s possible to port Lua to virtually any hardware environment, from the desktop os of your choice all the way down to resource constrained microcontrollers.

All of that is fine, and any number of scripting languages will provide these features. However, Lua implements all of this in a runtime just a hair larger than 100K. This is the main reason I like Lua. It provides a powerful programming environment in a tiny, efficient runtime that is easy to cram into small machines, like the one I target with my software.

At my day job I write software used to monitor energy production from solar power systems. I chose Lua to implement many of the features in our system due to the small size of the interpreter. There was no other language any where near as powerful that could fit in as tiny a space. The result is that I spend less of my time debugging C, and more time getting my job done.

You can learn more about Lua and help support the development team by buying Programming in Lua.