Tuesday, December 02, 2003|
more pyobjc I would be remiss, considering my current obsession with PyObjC, if I didn't point to this article.
I got this link from the Daily Python-URL website,
which usually has two or three good links to check out each day. |
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falling into the trap Wow. It's easy to continue to skip posting when you've already spent a significant amount of time not posting. I don't want to let the blog lie fallow again, so this is my attempt to prime the pump and get back into the posting habit. I had a good Thanksgiving vacation. I was able to get my home office back in shape, played with PyObjC some more (coding an obsession of mine -- cellular automata), travelled to Mom's house and visitted my Aunt Mary, and discovered the wonder of Ginger Altoids. Now that I know how rare Ginger Altoids are, I regret not buying up all that the store had. And that little roadside store in Leavenworth is the only place I've ever seen them. (For those that care, it's the first place we found with public toilets while going eastbound over Stevens Pass.) Programming note: All of my attempts at coding a generation algorithm for Conway's Life had always been somewhat brute force. Through judicious use of memory and other techniques I'd made it pretty fast, but they were always beaten by the people that figured out how to do it in a more mathematical fashion. I kept at it, though, thinking that if I just kept coming up with ideas that my "object algorithm" would eventually get fast enough. Well, I finally sat down and figured out how one of the faster algorithms works, and it actually made sense. I was always intimidated by the algorithm in XLife, or Hensel's algorithm, but I think anyone would be intimidated by Hensel's code. It's fast, but it's soooo optimized as to be inscrutable.
Still, the end result is that I'm happy to have figured out an honestly
new (to me) way of doing things, and I'm excited to start hammering on
it. |
Last update: 6/29/2005; 4:13:09 PM .
