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GIGO: words unreadable aloud
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Thursday 26 September 2002
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Silly analogy time: Python vs C
After programming some months in Python, I now have to convert this program to C. I had forgotten just how low-level and primitive C is. Last night, this stupid analogy came to me: imagine you have a trough full of teeny wood shavings and iron shavings, all mixed up. (These represent the 1's and 0's.) Your job is to move all the metal shavings elsewhere. In C, you have a set of very fine tweezers, and you pick up the metal bits one at a time. In Python, you wave a magnet over the trough, and you're done.
8:28:30 AM
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Wednesday 25 September 2002
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Tuesday 24 September 2002
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Monday 23 September 2002
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Programming Language Design and different ways of thinking
Here are a few notes for the longer story/essay that I really would like
to write about this set of related topics.
The pragprog list is currently deciding about what language(s)
to study next year. Frequently mentioned is the desire to learn
a language that will "affect the way I think about programming".
A discussion today on Lambda:
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$4365
refers to Michael Vanier's terms LFSPs vs LFMs —
(Programming) Languages designed For Smart People, vs
(Programming) Languages designed For the Masses:
http://www.paulgraham.com/vanlfsp.html
I came into the discussion fairly late ...
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$4428
by introducing a more useful (IMHO) pair of terms that show
about as much tact as Vanier (explicitly) and
Graham (by implication) do: LDCs vs LDTs —
Languages Designed for Cowboys vs Languages
Designed for Teams. (I would have called the latter
"Languages Designed for Collaboration", but then the
abbreviations would have gotten a bit confusing.)
Isaac Guoy suggested that the original terms would
make for a better satire, and that LDC/LDT haven't as
much humour-potential. The sad thing is that Vanier
and Graham appear to be serious about this.
This story is related to my conviction that it is
pretty useless to attempt to measure intelligence
as a one-dimensional thing.
(See Howard Gardner's writings, e.g., the 1983 book
"Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences"
which "Argues that all human beings are born with a
multiplicity of intelligences which can, and should,
be developed ..." ISBN 0465025080.)
It's also related (less directly) to some of
the comments that I made in August's
lambda thread about Richard Hamming, which drifted
into a thread about "the most important questions in
programming language design".
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$3951
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$3981
And to Frank Atanassow's question:
http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$3993
Yes, Frank. We still call gcc "gcc", though it
meets distinctly different specs now than it did in 1986.
We still call you "Frank", though you probably meet
few of the specs that you met in 1970.
11:52:44 PM
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Sunday 22 September 2002
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Banger Sisters
Nice to see Goldie and Susan having some fun together. Deb thought it sucked. A movie with a "message". Her take on the movie's message: "Do your own thing — instead of wasting 2 hours of your life on this turkey". My take on the movie's message: "Don't expect anything but stereotypes from movies made in Hollywood."
The movie starts by mentioning that it was somehow related to the movie "Election" from a few years ago (Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon). That movie sucked bad. Its message was "Be a pushy asshole and you'll be successful."
1:16:00 AM
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Saturday 21 September 2002
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Color test, template munging.
At some point, I made my item template's background color the same as that of my home page. It wasn't intentional. This posting is to see whether my new choice works for me. Or makes any difference at all.
1st try did, but not the right difference.
2nd try? We'll see.
My vote for worst feature of Radio's web-based editor: the ESCAPE key throws everything away with NO confirmation on it. Bad news for vi users!!!
The Rendering problem was: Radio doesn't notice changes in a file (in particular, one of the "#" files) if you rename it and create a new file with the same name. But that's often what I do because of the CRs in those files when they're edited via Radio/I.E. I have a shell script that renames the file, and then runs 'tr" to create a new one with the CRs replaced by NLs. I just have to remember to remove the backups when I do that to Radio files. I think I ran into this same problem months ago, but now I want to start removing the excess tables in my theme. This also solved the mystery of why my "GIGOzilla" change did not take, until this morning.
(I had replaced my title with "GIGOzilla" and the dorky anagrammatic subtext with "Carrying trademark bullying to absurd lengths". But since the flap with Toho and Davezilla seems to have subsided, it's not particularly relevant any more, so I have reverted it.)
12:37:36 PM
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Friday 20 September 2002
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Googlespell
Unfortunate discovery of the day: the Mac OS X (Jaguar) Mail application's spelling check dictionary does not contain the word "Google".
9:24:37 PM
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pragprog, LotY, LL2
Whew! Bursty traffic on the
Pragmatic Programmers' mailing list!
| | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|
| 2002 | 225 | 38 | 43 | 53 | 11 | | 26 | 12 | 142 | | | |
| 2001 | | 38 | 43 | | | | 26 | | | | | 1 |
Having stalled somewhat over the summer,
there is now an ongoing discussion about
what language to choose for next year's
Language of the Year.
And the call just went out for presentations at the
second "Lightweight Languages Worshop".
Lightweight Languages Worshop 2002 (LL2)
Saturday, November 9, 2002, MIT, Cambridge, MA
http://ll2.ai.mit.edu mailto:ll2@ai.mit.edu
CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS
LL2 will be an intense, exciting, one-day forum, bringing
together the best programming language implementors and
researchers, from both academia and industry, to exchange
ideas and information, to challenge one another, and to
learn from one another.
12:39:28 AM
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Thursday 19 September 2002
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Thither, Intentional Programming
Last April,
I wondered "Whither Intentional Programming?".
In August, I added a few
comments about Intentional Programming's relation to Aspect-Oriented Programming.
Well, it looks like the connections between AOP and IP
have now been cemented with greenbacks:
See http://intentsoft.com/corporate.html .
I quote: "Dr. Charles Simonyi, previously a Distinguished Engineer at
Microsoft Corporation, and Professor Gregor Kiczales, the leader of the
development team for AspectJ programming language at PARC"
are the founders of Intentional Software Corporation.
Simonyi was a primary force behind IP; and Kiczales' AspectJ was
the first and most accessible embodiment of AOP.
My April concern (about the Microsoft patents) still stands.
Looks like a "Heads, I Win — Tails, You Lose" situation for Microsoft:
If IP+AOP turns out not to be the big productivity booster that its proponents
think it will be, then MS "wasn't involved".
If IP+AOP does turn out to be a big productivity booster for programmers,
then MS reels it in via its patents, and buys IntentSoft or just uses the
ideas in its own version.
9:57:48 PM
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Wednesday 18 September 2002
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Add from email
Since I mentioned it earlier this evening, I updated
my strange blogroll tables.
That's what my <<Remember "Portals"?>> Nav-Link links to.
What I really want is a news aggregator that allows me to add channels
(subject to local approval for security reasons)
from elsewhere. Via email or something, with minimal changes in
the server software.
Looks like I'm running into the kinds of "presence" problems that
the Jabber project
noticed a couple of years ago.
1:08:24 AM
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Tuesday 17 September 2002
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Add from comments
With my home system being off and off-line most of the time, the only input I have to my weblog from elsewhere is the comments.
What would be cool would be for me to be able to add a comment to my weblog, that would have a URL for some other new weblog I've found, and then the server would add that URL to a list — a "potential additions" list either in the news aggregator or in something like
my inverted blogroll table.
Hmmm, maybe I could use a special part of
my other weblog for this.
Or maybe that'd be too unreliable and/or insecure.
More thought required.
11:47:49 PM
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Monday 16 September 2002
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wxPython ... and Scala
Got wxPython installed on my Windows system. Now if I can bring up the new Mac OS X beta version, I'll be seriously reconsidering my choice of Jython/Swing as the only reasonably cross-platform Python GUI library.
And the
Scala folks now have a distribution
that does not require Java 1.4, so I can try that on my home machine
(Mac OS X, even Jaguar, only has a 1.3-level of Java).
12:14:06 AM
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Sunday 15 September 2002
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Saturday 14 September 2002
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Friday 13 September 2002
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C'est la blague
This past summer, I stopped in at the
tasting room of
Bonny Doon Winery,
on my way to beautiful
Panther Beach.
I joined the "D.E.W.N." that day, the
"Distinctive Esoteric Wine Network".
(You get a pair of bottles of unusual wines sent
to you, 4 times a year.)
Winemaker Randall Grahm writes erudite
intro letters for each shipment, reminiscent of
the writing of
Stan Kelly-Bootle, except wine-oriented
instead of programming-oriented.
The label for a very nice French (Vin Pays d'Oc) Syrah that
is imported by Bonny Doon Winery sounds like Randall must
have helped write it. The name, though:
Domaine des Blagueurs
makes it sound somehow related to weblogs.
Last May,
I (barely) mentioned the word "bloggeur".
I think it's a much more appropriate word than "blogger",
because every blogger has a bit of the poseur in him or her.
However, the label on this wine made me rethink this just a bit:
Blagueur: (Def.) Qqn. qui fait des blagues.
Perhaps the Bard put it best: "Ah sirrah! ..., we shall do
nothing but eat, and make good cheer."
Syrah, sirrah, is the brilliant French cépage which
straddles France north and south and dialectically bridges rusticity
and sophistication; its carte de visite — white pepper,
anise, and cassis.
Altavista tells me that blagueur means "joker"; the circular
definition on the label means "Joker: one who makes jokes".
Knowing that, I would have to believe that whoever came up with
the English term "blogger" must have known that it sounded a lot
like blagueur. However, a Google search for "blagueur weblog" turns
up zero hits (tonight, before I post this). "blagueur blog" gets six
hits, all but one being pages written mostly in French. I wonder if
blagueur's French pronunciation is too different for it to sound
like a pun. Or the French just don't feel the need to point out such
an obvious, um, blague.
C'est la blague.
1:13:11 AM
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Thursday 12 September 2002
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Wednesday 11 September 2002
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City Nicknames, Take II
Last March, I mentioned
my
table of City Nicknames.
Hadn't done much with it since then, but lately many of the
entries in my referrers list come from searches for just that phrase.
So I did a little more research today, and the version
here is closer.
Still some more work to do.
Found a couple of other related sites. I'll get the URLs in there (and/or in here) in due time.
11:00:42 PM
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Tuesday 10 September 2002
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Still considering .Mac
Still thinking about whether to sign up for .Mac. New today (or yesterday): Apple offered
100 free prints through iPhoto's digital photo printing service to current members,
and those who sign up before October 31st of 2002.
Still don't like the clumsy way their software responds to bandwidth spikes on a given page.
1:46:43 AM
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Monday 9 September 2002
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Jaguar recovering
As far as I can tell at this point, everything that worked before I upgraded to
Jaguar is working again. It's snappier. And some of the fonts are much
more readable (especially the font used inside Radio's editing window!).
But I can't get VPN to work. I'll have to dig up some writeup about how
it's supposed to work — I've never used it before.
9:41:48 PM
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Sunday 8 September 2002
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Jaguar Woes
Not too many problems with the Jaguar upgrade, but some have a fairly high impact :
- Have to use a QWERTY keyboard. The methods I used on Rhapsody and all versions of Mac OS X since then, to install my own keyboard layout, do not work on Jaguar.
- My main reasons for spending the $$ to get Jaguar was for the VPN client. Boy, is that a far cry from Apple's vaunted UI expertise! And I haven't yet become convinced that it connected properly to my employer's network.
- (minor issue, I hope) Jaguar broke the connection between my newsgroup files and the Mac OS X version of MT-Newswatcher. Now, it keeps trying to start Classic when I double-click on them.
Oh, and not Jaguar-related: I guess I'm done with posting photos to the Web — my network disk allotments at got.net and Radio UserLand's server are both nearly full.
12:59:29 PM
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Up On Jaguar
Well, this is coming from Jaguar. Fairly smooth update, except that I can't use my own keyboard layout, and I can't set my preferences in VPN.
2:08:48 AM
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Saturday 7 September 2002
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More Central Coast
Radio is eating my post.
Content part:
More photos here.
Radio speculation part:
Is it eating them because I tried to use a real em-dash (—) in the Title?
Or is it from using a Radio macro reference in the Link?
Or because I've gotten up to 92% usage of my 40 Megabytes on Radio's server?
Or cosmic rays?
Nope. The problem was a missing percent to close a Radio macro.
But I fixed it in the weblogdata file and it didn't upstream it.
10:40:17 PM
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Friday 6 September 2002
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Central Coast Sampler
My camera found its way home after its extended vacation.
Here is a small sample of the photos I got on my walk
in the local state park.
11:47:59 PM
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Thursday 5 September 2002
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Light Reading
Got to spend the long weekend on the Central Coast; pix when my camera gets back from its vacation. Finished reading Java Design — Objects, UML, and Process by Kirk Knoernschild. Now, I need to write a review of it for the
ACCU newsletter.
A more appropriate title might be UML Design — with Java examples.
The examples are pretty well done in the book, and I do now have a better
appreciation for UML. Nice summaries of RUP and xP in an appendix.
At the local used bookstore down there, I found
Ishi, Last of His Tribe, by Theodora Kroeber.
That "K" is the "K" in "Ursula K Le Guin".
This Bantam paperback is the fictionalized 1964 version of Ishi's story.
Somewhere, I also have Ishi, the Last Yahi, which is the
more scholarly anthropological treatment.
There is now a federally designated Wilderness Area,
The Ishi Wilderness, that contains some of the land where
some of the Yahi lived. It's in northeast California, in the northernmost
foothills of the area where the Cascades meet the Sierra.
North of Chico, east of Red Bluff, and south of Mt Lassen.
1:31:56 AM
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Wednesday 4 September 2002
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Stupid .Mac bandwidth limits
Somewhere, someone pointed to some very nicely-done political posters, at
http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html
Unforttunately, Apple's inflexible policy about bandwidth has caused the
site to become unavailable this evening. You'd think that spikes would be
permitted as long as the volume doesn't stay high for several days.
I used to work for Apple, so I had a free mac.com account and I have
been trying to decide whether to
sign up for their .mac services. This bandwidth thing is one huge flag
pointing me in the "I don't think so" direction.
One other is the stupidly long URLs that they force on you, and the
even longer ones that whatever software they're using
(webobjects?) generates.
11:47:21 PM
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PCT Hikers' Journals
Well, they're mostly into Washington by now.
Here are some of the journals from this year's crop
of PCT hikers:
- On the PCTA site: http://www.pcta.org/plan/journal.shtml
all three of the normal folk are keeping fairly decent journals.
The triple-crown guys may or may not be; but I'd guess that
they're too busy walking to write much. At any rate, I couldn't
find anything since May on their site.
- on pcthiker.com,
Navigation is more difficult here, but several of the folks on
http://www.pcthiker.com/pages/journals.shtml are still going
strong.
- not much time to look, but I couldn't tell whether there were
any 2002 journals on http://www.hikertrash.com
Maybe next year ... or the one after that.
11:22:33 PM
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Tuesday 3 September 2002
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Attitude
Today's attitude: "Oh, cool. I get to do another day.
Lemme see if I can make good use of it. Make the world
just a leetle bit better for my having gotten to do this day."
8:36:16 PM
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Monday 2 September 2002
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BackpackingLight Links
Now that I have gotten
gmane.org to
subscribe the backpackingLight list,
I can actually find the time to look at it once in a while.
Here, I've collected links to some of the newer
developments since I've been out of touch with the
lightweight backpacking community.
-
Last year, I bought a G4 backpack from Glen van Peski
http://www.gvpgear.com/
I love it. It weighs about 12 ounces.
- http://www.golite.com builds gear based in part
on designs pioneered by Ray Jardine
- I made three pepsi-can stoves last year, and still
use the one I have left (I gave away the other two).
If I don't make myself some more, I'm thinking of getting
a Brasslite stove. http://www.brasslite.com/ $55.
- Another new company: ULA -- Ultralight Adventure
Equipment, Logan, Utah http://www.ula-equipment.com/
- An amazing work of comparison ... Biker Dave's guide to
Ultralight tents, tarps, tarptents, (no tenttarps?), hammocks,
bivy sacks, sleeping bags, and backpacks.
http://bikerdave.crosswinds.net/shelterII.html
An amazing work.
10:05:24 PM
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© Copyright
2007
Doug Landauer
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Last update:
07/2/6; 12:18:36
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The rest of the photos
that I took last weekend are