BEGIN NERD VOICE
I've done stochastic analyses of your responses to questionnaires and exhaustively compared your responses to other women on this site, and I calculate there is an 45.2% you might like me. You're the highest score yet!
END NERD VOICE
Really, don't be that guy.
OOOH Baby! I'm SO hot right now!
Hey, you never know who you might find out there! Maybe there's even a girl who likes dubstep!
But but but! A mechanical object can be beautiful, and so can code! Often I've seen brilliant and occasionally sadistic approaches to the problem that I can definitely appreciate at an artistic level. Something like Duff's Device requires both technical brilliance and a good amount of creativity. I have to read and analyze code for my job on a regular basis.
A mechanic must know his way around a car to know how to repair it, and I must know my way around the code base if I am to diagnose problems. I can't just focus on the broken parts of it, or changes I make will likely introduce side effects. On most of my projects I didn't even have a requirements document, just a big pile of usually-poorly-written code. Each program is a unique individual machine, as if every single car were built dramatically differently. How much harder would it be for a mechanic if they had to go hunting for the spark plugs before they could even get started?
I've read a lot of code over the years and thinking back on it, I do kind of approach it that way. What I'm doing feels more akin to taking a machine apart to see how it works rather than reading it as I would a book. I often feel, when I'm interrupted, like I'm ass-deep in wires that are going every-which-way.
It is still a method of communication, though. You can often tell a lot about the programmer and his state of mind at the time by reading his code. It's very easy to tell when they were confused about what they were trying to accomplish, how comfortable they were with the language they were using and whether or not they were in a hurry.
Early on in my career, I started with the assumption that the original programmer knew what he was doing. The more code I read, the more I realized that this is almost never the case. From my observations, it takes about a year for someone to come up to speed with a project, the business process for the company they're working at, and any code base that was already there. Longer if the company's business processes suck. Until then they're mildly to severely confused, and this is reflected in their code. Since a lot of programmers don't hang around at one company for much longer than that, most of the code that I've run across has been crap. The first inclination might be to rewrite it, but as you're starting on a new project you're also mildly to severely confused, so it's best just to study the crap closely and make minor improvements as the opportunities arise. A crap in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or something. Most of the time. I've run across a couple of what had to have been bottom-ten-percent programmers whose crap did end up requiring full rewrites. Coming into a C project where the programmer didn't realize strings are null terminated is a huge warning. C++ or Java code where everything inherits from everything else is also a warning.
That would explain why I got a dildo, two pounds of Kona coffee, a Mickey Mouse Ears hat and the third season of My Little Pony in the mail last week...
That's Ok! I don't see any need for job-killing regulations for the energy industry in Washington! If anything they need LESS regulation, or someone will outsource all those gas jobs to China! Congress doesn't want to kill jobs do they?
I've found with C++11 and Boost that I prefer to develop in C++ than Java. Or pretty much anything else for that matter. Design your code reasonably well and it can be solid, and fast. I've left my applications running constantly for months on end and never seen a resource leak, and the compiled binaries are tiny. I just got done stamping the last of the ruby code out of the code base I have to maintain and my new code runs significantly faster, is so much more maintainable that the previous developers of the code really ought to be ashamed of themselves and takes under a minute to deploy. In about the time it takes gem to warm up, I've deployed my files, verified md5sums on 4 different systems and left to get a donut. Mmmm..... Donut.....
I don't care for GTK or QT. I kind of wish the boost guys would write a widget toolkit so I don't have to do that myself, when I finally get to that item on my to-do list (It's sitting down around 4 or 5 on the list right now, so it'll be a while.)
That's how the stand your ground law works. You start some shit with a dude, goad him to throw a punch, then you can legally murder him in cold blood. My money would be on the jury acquitting. In states that have it, you can hunt people for sport as long as you stick to this simple formula. Enjoy.
Oh no! There is no default value. It's in the tiny print in the paperwork you must sign when you buy the car. The ONLY value is accept. You can not-accept or you can buy the car. Those are your choices.
You can just iterate through a list and pop elements off with car and get the rest of the list back with cdr. So you can put an arbitrary structure in a list and retrieve it later. If you use mapcar, your lambda will examine all the elements in the top level of the list at some point. You still have to know approximately what structure the data in the list has -- you decide that in advance. So if you wanted a list of vehicles of... some sort, and each vehicle would have all the names of the passengers of that vehicle, then you could use mapcar to iterate through the list of lists and then use a mapcar on each list your lambda sees in order to print the names of the passengers.
Of course, then you start wanting to do things like add the type of vehicle as something you print out, so you need to add that to your vehicle. Maybe you want to have your type as a top level element of each vehicle as the passengers are now, and then make the passengers a contained list that you can break out with (car (cdr vehicle)) and then mapcar over. That's more-or-less how simplistic lisp object systems would build objects.
The methods vary depending on what type of lisp you speak. You may notice that I have an emacs accent. Seems like that's the easiest lisp to get into.
I did a static-compiled hello world program a while back and found that it was only a few kilobytes, which is still a lot but way less than I expected. A C function I wrote to test an assembly language function I also wrote recently came it at about 7000 bytes. That's better...
There have been several occasions where I've seen a team "solve" a problem by throwing another couple gigabytes at a Java VM and add a task to reboot the system every couple of days. I've lost count of the times where simply optimizing SQL I was looking at (Sometimes by rewriting it, sometimes by adding an index) has resulted in hour-long tasks suddenly completing in a minute or two. There's plenty of room to get more performance out of existing hardware, that's for sure!
And that'll work until some massive content carrier builds out their own damn network and makes it significantly cheaper for their own customers to access their content than everyone else. Guess who's doing that right now.... Google. They have their fingers in all the right pies to start eviscerating the current network providers, and everyone's going to be all stunned when that's what starts happening.
Hmm. I copyright my resume to prevent dumbass recruiters from scraping it off the internet and submitting it to companies. So far that seems to be working pretty well (I haven't had to threaten to sue anyone yet.) It makes a difference because companies will typically not consider a direct application if they've already seen the same resume from a recruiter. Having the copyright notice puts recruiters on notice that I will sue the bejsus out of them (at the salary under consideration times the number of years on average I stay with a company times triple damages for intentional copyright infringement.) I think I'd have a pretty good chance of winning that, too.
I think some tweaks could be made to the legal code without discarding it completely. You could set it back to around the original term -- 10-20 years of a legal monopoly on the work in return for it being released into the public domain at the end of that time would be fine. I'd also set it up so that if you wanted to be eligible for any additional damages for infringement, you'd be required to register a DRM-free version with the Library of Congress, which will be released at the end of the copyright term. And under no circumstances could copyright ever be used to prohibit you from using hardware you purchased and own for whatever purposes you wanted to put it to. Under my regime.
Since politicians like money and the current copyright holders will deliver large briefcases of cash to them to prevent their little racket from being up-ended I really doubt this is much more than a dog-and-pony show before the back-room fuck-and-suck starts between the politicians and the political donors. By the time they get done I'm sure they'll have dismantled anything contributed by The People.
Mastery in Lisp, Perl, C++ and Java comes from understanding the data, how it works and flows in the system. Understand C++ pass-by rules (pass-by copy, reference and pointer) and how you manage object lifetimes and you are well on the road to mastery. Understand the pass-by rules in perl (how to create a reference and when to use one of the magic characters to reference a memory location) and you'll be further along in its mastery than I am. Understand how to build and iterate a list in Lisp and realize that code is just another list and you will be well on your way to enlightenment. You don't attain mastery in Lisp, you attain enlightenment. Once you become an enlightened Lisp programmer, all your other programming becomes substantially more enlightened as well. More on that in a moment. Understand pass-by rules in Java (everything's a reference except for those things which aren't,) and how you write an entry point to a program and you'll be well on your way in Java. And I don't mean understand as in "Yeah, that thing's a reference," but to actually know what that means and know how you can leverage it being a reference to your advantage. When you can take the reference from my hand and realize it points to the same object, then you will truly be a master.
I have a lisp textbook from the 70's. I believe the latest copyright date in there is 1978. In this textbook the author talks about block world (If you google on "MIT lisp block world" you can find some information about the project.) One of the things he does is builds a English parser that can take simple commands and perform a task in the world. You could also query the system "Why did you... (perform some action)". How he accomplishes this is he creates a series of task mementos which he builds in a tree and then executes. Now this was years before the design patterns craze, and he doesn't call them mementos, but that's what they are. In 1978. I got this textbook as part of a week-long introduction to Lisp. I didn't understand it (or become enlightened) at the time. That took a good while longer. Every so often I go through a phase where I like LISP and want to do something with it. This usually lasts right up until I realize I'll have to write my own libraries for EVERYTHING, then I lose interest and wander off.
THEY didn't blow it up! It blew ITSELF up! No bastards here!
Hmm... nothing we can do about it... go back to hiding our heads in the sand. On the plus side if I happen to be outside and it blows, it should be a pretty amazing sight for a minute or two before the shockwave arrives.
Dwarf fortress world generator is pretty nifty. You can go into legends and see the history of every creature ever created in the world from birth to death. Some of them don't die, and you'll have some ancient vampire show up in your fortress. Then he has an "accident" involving lava. Many fun things in Dwarf Fortress involve lava in some way. It doesn't take much to tell a story. You just need to add Imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
Weren't OLEDs supposed to deliver a lot of that same stuff a few years ago? What ever happened with that?
BEGIN NERD VOICE I've done stochastic analyses of your responses to questionnaires and exhaustively compared your responses to other women on this site, and I calculate there is an 45.2% you might like me. You're the highest score yet! END NERD VOICE
Really, don't be that guy.
OOOH Baby! I'm SO hot right now!
Hey, you never know who you might find out there! Maybe there's even a girl who likes dubstep!
A mechanic must know his way around a car to know how to repair it, and I must know my way around the code base if I am to diagnose problems. I can't just focus on the broken parts of it, or changes I make will likely introduce side effects. On most of my projects I didn't even have a requirements document, just a big pile of usually-poorly-written code. Each program is a unique individual machine, as if every single car were built dramatically differently. How much harder would it be for a mechanic if they had to go hunting for the spark plugs before they could even get started?
It is still a method of communication, though. You can often tell a lot about the programmer and his state of mind at the time by reading his code. It's very easy to tell when they were confused about what they were trying to accomplish, how comfortable they were with the language they were using and whether or not they were in a hurry.
Early on in my career, I started with the assumption that the original programmer knew what he was doing. The more code I read, the more I realized that this is almost never the case. From my observations, it takes about a year for someone to come up to speed with a project, the business process for the company they're working at, and any code base that was already there. Longer if the company's business processes suck. Until then they're mildly to severely confused, and this is reflected in their code. Since a lot of programmers don't hang around at one company for much longer than that, most of the code that I've run across has been crap. The first inclination might be to rewrite it, but as you're starting on a new project you're also mildly to severely confused, so it's best just to study the crap closely and make minor improvements as the opportunities arise. A crap in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or something. Most of the time. I've run across a couple of what had to have been bottom-ten-percent programmers whose crap did end up requiring full rewrites. Coming into a C project where the programmer didn't realize strings are null terminated is a huge warning. C++ or Java code where everything inherits from everything else is also a warning.
That would explain why I got a dildo, two pounds of Kona coffee, a Mickey Mouse Ears hat and the third season of My Little Pony in the mail last week...
I'm sure they'll bring the same level of skill and professionalism to this task as they do all their other contracts!
Aaaaaaand WHOOOOSH! :-P
That's Ok! I don't see any need for job-killing regulations for the energy industry in Washington! If anything they need LESS regulation, or someone will outsource all those gas jobs to China! Congress doesn't want to kill jobs do they?
I don't care for GTK or QT. I kind of wish the boost guys would write a widget toolkit so I don't have to do that myself, when I finally get to that item on my to-do list (It's sitting down around 4 or 5 on the list right now, so it'll be a while.)
If you have a 3D printer that can print with clay, you could use Adobe to design, print and build your adobe house!
There's gotta be a ton of hot robo-porn up there already! Let's go, I want to see some bare circuits!
"Dear Sir,
That's retarded, and you're retarded for saying it.
Respectfully,
your name."
That's how the stand your ground law works. You start some shit with a dude, goad him to throw a punch, then you can legally murder him in cold blood. My money would be on the jury acquitting. In states that have it, you can hunt people for sport as long as you stick to this simple formula. Enjoy.
But they'll be SO much better! I'm sure they'll bring the same level of professionalism and quality contractors that they did to YOUR project!
Oh no! There is no default value. It's in the tiny print in the paperwork you must sign when you buy the car. The ONLY value is accept. You can not-accept or you can buy the car. Those are your choices.
(setq vehicle-list '((bob) (fred alice) (earl)))
(def print-vehicle (arg)
(print "passengers in vehicle: ")
(mapcar (lambda (passenger) (print passenger " ")) arg)
(print "\n")
)
(mapcar (lambda (vehicle) (print-vehicle vehicle)) vehicle-list)
Of course, then you start wanting to do things like add the type of vehicle as something you print out, so you need to add that to your vehicle. Maybe you want to have your type as a top level element of each vehicle as the passengers are now, and then make the passengers a contained list that you can break out with (car (cdr vehicle)) and then mapcar over. That's more-or-less how simplistic lisp object systems would build objects.
The methods vary depending on what type of lisp you speak. You may notice that I have an emacs accent. Seems like that's the easiest lisp to get into.
There have been several occasions where I've seen a team "solve" a problem by throwing another couple gigabytes at a Java VM and add a task to reboot the system every couple of days. I've lost count of the times where simply optimizing SQL I was looking at (Sometimes by rewriting it, sometimes by adding an index) has resulted in hour-long tasks suddenly completing in a minute or two. There's plenty of room to get more performance out of existing hardware, that's for sure!
"This little piggy went 'waah waah waah' all the way home #firedanotherone"?
And that'll work until some massive content carrier builds out their own damn network and makes it significantly cheaper for their own customers to access their content than everyone else. Guess who's doing that right now.... Google. They have their fingers in all the right pies to start eviscerating the current network providers, and everyone's going to be all stunned when that's what starts happening.
I think some tweaks could be made to the legal code without discarding it completely. You could set it back to around the original term -- 10-20 years of a legal monopoly on the work in return for it being released into the public domain at the end of that time would be fine. I'd also set it up so that if you wanted to be eligible for any additional damages for infringement, you'd be required to register a DRM-free version with the Library of Congress, which will be released at the end of the copyright term. And under no circumstances could copyright ever be used to prohibit you from using hardware you purchased and own for whatever purposes you wanted to put it to. Under my regime.
Since politicians like money and the current copyright holders will deliver large briefcases of cash to them to prevent their little racket from being up-ended I really doubt this is much more than a dog-and-pony show before the back-room fuck-and-suck starts between the politicians and the political donors. By the time they get done I'm sure they'll have dismantled anything contributed by The People.
I have a lisp textbook from the 70's. I believe the latest copyright date in there is 1978. In this textbook the author talks about block world (If you google on "MIT lisp block world" you can find some information about the project.) One of the things he does is builds a English parser that can take simple commands and perform a task in the world. You could also query the system "Why did you... (perform some action)". How he accomplishes this is he creates a series of task mementos which he builds in a tree and then executes. Now this was years before the design patterns craze, and he doesn't call them mementos, but that's what they are. In 1978. I got this textbook as part of a week-long introduction to Lisp. I didn't understand it (or become enlightened) at the time. That took a good while longer. Every so often I go through a phase where I like LISP and want to do something with it. This usually lasts right up until I realize I'll have to write my own libraries for EVERYTHING, then I lose interest and wander off.
Hmm... nothing we can do about it... go back to hiding our heads in the sand. On the plus side if I happen to be outside and it blows, it should be a pretty amazing sight for a minute or two before the shockwave arrives.
I remember as a child putting nitrogen outside to watch it turn into a liquid. Oh, what fun we had!
Dwarf fortress world generator is pretty nifty. You can go into legends and see the history of every creature ever created in the world from birth to death. Some of them don't die, and you'll have some ancient vampire show up in your fortress. Then he has an "accident" involving lava. Many fun things in Dwarf Fortress involve lava in some way. It doesn't take much to tell a story. You just need to add Imagination.
There goes my plan to take over Hawaii with a race of mutated pineapple people! Well, played, Hawaii. Well played.