February 2008
21 posts
Psychological Gang Bang of Hillary is Proof We... →
Really? You’re gonna use “Gang Bang” in this context?
Colorblindness, Innarticulate Reporters, and Race →
1 tag
The 5 stages of learning $stuff
Denial : “I don’t need to learn $stuff”
Anger: “This syntax sucks! “
Bargaining: “If only I knew how to do this using $stuff, I’d be done sooner”
Depression: “Learning this $stuff really sucks and I don’t think I’ll ever get it”
Acceptance: “I know $stuff now so I can put that on my CV”
I’m...
“ […] the Clintons’ worst nightmare — a very dynamic, talented...”
– BET Founder Johnson Defends His Recent Criticisms of Obama - washingtonpost.com
Add syphilis to Columbus' discoveries →
January 2008
44 posts
Simple [SQL] script to iterate through db objects →
I never met a bunch of tables I didn’t want to iterate through
“A talented undergraduate student could write something like this in a few months...”
– stiffx, on the release of Arc, the vaporware Paul Graham has been talking about for some years
The Associated Press: Poor Haitians Resort to... →
“There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic...”
– Black Americans’ love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy. - By Melissa Harris-Lacewell - Slate Magazine
“How it is that the editors and reporters of the nation’s leading newspaper -...”
– Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on the NY Times’ using “black” and “latino” as if they were mutually exclusive
Georgia names since 1990 →
There are 147 Georgia girls named Chanel, 31 named Cinnamon, 1,435 named Diamond … and just a half dozen boys named Bubba.
“What is driving a lot of programmers towards the ‘art form’ theory...”
– Paul W. Homer on the nonsensical notion of software as an art form
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
– Farmers’ Almanac, 1978
Commodity Grid Computing With Amazon S3 and EC2... →
2 tags
The tinyurl algorithm
TinyUrl takes long url’s and turns them into short ones. There are at least a dozen of clones sites just like it that essentially provide the same service. I’m surprised there’s not an open-source implementation.
Here’s an algorithm for storing long urls as short ones. We assume that our shortened url will have a maximum of 4 “digits” and
pick from an alphabet...
“[…] for many lower-level problems there’s The Right Answer (IEEE floating...”
– Low-level is easy
“Why is Python so easy to not learn, and what should I copy from it if I want my...”
– Teeth marks at the rear end - Proper Fixation
2 tags
Stop wasting your time on TeX
If you’re using TeX a lot like I did, you might want to read this:
Everyone has a favorite way to design their favorite symbol. For example, did you know that there is no “official” function for the absolute value of an element? Here’s the worst part: 50 different mathematicians will
have 50 different ways to define the absolute value bars. Some will think the bars...
VM's... What's the best? | Lambda the Ultimate →
What’s the best VM to write a compiler for? Right now, I would bet most of my money on the .NET CLR.
WatchMarketing to school age students is now a 2 billion dollar industry. The way corporate sponsors are stepping up to the plate, offering … all » promotions, sponsorships and even free curriculum there is no stopping the flow of advertising in covert forms.
“You can use PageRank to asses importance of countries in international trade,...”
– taw’s blog: PageRank - a new addition to your Data Processing Toolkit
“The twin role played by the skin – protection from excessive UV radiation and...”
– Skin colour map (indigenous people) - Maps and Graphics at UNEP/GRID-Arendal
[WorldCat.org] Search for books, music, videos,... →
Code with less noise →
Less noise -> less accidental complexity -> more meaning -> less maintenance cost.
WatchMoney As Debt
tumblry.py - A Python library for posting to your... →
“JOHN BOGLE: Its CEOs, well, the upper level of five or six top officers. And...”
– Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts of interview with John Bogle | PBS
“And it’s no secret that this lack of savings in our economy — just about...”
– Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts of interview with John Bogle | PBS
The Entrepreneurship Myth →
“Somewhere there is something that you find interesting, wonderful and beautiful....”
– Shawn Blanc » Why We Began Blogging
3 tags
Dynamic attribute names: an application
Here’s a neat application of the dynamic “attribute name extraction”
hack I posted earlier. I’m writing an program that posts stuff on
tumblr in python, using their API. Here’s how it should work ideally:
>>T=Tumblr('email@domain.com','password')
>>T.post(Quote('the quote','the source'))
>>T.post(Regular('a title'))
Python doesn’t...
“Rails improperly pluralizes the word “penis”. From the New Oxford...”
– Bug #10919: incorrect pluralization of penis
“They’re called design patterns, not design templates. Designing to them is...”
– Giles Bowkett: Let The System Design Itself
“And you over there, the one who just wants a job as a programmer, the one who...”
– Ragnawald, giving us all that warm, fuzzy feeling we so crave
Stevey's Blog Rants: Emergency Elisp →
An (e) lisp primer.
“I think it’s important in this day and age of polyglot programming to...”
– Meme Agora: C# MVP & Polyglot Programmer
“Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate Personhood is...”
– Corporate Personhood
“Talk of “moral sentiments” may seem surprising from a man whose...”
– Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism - WSJ.com
Extracting attribute names dynamically in Python
Here’s the problem: you have a Quote class that has 2 attributes, but you don’t know what they are. How do you find what they are? Let’s assume that the variable q is an instance of the Quote class:
In [5]: attrs = [ method for method in dir(q) \
if not callable(getattr(q,method)) \
and '__' not in method ]
In [6]:...
Real World Haskell →
Looks like a useful Haskell tutorial
1 tag
Managed runtimes are good for obscure languages
The most common complaint of newbies looking to learn languages like Scheme or Haskell is the fact that the libraries just aren’t there. Implementing these languages in mananged runtimes like the JVM and the .NET platform take care of this problem instantly. Currently, this seems easier to do on .NET and you can see people are frantically implementing their language of choice here:...
Much ado about nothing (new)
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2008/01/21/what-good-is-a-cs-degree/ http://www.ekinoderm.com/wordpress/?p=27 http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/no-disrespect.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/01/no-disrespect.html Bloggers react to a reactionary article that seems to find a correlation between Java and dumb programmers. Most seem to realize for the first time in their life that some...
“For all my wide range of skills, I’ve found I have been valued less in the...”
– http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=412412&cid=21974390