March 25, 2008
Epic Lolz
Over Easter we insulated our roof. It was quite easy job, but I'm not going to write much about it as this post is entirely an excuse to show this picture:
No animal abuse was involved: he climbed up the ladder into the loft and stayed there until we moved him to put down more insulation.
Posted by Noel at 11:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 04, 2008
Word of the Milieu: Flattline
Flattline |flatˌlīn| (verb).
To post a difficult problem, often syntax related, to the plt-scheme mailing list in the hope that wiser folk will solve it. For example: “I've gone nowhere on this macro in two weeks. I'm going to Flattline it.”
The term depends on an ambiguity between the medical term flatline, indicating a patient is dead (as in “he flatlined before we reached the hospital”), and the suggestion that one has a hotline to Matthew Flatt, the motive force behind the PLT Scheme implementation. Uses of the word that exclude either meaning are incorrect, so one should not say, for example, “I'm going to put a call on the Flattline”. One should also not expect Matthew Flatt to solve all of one's problems.
Posted by Noel at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 07, 2007
ICFP 2007 In Fashion
Naturally no meeting of computer scientists would be complete without some mention of fashion. The satorial pinnacle of ICFP was easily claimed by Adrien Pierard who was rocking a bowler hat and pipe combo. I was pleased to find his hat was indeed sourced from James Lock & Co. I saw several Threadless t-shirts: The Communist Party, Dark Side of the Garden, and Well This Just Really Sucks. (Follow the first link to Threadless, buy a T-Shirt, and I get $3.00 towards a tee. Follow the other links and I get nadda. Threadless is a great example of a business model that is only possible over the Internet. If you're not familiar with them, check 'em out.)
Computer scientists pay almost as much attention to their computers as they do to their clothing. From an informal survey of the conference Apple is continuing its rise in popularity amongst the geek crowd — the ratio of Mac to PCs was about 1:1. Of course a Mac is about as close to a fashion statement as a computer can come, so it isn't surprising to see this adoption.
Posted by Noel at 02:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 23, 2007
As recently seen on the Untyped Subversion commit list...
I personally watch commits go by for several projects, and it is instructive in many ways to read the commit messages and code. It is a way to learn new things about the software process as well as the implementation of solutions in code. That said, very occasionally, you actually get a giggle from the process...
Today was one of those times.
Date: 2007-08-22 12:22:06 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007) New Revision: 1398 Log: [DJG] IDCheck trunk: Tests tests tests.
Date: 2007-08-22 12:41:46 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007) New Revision: 1399 Log: [DJG+NHW] IDCheck trunk: Testing all the way.
Date: 2007-08-22 12:49:21 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007) New Revision: 1400 Log: [NHW+DJG] IDCheck trunk: Oh what fun it is to ride on a one horse testing sleigh.
The song ends there, I'm afraid... but it does seem like Dave and Noel are a bit cracked out today. Perhaps they should be out playing frisbee instead of coding this fine Thursday. As I'm not in the same timezone, it's difficult to say what's going on over there...
Posted by jadudm at 12:44 PM | Comments (1)
June 08, 2007
What The World Eats
What the World Eats is a moderately fascinating photo essay of the weekly food consumption of 16 families around the world. The choices and differences aren't that unexpected, but it is interesting none-the-less. Here are some thoughts:
- Those starving Africans really are. Of course I knew that intellectually, but didn't feel it till I saw what they ate.
- The Bhutan family's food looks tasty. All those chillies and ginger. Yum. Mexico and Cairo also look good.
- I'm surprised the Sicilians have such anaemic looking tomatoes. Perhaps the photo was taken in winter.
- The backgrounds are fascinating. Almost the best thing in the pictures. Favourites are Bhutan, Mongolia, and Ecuador. What's with the Western families that look like they haven't redecorated since the 1970s? I can just feel the desert looking at the Kuwait house.
For comparison the two of us spend around £40 on food a week.
Posted by Noel at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2007
Behold the Abominable Cow-thing!
The empirical hammer of science smashes the myth of the yeti, or at least suggests it is more closely related to ungulates than man.
Posted by Noel at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2007
Instant Business Model
Mark Hedlund writes:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.
So true, but note that it doesn't really matter if it has already been implemented. AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Jabber are successfull in the same market as ICQ (and don't forget IRC, still in use by many hackers). Facebook and MySpace are something like wall. The real lesson, I think, is that the basics of human nature are pretty constant. A lot of the examples above are about giving people a way to talk. It's not a novel idea, it's just the manifestation that changes.
Posted by Noel at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2007
Those Who Can Program...
The Shapes Project aims to make enough 2-D shapes that every one of the estimated 9.1 billion people alive in 2050 will be able to have one of their own. Not only that, but each shape will be unique. The uniqueness is guaranteed by a system any computer scientist would understand: define a grammar of shapes and then construct unique samples from the grammar. Here's how the artist's web page puts it:
Contrary to some errors made in certain press articles, McCollum's Shapes are not "generated" in a computer with an invented or scripted "program." Every shape is laboriously created by the artist using Adobe Illustrator — a common, everyday graphics program — by drawing little parts, cutting and pasting the parts into bigger parts, then cutting and pasting those parts into even bigger parts, and so on, and keeping track according to a written protocol, to insure against repetitions. The first exhibition of the project, in 2006, took around two years to complete.
I find his insistence that each shape is constructed by hand very amusing. Those who can program do, and those who can't spend 2 years monkeying around in Illustrator.
Posted by Noel at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2007
Functional Graphics = Fun!
Ezra blogs on something I've often thought. Wouldn't it be cool if Processing had a better programming model. For better you should read: functional reactive. Imagine how easy it would be to code great animations. As he notes, it would make a good Master's project, but it probably wouldn't work as a PhD as I don't think there is enough originality.
He closes with:
f I were just starting now on my PhD, I'd find a way to include this in my work, or I'd put off the PhD until I could get this done! Tinkering with graphics demos and slapping them up on the web is the kind of hacking I'd really like to be doing. As it is, I'll have to leave it to some young whippersnapper, alas.
You mean a PhD isn't about pursuing your own side projects? Why didn't some one tell me! 'sides Ezra, your PhD is really cool already. I don't think it would be fair if you got all the toys.
Posted by Noel at 01:11 PM | Comments (1)
October 26, 2006
Paperback iPod
£9.95 RRP for an iPod? Maybe.
The iPod has also benefited from a more crowded world. The academic literature surrounding personal stereos frequently references the 19th-century German sociologist Georg Simmel, who was one of the first to detail the acute horror of the urban commute:
Before the development of buses, railroads and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.Europeans responded to the new reality by keeping silent and expecting the courtesy of not being spoken to. That strategy wasn't always successful. They also started reading. Books, in effect, were the original iPods.
Has the iPod changed anything? - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine
Acute horror? That's a bit strong. Otherwise an interesting point. Books are certainly cheaper, and they come in a wider range of colours.
Posted by Noel at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2006
Geektool, 'remind', and a little bit of Scheme
Geektool takes shell commands and lets OSX geeks overlay their output on the desktop. (It does more than that, actually... it's really quite awesome.)
Remind is a powerful, command-line based reminder app and calendar generator (helpful wiki).
I've been pushing on Snooze lately, our imminently-releasable persistence layer for PLT Scheme. I thought to myself: "How quickly could I knock up a GTD DB using Snooze?"
Turns out, not more than an hour or so to get something rolling. Now, I have a simple command-line GTD interface that uses Snooze for persistence, remind for rendering of content, and Geektool for rendering things to my desktop.
The lower-left portion of my desktop has a six week calendar overlaid, and above is an eight week calendar with a condensed list of the same information.
I'll publish the GTD interface when I've had a chance to work with it for a while. For now, I suspect it will evolve as I decide how I like working with it best.
Posted by jadudm at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)
July 16, 2006
Doctor Jadud is in the house!
Congratulations to Dr Matt Jadud who passed his viva on Friday!
Posted by Noel at 03:52 PM | Comments (0)
July 05, 2006
The Duel: Part II
It was a hell of a day. We managed to document most of Unlib -- much more work than we thought -- and made considerable progress on the content management part of our latest project. We also busted some phat riffs on Dave's synth. The result: (computer) science is the winner.
Posted by Noel at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)
The Duel: Part I
Today Dave and I are going head-to-head to see who can finish the most active tickets by the end of the day. On my plate:
- Release Unlib
- Release Snooze
- Release update to Instaweb
- And a few other things that are confidential
Dave's stuff is all confidential, so I can't list them here. Check back in 8 hours to see who wins the duel!
Posted by Noel at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2006
Binding! The beer of choice for Computer Science
David van Horn and I were wandering around Frankfurt after Dagstuhl when we came across this sign. It's beer, and it's also one of the major issues in programming language design. Clearly this is the drink of choice from discerning computer scientists!
Posted by Noel at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
Give us all your money!
Actually, don't give us all your money, give it to the British Heart Foundation instead!
The Davester and myself are entering the London to Brighton bike ride. Being a ride for charity we're collecting sponsors. You can sponsor me or Dave. If you have a blog please pass on the links so we can reach the maximum number of people.
This will be my first major ride since October, when I dislocated my fingers coming off my bike. I spent a bit of the weekend cleaning off the cobwebs, adjusting the brakes, and so on. A quick trip down to the city centre showed both the bike and the rider to still be running a bit rough, but time will solve this problem.
Posted by Noel at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
January 22, 2006
A Game A Week
At the Experimental Gameplay Project at CMU the participants were challenged to create a game about a particular theme every week. The results are impressive, but more interesting are the insights derived from observing the process. It's not about games. It's about using extreme resource constraints to force innovation. It's about accepting failure as a necessary part of creativity. It should be read by anyone who wants to turn a big idea into reality.
Posted by Noel at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2005
Population of the World
A cartogram of the world by population gives some perspective. This green and pleasant isle really is quite crowded. Canada, on the other hand, is somewhat devoid of human inhabitants.
Posted by Noel at 04:26 PM | Comments (1)
November 24, 2005
Frag!
From The Scheme Way is a link to Frag, a first-person shooter programmed in Haskell. Neat!
Posted by Noel at 10:57 AM | Comments (0)
The Rise of Intelligence
A recent study of human skulls covering a period of about 600 years shows the human skull has changed significantly. Facial features, particularly the lower jaw, have decreased markedly in size, and more intriguingly the size of the cranial vault has increased “by more than a centimetre” (presumably they mean a cubic centimetre). What does this mean? I don't think anyone knows, but I'd guess the increase in processed foods means less need for strong jaws, and the increased brain size might explain why IQ scores are increasing over time.
Update: The increase in IQ over time is known as the Flynn effect. There are some good links here. Cranial capacity is proportional to body size, as discussed here. I haven't been able to find the publications of the original study, so I can't tell if they controlled for increases in body size. If not, then the increase in cranial capacity is likely not significant, as people today are generally larger than in the Middle Ages.
Posted by Noel at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
Nokia's New Browser Breaks Nokia's New Browser
I've just read a post about Nokia's new web browser for mobile devices. It is based on WebKit, which is developed by Apple for its Safari browser and in turn is based on KDE's KHTML component. Now, in a piece of delicious irony, the page where Nokia tout their new browser crashes Safari! And Mozilla! And in fact every browser apart from IE 6. Oh dear.
Posted by Noel at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
Not-so-failsafe Computing
I went to withdraw some money from an ATM yesterday, but instead of the normal screen I was confronted by a Window NT 4.0 bootup screen. The machine seemed to have hung at that point, so for a laugh I pressed 4-5-6, thinking it was the closest key sequence to the famous Ctrl-Alt-Del. Imagine my surprise when the machine rebooted! It can tell you the ATM was a Pentium 3 running at 700MHz, with 128MB of RAM. This whole episode amazes me for so many reasons: that ATMs run Windows (do they ever get viruses? can I play Minesweeper if the network is slow?), that the software doesn't detect crashes and try to recover, and that they can be rebooted so simply. I'll never look at an ATM the same way again!
Posted by Noel at 05:26 PM | Comments (0)
July 22, 2005
The Moon
Google has added the moon to Google Maps! Make sure you zoom in to maximum size!
Posted by Noel at 06:34 AM | Comments (0)