Archive for July, 2006
July 28, 2006 at 12:54 pm · Filed under General
I don’t know why it took me years to figure this out… 
I just never tried this:
a = [1,2,3]
d = { 1 : ‘one’, 2 : ‘two’, 3 : ‘three’ }
map(d.get, a)
[’one’, ‘two’, ‘three’]
Shouldn’t this be in the python tutorial in the Functional Programming Tools? I’m a big fan of data driven vs. pure code manipulation of basic data structures.
I “get it” now.
This leads me to a better understanding of Lisp as well. The Lisp people have a love for their neat little functions that seem to do solve all problems via lists. This is the same thing that the Smalltalk people feel about their amazing Collections library.
Now, I know I haven’t blogged in a while and nobody cares about that, but I’m holding back the temptation to talk about this talk with Eric at Jack’s about Haskell.
July 12, 2006 at 9:04 pm · Filed under General
For the last 5 minutes, I was thinking about personal submarines. How much would one of those cost? Who makes them? What is the latest technology in the personal submarine business?
So, after a little searching, here is what I find.
Here is a story about some guys that are testing their little sub in the Puget Sound up in Seattle. This is fairly recent. Their company is called u.s. submarines or http://www.ussubs.com, and the site is nice. It definitely has the right feeling for a submarine web site (kind of dark). The company sells all kinds of subs, and the used ones can probably be had for under $2 million. Check out their luxury sub, the Phoenix 1000… it even has a docking mini-sub! This is so 007! I’m sure they can build a trap door that goes to a shark chamber They also sell underwater habitats. Neat stuff.
Moving on, I find a chinese sub manufacturer’s web site here. Definitely check that out.
Closer to home, there is a venture funded ‘jet sub’ over here. There is a story on the web about it being tested in the SF Bay for 10 mins.
Finally, there is psubs.org, an organization for “the discussion, design, construction, certification, and ownership of personal submersibles.”
July 12, 2006 at 8:28 pm · Filed under General
While searching for a submarine to buy on eBay Motors, I click on http://motors.search.ebay.com/submarineeBay-MotorsW0QQcatrefZC2QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQsacatZ6000
and get the much quainter message:
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
It’s sporradic, but wow… what luck
July 12, 2006 at 8:15 pm · Filed under General
Attempting to go to http://www.bananarepublic.com/ got me this:
Virtual Host or Web Application Not Found
The web group default_host/ has not been defined
IBM WebSphere Application Server
Yep, someone is going to get fired.
Or maybe this is just signs of a mini 1999 era?
Why am I even visiting that site anyways?
July 10, 2006 at 9:32 pm · Filed under General
Today I was thinking about something about programs. In most languages, you have to literally declare stuff before it can be used. This is true in C, Python, and a bunch of other languages. The annoying example that I’m thinking of is the ‘they are in the same file’ case. For example, in Python, if you try to call functions defined after the if name == “main“, it will fail. It will state that the function is not defined.
This is so damn annoying. What is annoying is that the compiler is going to discover all the functions and methods when it compiled the module. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity here. Yet, this little stuff forces the programmer to organize their software in a certain way. I have to have my ‘main’ at the bottom. In C, it also forces me to define my function prototypes. This is ok for external functions… but why do I have to do this for internal static functions?? Extra work.
When I have to look at someones code, I have to search for the bottom, and then scan around. It just seems unnecessary and inverted. If the main is the ‘top’, shouldn’t it be at the top for ‘top-down-design’?
C is rife with the same requirements. I’ll bet there is a story from 1972 where one of the designers said, ‘eh, lets just do it this way… we’ll fix it later’. How many hours of time has this consumed of programmers?
Ok, so what if… what if programs had their ‘main’ at the top? It seems trivial, but I’ll bet if you add all these little ‘decisions’ up you will understand why certain ‘new’ ways of doing things will make your existing code start to feel like cobol. (Example: semicolons at the end of the line :-). Has anyone else noticed the rise of languages that put significance in the EOL? It matters. )
July 7, 2006 at 3:21 am · Filed under General
Why didn’t I dig into this sooner? All the other types are much more complicated. This one is the easiest and the most powerful.
July 2, 2006 at 12:26 am · Filed under General, Windows
When you want to get rid of a lot of startup crap that gets installed on a computer,
just do:
start msconfig
It gives you a gui to change all the settings.
