ThePanda

This is my little rant about licensing, it is somewhat work related, but as before I am not breaking any rules here.

People of this world love GPL, much like the people of this world like RMS. GPL is good for somethings, there was a time when I actually used to put GPL notices on top of some of the code I wrote, however GPL also makes software hard to use in certain circumstances, and that sucks. If software’s about freedom, freedom should be afforded to everyone, even those who work for corporations which have traditionally not maintained too many free software practices. When RMS and GNU talk about freedom, they also, admirably, force everyone using their software to respect the same sort of freedom, something which is good, but well the idea of restricting freedom to people who also uphold those same freedoms seems a little weird in this context/it prevents me from excersising such freedom in this context.

This shall not happen again, copylefting has issues with a lot of things I had never thought about. I like the ability to use somethings without caring about licensing, especially if they are freely available. It would make me happy if people started using the New BSD, the MIT/X, LGPL, or any of the other freer licenses. I really don’t care that much about the politics and such behind licensing and open source software distribution, but seeing as GPL 3 is going to be more restrictive than the current version is, having people change to something less restrictive is in by best interest, for now, and for later.

Ze Panda

This is going to be a slowly growing entry for my plans for next semester, and now, sort of, because I have all these plans, much like I do every year, and they won’t be implemented, and unlike last year, when at least I went back to school not tired, this time I am going to be tired when I get back, and I need to keep this a little organized.

1. Decide on meal-plan: I do not eat 20 meals a week, I cannot eat 20 meals a week if I keep up my current schedule, and having 20 meals a week is just an excuse to buy more stuff at the Gate or Jo’s, which isn’t entirely a bad thing, but bah. However taking anything below 20 meals, which is not no meals, is financially stupid, and taking no meals is stupid because I won’t cook after classes, especially not when I am tired and can do other stuff. I could make sandwiches and eat those, but that isn’t healthy. Ergo must decide on mealplan.

2. Figure out CS051 homeworks, this needs to be done soon, so I am not doing this as I am attempting to do other thing, even though that is exactly what will happen.

3. Find a research topic, perhaps e-mail Anna again, or go talk to Silverman or Hoffstein though this would be bad, since I’d need to explain to Hoffstein why I am no longer a math concentrator. Hmm, need to solve this.

4. Must do something on birthday, or have work to do, past experience has shown that both clearing schedule and having nothing to do is a recipe for disaster. Must make sure shit does not hit fan on birthday, is unplesant for that to happen.

5. Actually survive all the classes

6. Get a computer before leaving New York, deck it out with stuff I will use, perhaps convert this computer to use one of the OSes everyone seems to rave about, perhaps Linux or one of the BSDs, or (gasp) OpenSolaris, if Polaris or anything similar becomes runnable by then. I could then potentially have 4 different OSes running across 2 different places, nice.

7. Other things which I should list later.
Ze Panda

PS: Missing comments and such aren’t entirely my computer, I did a DNS flip somewhere in the middle because of shifting to a new set of servers, and the shift somehow skipped my last entry

This isn’t officially breaking any of the things on the confidentiality agreement I signed for working at Bloomberg, LP, mostly because this is about things I have discovered which are fairly general, not really anything which is somehow proprietary to Bloomberg, LP. Some of these might have been learnt as a course of my work at Bloomberg, LP, but none of them are specific to the Bloomberg. This is going to be a list, so I don’t have to go through long pragraphs.

1. The one of the more obvious ones which has been pointed out has been my lack of C++ skills. Well see, the way this worked out was, that when I tried learning C++, what existed of the language wasn’t very fun, things like templates weren’t commonly used, and namespaces were the subject of a future DDJ article. I have to admit that I have used a lot of weird flavors of C, but thanks to programming stuff on Linux, and other stuff, I am pretty used to using C on gcc, which is fairly similar to using ANSI C, and once you try to learn enough to pretend you are a language nazi, you sort of learn enough. C++ on the other hand never really appealed to me, it was much like Java, except not really, and I have never completely understood people’s love for object oriented programming. It is definitely useful for somethings, but it just doesn’t seem to represent much of a model of computation, and I am not that big a fan of it. That being said, there are definite advantages to it, for one all that the STL offers is sort of useful, you really don’t want to code all of it up when working on small projects. I am still iffy about using C++, I like C, I like Scheme, and I am not that sure about my relation with Object Oriented languages. Sure I can code in Java, and I am pretty good at it, it is merely a problem with finding that the ideas which it affords are used more often than they are often needed. That being said, I have warmed up to it over the last two years, and I would definitely like to see some of what the new features in C++ offer.
2. sed and regular expression, sure I have read about them, I can read some and even write them down, they however are not things I am used to, and it takes me too long to use them. sed however seems useful, and well regular expressions are always sort of useful.
3. C debugging tools, I am not really used to them, I can use gdb, there’s only so much I can do with it though.
4. More vi, I have definitely warned up to gvim, and I remember more of the keyboard shortcuts than I ever have before, and this is useful. It is definitely better than emacs, though I’d still settle for a more modern editor which can do everything vi can.
5. This is not a learning thing, but of late my feelings on the difference between pthreads, and Java threads is something to the order of Java threads being a lot more process like, they are lightweight, allow for easy communication, but aren’t exactly the same thing. pthreads on the other hand are a lot more thread like, the programming model forces you to imagine them as two execution threads through the same code segment, and they have their own peculiarities which are cute.
6. Oh, this is historic, but back when I was still in school, if you did computers at school (it wasn’t computer science, the science was mostly non-existant), you needed to make these projects, which worked in certain ways, and needed to have certain things, graphics for instance, and you used these libraries including conio. Now the problem is outside of the Turbo line of things, and their derivatives (Boroland and such), you really didn’t see conio, and it was this strange library who’s functionality you never really saw anywhere else. In reality you shouldn’t need them, but there are these things which you could use them for, and then you find out about curses (something like an ncurses precursor) and realize that conio was nothing more than a less powerful curses. Darn.

Hmm that’s all I can remember, I will add to this slowly, perhaps.

Ze Panda

PS: I am warming up to some of Joel’s ramblings, I still don’t agree with a lot of his comments, but some of them are definitely true, and are somewhat fun.
PPS: Seeing as Fog Creek no longer accepts internship applications from internationals, I am not that worried about this going online.
PPPS: I wish Drunken Batman came back, and published something new.