Someday, I am going to stop printing out solutions for any of the CO programs I write, the print out will be fairly simple:
“Solution Verified”
or
“Failed to Verify Solution”
I like results, I like the creative process, but results make me happy. The way there, fun as it is, is often filled with anxiety. It is a lot like being in a mode of transportation for a while.
Ze Panda
I need to write a relatively long paper somehow related to my semester long study of dystopian fiction. So far we are down to dystopian fiction 1, me none. I really like the stories, I’d be happy to write one if that is what was required, but writing about the meta-theory of dystopian fiction has me in a fix, what with dystopias being varied and hard to define. I could swear we began each of those discussion sections with an argument on whether something was a true dystopia or not. Either ways, I have productively watched Hot Fuzz today, and while this may not help my academic goals in any way, it was a nice movie.
This blog entry reminds me of a question we had in a CS166 homework, and debates about how much can you trust any single piece of binary code. But then again, seeing as the blog seems to mention Reflections on Trusting Trust, one wonders if the lessons of that particular paper are lost on the entry. Sure, having source might help, but you better be writing your own compilers, for which you better also be writing your own bootstrap compilers. Oh for the days when von Neumann was unhappy about Gillies creating an assembler (no I am not advocating a return to those days, I would not want to be employed as an assembler, and I am still a student).
Ze Panda
It is all over the web, there are about 50 mentions of this on Reddit, there might be another bubble out there, except it doesn’t feel like one. See back when there was that other bubble, I lived in another country, was there for more than a month a year, and things looked very different. It is easier to pick up somethings when you live in a country when everyone wants to be a part of the bubble, as fast as possible, without care. I was talking to Itay (who has finally posted another blog post) about this earlier today (also about lots of other things, but those are unimportant), and he was pointing out all these subtle clues in the CS department that I am missing. Clues about all the people who want to start startups, clue about all the startups, clues about how the holly grail of achieving anything currently is being bought out. Maybe there is a bubble going on, maybe it is a nicer bubble, what with people paying for things in cash and not stocks, but it certainly does not look the same on the other side. There are no crazy NIIT posters about bullshit that doesn’t help anything, there are no crazy people getting crazy certificates. There are the standard crazy sums of money all the people are being paid to work, but those numbers sound pretty much at par with what I heard last year. Bubbles look different from different places.
I am TAing 167/9 next semester, along with being a lot of work, this should be fairly fun. Woohoo.
Ze Panda
26 seconds of mistakes, many hours of pain. At least this thing ends tomorrow (or so I hope), more time to sell to the other taskmasters, and analyze symmetries and sampling on how to place cities.
The Flaming Lips are on campus on Saturday, all a part of the crazy weekend that is Spring Weekend. Another concert I shall actually be attending, this is all very surreal, I didn’t attend concerts a few years ago.
Sleep looks good for now.
Ze Panda
I remember the days, not long gone, when programs I wrote did not run for hours, or minutes, not even for seconds. And here I stand, celebrating the ability to finish a relatively simple instance, of a relatively well studied problem in 26 seconds. Admittedly this is exciting since it gets this to a point where running tests on this program is not a pain, but where oh where have all the fast programs gone. And will they ever return.
Ze Panda
Those are the two places I will be sleeping once the 24th of May rolls by. Of course a lot of this depends on getting work done until then. Bah work.
Ze Panda
Larry Wall was here for a CS DUG thing earlier today. Most of his talk was focused on Perl 6, what makes it different from Perl 5, and to a lesser extent, why Perl looks anything like it does. Now, as a minor warning, before I anger anyone with something stupid, I don’t really use Perl, and while I can write really really basic perl scripts, and parse scripts already written, especially with the help of the tubes, I don’t understand that much about it. In a line, Perl 6 looked exciting, especially with all that was done with closures, how close it looked to haskell, lazy lists, and other such fun things, and while I really want to try and learn it once it makes it to a semi-stable release, or perhaps earlier, maybe over the summer, I still find a whole lot of Perl code ambiguous. Or to put this more simply, much like my, now very much reduced, dislike for Python, my dislike for Perl originates from not knowing how to code well using Perl. I don’t really understand regex to any great degree, I can read man pages, experiment, and produce fairly usable regex, but I never got around to learning it (perhaps I should have, but as things go, this never made it to the top of my priority queue). That being said, there’s a fair number of strange things which have been bugging me about Python (tail-recursion, the memory model, strange things which go bump at night), and the talk today seemed to state that this a lot of these things seem to have been done right for Perl 6, so at some point in time, I will probably end up trying to learn this, and then not use it forever, and then not be sure about it when I next need to use it.
C sucks at parameterizing types in a library. It makes me unhappy.
Ze Panda