Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil,” say Hoare and Knuth. I have determined that I suffer from a slightly different but related malady: premature cleverization. At the start of a programming task, before I’ve written any real code, I get some wacky idea like “I could do this all with binary XORs” or…
I got to see Steve Wozniak speak at Columbia University last night, promoting his new book iWoz. Strongest impression: The man has an incredible amount of energy. He talked in a strong voice at high speed for nearly an hour before rushing off to tape a spot on The Colbert Report. Most interesting fact: he…
Been too busy with work and class to post much, but here’s a link for all the IANALs out there: Project Posner. It’s an on-line database collecting the case opinions of Richard A. Posner, judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. This was the brainchild of law professor and former Posner clerk Tim Wu.…
I’m playing some more with the early chapters of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, looking at basic tree search techniques for the 8-puzzle. I wrote simple breadth-first and depth-first search algorithms for this puzzle in Common Lisp. Here’s the code. It’s an interesting demonstation of how inefficient these alogrithms really are. I represent the puzzle…
Ran across an interesting remark in a discussion of Microsoft hiring interviews: If I remember, a lot of MIT people back in the 70s broke the computer world into the Lisp and non-Lisp data typers. The Lisp folk took a casual attitude towards data structures – just shove them in a list, put them on…
I was looking at a problem in the early chapters of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. It’s called Vacuum World. This is a very simple agent problem consisting of a vacuum placed on a grid. The grid has only two squares, each of which is either dirty or clean. The vacuum has three actions: move…
I decide to play around with the Java logging facility. I write a simple test program: import java.util.logging.*; public class LoggingTest { public static void main(String[] args) { Logger log = Logger.getLogger(“com.stuartsierra”); log.entering(“LoggingTest”, “main”); log.info(“Info Message”); log.warning(“Warning Message”); log.exiting(“LoggingTest”, “main”); } } Compile, run, and I get this: Aug 30, 2006 10:48:45 AM LoggingTest main…
“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem.” —David Wheeler or Butler Lampson, depending on whom you ask I’ve seen a fair amount of press about Virtualization over the past year or so. For servers, I think it makes some sense: it would…
This poster hangs in my cubicle. The caption reads, “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job, the kind robots will be doing soon.” Besides saying “nyah nyah” to the superiors who never stay in my cubicle long enough to read…
Steve Yegge, who spent 7 years working on distributed computing at Amazon, writes about a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. Yegge: “it’s abundantly clear that it’s time for us to move up to a higher level of abstraction. … Object-Oriented interfaces are failing us, and we need to turn today’s network into a computer…