Mired in code

Idiomatic C and Arduino

2013-03-17T19:25:00.000-04:00

The few of you who read this blog regularly will be wondering about "C". Not Python, not some new-fangled functional language, but good old-fashioned C, the workhorse language of the last 30 years or so. That's because I'm talking Arduino, and C - sorta kinda - is the language of choice for that platform. For those not familiar with it, Arduino is an open source hardware platform

3d printers and the thing store

2012-12-31T00:38:00.000-05:00

A recent discussion about 3d printers led me to thinking about what they can do now, and what they might do in the future, and where it might go. I thought of something I hadn't seen mentioned before, and am now going to justify why I think it's the important part of how 3d printers are going to change the world. Predicting the future is easy - it's going to be just like the past, except

Type checking for algorithmic errors

2012-12-22T14:37:00.000-05:00

While listening to a recent podcast about Yesod - a web framework designed to be type safe - the host commented that he didn't buy into static type checking, because it was neither necessary nor sufficient, as it couldn't catch algorithmic bugs. While he's right that static typing isn't necessary - otherwise dynamic languages wouldn't work - or sufficient - it can't catch all bugs, he's wrong in

The changing nature of my identity

2012-11-23T14:04:00.001-05:00

When I was in school, a large chunk of my self-identification was as a geek and a hacker. The former was more accurately a "computer geek", and the latter was something I was proud to be called by talented computer people. As time has gone by, those labels have been redefined in ways that I don't really identify with. So I'm going to rant a little about how programmers

Monads in Python

2012-08-21T12:51:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note based on a recent Aha moment, showing that learning Haskell is improving my Python coding.C# and Python's string.findI'm translating some C# into Python for a client, because - well, C# just isn't suited to big data problems. They keep running into problems with it, and asked me to come aboard to redo this in Python. This code involves lots of string processesing. It translates

Processes - a modern approach to concurrency

2012-04-20T12:12:00.000-04:00

I seem to keep running into an assumption that the only solution for concurrent operations is having multiple threads of control in a shared address space - aka "threading". This is in spite of this model having the rather nasty downside of exposing everything in memory to shared access and modification, making it very easy to inadvertently write ill-behaved code. It's as easy

Converting Python from the dom to etree

2012-04-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

Overview As part of a technology upgrade for an application, I recently rewrote a collection of Python classes to use xml.etree instead of xml.dom. The application used pretty much all of the libraries: reading in xml strings to create in-memory representations, then searching them for various values. Taking a non-xml data structure and creating an xml representation of that, then writing it

Configuration with Python class objects

2012-03-06T18:57:00.000-05:00

Another old bit of writing. While the space used for the demonstration - web applications - is now thoroughly dominated by template engines and frameworks, the core concepts are still valid. Resurrected by request. Abstract The requirements for configuring a complex program include such things as separate namespaces for different parts of the program; the ability to configure an object as like

The political implications of the iOS App Store

2012-03-02T15:49:00.000-05:00

You may well be wondering how a something like an online software store can have political implications. The answer is that the infrastructure that makes it work can, at least in the ongoing war on general purpose computing. If you aren't familiar with this war, read the article. By delivering iOS with the App Store as the only authorized means of adding software,

An evaluation of Haskell

2012-02-26T13:56:00.000-05:00

I've now been writing Haskell code on and off in my spare time for most of a year. I've done small calculations in the REPL, and written a few small utilities. I still don't think I'm an expert in the language, but do think I've gotten enough of it under my belt to evaluate it compared to the other languages I've used. First comment: I don't think this will ever be an

An analysis of FBS controversies: Part III, the solution

2012-01-17T19:42:00.000-05:00

While the title is "the solution", this is, of course, my proposed solution. The problem to be solved is that the current system leaving "deserving" teams out of the playoff creates controversies. Why a playoff is not the solution A playoff would seem to be the obvious solution, but there are some real reasons not to change. Ignoring the financial interests,

An analysis of FBS controversies: Part II, the analysis

2012-01-15T22:20:00.013-05:00

Now that I have a tool that can report on how much controversy any given scheme would have, I can start looking at numbers! Which seasons? First, I have to decide the range of seasons to check. The earliest season I can use is 1872. See the writeup on the code for a discussion of why 1869 through 1871 can't be used. An argument could be made that I should start with

An analysis of FBS controversies: Part I, the code

2012-01-13T15:48:00.001-05:00

America's college Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) has a history of controversy when it comes to picking a champion. And a history of proposed solutions. I've decided to examine how well those solutions would have worked if applied to previous seasons. The football background If you're a football fan, you can skip this section. The FBS has one unusual property. Unlike

Why the Mac UI sucks

2011-11-23T15:00:00.002-05:00

The problem One of my ex-bosses - a very sharp man whom I respect immensely - says that one of the problems with X is that there are too many choices for window managers. This causes people to waste time trying different window managers and playing with configurations rather than actually doing work. The second part of that statement is certainly true - people do

Leveraging Haskell's derived classes.

2011-10-28T13:11:00.001-04:00

One of the mantras of dynamic languages is "Minimize boilerplate". By boilerplate they mean repeated code sequences that just change a few names. A typical example is the setter/getter methods of Java objects - at least most of them. Python, for example, deals with those by providing a decorater that turns an attribute get or set into a method invocation. This eliminates the primary motivation

"More Power" is not always a good thing

2011-10-20T00:36:00.001-04:00

In Succinctness is Power, Paul Graham ponders why Python — or any language — would choose readability over power. He isn't sure what is meant by regularity, and discusses several definitions of readability, but never gets to what I think is the core of the what Paul Prescod meant by his statement. Readability isn't simply about the line or character counts that Paul talks about.

Satisfaction

2011-10-06T18:28:00.013-04:00

I was listening to a podcast review of the game Dark Souls, and the reviewer gave it a near-perfect score of 9.5 out of 10. He believes that it will be a contender for one or more Game of the Year awards. What was interesting was that he didn't think the game was fun. Instead, it was frustrating, rewarding and satisfying. The problems the game presented were frustrating, but so well done that

The myth of "costs nothing"

2011-09-21T15:37:00.001-04:00

A common argument to hear when a new feature is proposed for some program or programming language is "If you don't use it, it costs nothing." This argument is generally false, and I'm getting tired of hearing it. So I'm going to explain why it's false here where I can easily refer to it. The first problem is that nothing is actually almost nothing. For the cost to be nothing, then the code paths

Eddie - shell scripting with Haskell

2011-07-31T00:37:00.001-04:00

The last few years have seen an increase in interest in functional programming languages, as they are better suited to dealing with the concurrency issues found on modern multi-core desktops. Functional programs have functions that are functions in the mathematical sense: the result depends only on the input parameters, with global state not playing a role. No global state means no global state

Dynamic types in a statically typed language

2011-06-05T01:44:00.007-04:00

One of the more interesting surprises in Haskell was the regular expression library - or rather, libraries, as the same API can be used with a number of different regular expression engines. Before looking at that, let's look at a couple of more conventional languages. Python has a typical OO regex API: the module includes a couple of routines for creating regex objects or running common

Mobile development keeps getting bettter

2011-05-09T22:58:00.000-04:00

I just found a nifty web site/application for those who do mobile development - or just think about coding problems while running around town. The folks at ideone.com have a pretty spiffy programmers tool - at least for small programs. It will compile (if needed) and execute a source text - possibly with standard input. They even have an API so "native" applications running on various devices

Why Haskell?

2011-04-27T09:58:00.000-04:00

This should not be considered an expert overview of the language. It's a deep language, and I'm still learning it. This is a discussion of what I've seen so far to explain why I chose it. As I mentioned, I'm not learning Haskell because I expect it to be a marketable skill; I'm learning Haskell because I expect it to improve my programming skills in general. That should happen because it's

Personal choices in marketability

2011-04-26T04:35:00.001-04:00

Having figured out what skills are going to be in demand, the next step is to filter in your personal attributes: Which things you enjoy doing - I assume you're a programmer because you enjoy it, we certainly don't do it for the fame or money. Which things you are good at - in particular, what innate abilities might be required for some choice, and how well you do at those. My tastes and skills

Keeping yourself marketable

2011-04-23T18:15:00.000-04:00

A recent question on LinkedIn asked about the skill set to be working on if you're hoping to make yourself more marketable. This is something every professional programmer should be thinking about as long as they want to keep doing technical work. I've been thinking about this for a bit, and it ties into what I wanted to write about next in any case. Before considering what skills you want to be

Almost like a real web app

2011-04-07T18:58:00.000-04:00

I took a long weekend over the first, and did the next round of changes to my X10 controller web app. The changes revolve around loading the config information from an SQL database rather than using lists wired into the code, and arranging things so that changed data could be reloaded without restarting the app. A database is normally a critical part of a web app, so this almost makes this a real