So Jeff at Coding Horror decides to post something pointless. Well, perhaps not because it somehow manages to become topical because of today's successful Ariane launch and the clarification of the Ariane failure in 1996 (read the comments for that.)
All programmers know the term GIGO. If they don't, then perhaps an alternative career should be considered. Accurate number storage has always been an issue, so I would expect that any post about it in the 21st century should be putting forward a practical solution, not leaving it as an exercise for commentators.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Another great article by David McWilliams
I always like to check out David McWilliams's web site every so often to see what he has to say, as well as to read some of the surprisingly cogent comments attached to his blog entries. This recent article by David is a good synopsis of what is wrong with this country at the moment.
The question is, who is going to be able to make the necessary changes to get us on the road to recovery? Unfortunately David no longer has the brilliant "Agenda" programme anymore (possibly the only thing TV3 ever did that justified their existence) to bring these issues into visibility to a wider audience (on a side note, I always thought it was a little convenient that the programme should be dropped as his predictions of a property market decline were starting to tally with the signs on the horizon). So, incisive and eloquent as he may be, unless he has the ears of those with influence, there are very few other people in a comparable position to change the current way of thinking in those towers of ivory.
What's always been lacking is a coherent and consistent opposition, and that doesn't look like it's going change anytime soon, despite the occasional spark.
In a related article, he takes a look at the cultural aspects of the bank-manufactured property boom. There's nothing particularly new there, we've been aware of the scam that's been perpetuated in this market for a long time, but it's interesting to see the workings of the US valuation system and how it could (or should) apply to our situation.
The question is, who is going to be able to make the necessary changes to get us on the road to recovery? Unfortunately David no longer has the brilliant "Agenda" programme anymore (possibly the only thing TV3 ever did that justified their existence) to bring these issues into visibility to a wider audience (on a side note, I always thought it was a little convenient that the programme should be dropped as his predictions of a property market decline were starting to tally with the signs on the horizon). So, incisive and eloquent as he may be, unless he has the ears of those with influence, there are very few other people in a comparable position to change the current way of thinking in those towers of ivory.
What's always been lacking is a coherent and consistent opposition, and that doesn't look like it's going change anytime soon, despite the occasional spark.
In a related article, he takes a look at the cultural aspects of the bank-manufactured property boom. There's nothing particularly new there, we've been aware of the scam that's been perpetuated in this market for a long time, but it's interesting to see the workings of the US valuation system and how it could (or should) apply to our situation.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Code vs Pseudocode
I just read this post over at Coding Horror and find myself agreeing with much of it. I always found that writing pseudo code was more of a hindrance to writing proper code in the first place.
It probably makes sense to write pseudo code if you're not going to be doing the actual code yourself. Otherwise, there are a few traps you can fall into - You can get bogged down in putting more detail than necessary in the pseudo code because you're thinking of the actual code that's going to be written and you can also lock yourself into a particular way of thinking that blocks the process of writing the code, because the pseudo code described the functions in such a way that the language being used to write the code doesn't translate well.
I would say writing pseudo code is a particular skill, best left to those who are good at it - They may or may not be coders, or good coders at that. I've found that when writing code, I tended to go straight from the big picture into code, and trying to think about how to get there ended up muddying the waters.
My guess is that for a large project which is going to need long-term maintenance, it makes sense to have someone look at the overview and break it down into pseudo code before any coding is done, otherwise it's probably better to have the coders build up the higher-level documentation as the code is written.
Perhaps the way of thinking that makes most sense to me is that as a writer, you wouldn't write your table of contents first and then the book unless you have a very firm idea of what's going to be in the book. I'm sure most authors would block out their ideas, come up with their characters and motivations, and main plot event and let the story grow from there. A lot of people don't realise the creative input that's needed to write code - It's a bit more than just putting blocks together, no matter how many design patterns have been learned off by heart.
It probably makes sense to write pseudo code if you're not going to be doing the actual code yourself. Otherwise, there are a few traps you can fall into - You can get bogged down in putting more detail than necessary in the pseudo code because you're thinking of the actual code that's going to be written and you can also lock yourself into a particular way of thinking that blocks the process of writing the code, because the pseudo code described the functions in such a way that the language being used to write the code doesn't translate well.
I would say writing pseudo code is a particular skill, best left to those who are good at it - They may or may not be coders, or good coders at that. I've found that when writing code, I tended to go straight from the big picture into code, and trying to think about how to get there ended up muddying the waters.
My guess is that for a large project which is going to need long-term maintenance, it makes sense to have someone look at the overview and break it down into pseudo code before any coding is done, otherwise it's probably better to have the coders build up the higher-level documentation as the code is written.
Perhaps the way of thinking that makes most sense to me is that as a writer, you wouldn't write your table of contents first and then the book unless you have a very firm idea of what's going to be in the book. I'm sure most authors would block out their ideas, come up with their characters and motivations, and main plot event and let the story grow from there. A lot of people don't realise the creative input that's needed to write code - It's a bit more than just putting blocks together, no matter how many design patterns have been learned off by heart.
Sure you did a grand job there, Charlie!
Wouldn't be it be great to able to live your life without ever having any doubts about what you did? Some people obviously do.
Music as art? Jarvis Cocker shows how...
Good to see someone bringing music back to its roots. For real - none of this so-called back to basics posturing in a studio - Jarvis Cocker is trying to bring music back to the people in a very real way.
I like Jarvis and stuff like this makes me want to go back and listen to his self-titled album of 2006 again just for pleasure of it. I see he has a new one out soon, so I'll have to keep an eye out for that.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Bones - watching it again. Might give Thomas Harris another go.
A post about a telly programme? I'm not really a blogger, but even so I never expected to be doing that. Anyway, it looks like we might start watching "Bones" again. We happened to catch a couple of episodes of season 4 recently which looked pretty good, but first a bit of background. At the end series 3, I was just about ready to get a ticket to the US and go over to personally throttle the writers responsible for such a pathetic wrap-up to the season - So many months on strike and this is the best they could come up with? What were they doing during that time?Sunning themselves on the beach? Smoking crack? Nothing worthwhile anyway, I'd be pretty sure of that.
To be honest, my feelings at that point were that they should have stayed on strike and perhaps the studios might have got people in off the street to write the scripts, because they would have done a hell of a job in comparison. That last episode should be buried somewhere and forgotten about, and the writers struck off the writer's guild, which mustn't have particularly high standards.
Anyway, I just happened to read one of the comments on IMDB about the end of season 3 which expressed much of what I felt and brought Thomas Harris's "Hannibal" into the review, summing up pretty much how I felt about that particular piece of rubbish, and it got me thinking that perhaps I misjudged the previous books in that series (which I hadn't read), so perhaps I should try reading them and forget about that book.
I've never bothered sitting down to watch "Silence of The Lambs", because any time I've caught a bit of it on the telly it's been laughably overdramatic and I simply can't take Anthony Hopkins seriously as Lector, having seen "Manhunter" a long time before (of course, the sketches from the "Fist of Fun" radio show and "This Morning With Richard Not Judy" probably don't help). I did think the film, "Red Dragon" was pretty good though (not as good as "Manhunter" of course), despite Hopkin's prescence and this is actually what nudged me into getting "Hannibal", much to my regret.
I guess I should be able to pick up those books secondhand cheaply enough and it might be worthing giving them a read.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Is the Green Party in Ireland dead?
I certainly hope so. It's bad enough that let them on my ballot sheet in the last general election and they then went and assisted the incumbent government in maintaining their stranglehold on the country. Not that the alternatives were anymore credible, but it seems like it would have been nice to have change for its own sake. At least a fresh government with something to prove might not have been so ruthlessly and cynically incompetent (you couldn't get to be that bad by accident)
Now we end up with a spineless, zombie-party verging on the edge of duplicitousness. Now Cowen wants FF voters to give their transfers to the Greens. I guess that'll be their 30 pieces of silver then.
It's enough to make you sick, for real - not some prima donna stunt.
When we do get another chance to register our choices, put them out of our misery, please!
Now we end up with a spineless, zombie-party verging on the edge of duplicitousness. Now Cowen wants FF voters to give their transfers to the Greens. I guess that'll be their 30 pieces of silver then.
It's enough to make you sick, for real - not some prima donna stunt.
When we do get another chance to register our choices, put them out of our misery, please!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Having seen some of the talk about Wolfram Alpha and subsequent discussion about whether or not it's a "Google-killer", over hyped or whatever, it seems to me that a few things have got lost in the hubbub.
The way Google is going, it's going to end up falling on its own sword. Honestly, it has so many half-done applications on the go, like books and apps and they spend so much time doing something that would be interesting if it had any interest to non-US citizens that in the not-too-distant future we're going to lose interest and move on to the next newcomer.
Nearly every other search I do on Google sends me to Wikipedia anyway, so I really ought to set things up so that I get redirected there automatically if it comes up as the top-ranked result.
WA looks really interesting and although it's applications may be a little more esoteric than what would be normally classed as mainstream search, the fact that it will make this kind of knowledge mining open makes me think that if enough of it filters into the mainstream it could snowball. Imagine if Wikipedia articles start using Wolfram Alpha search queries as their citations? I can see some of the business and statistical analysis you see in newspapers and journals coming off as imitators rather than originators - How are they going to feel about this?
These are the kinds of questions I look forward to seeing answered over time and I would love to see the sort of data that the Wolfram Alpha engine could output if other corporate or scientific organisations were to use it to analyse their data. It's possible that this new kind of query could well exceed the hype (imaginary or otherwise).
The way Google is going, it's going to end up falling on its own sword. Honestly, it has so many half-done applications on the go, like books and apps and they spend so much time doing something that would be interesting if it had any interest to non-US citizens that in the not-too-distant future we're going to lose interest and move on to the next newcomer.
Nearly every other search I do on Google sends me to Wikipedia anyway, so I really ought to set things up so that I get redirected there automatically if it comes up as the top-ranked result.
WA looks really interesting and although it's applications may be a little more esoteric than what would be normally classed as mainstream search, the fact that it will make this kind of knowledge mining open makes me think that if enough of it filters into the mainstream it could snowball. Imagine if Wikipedia articles start using Wolfram Alpha search queries as their citations? I can see some of the business and statistical analysis you see in newspapers and journals coming off as imitators rather than originators - How are they going to feel about this?
These are the kinds of questions I look forward to seeing answered over time and I would love to see the sort of data that the Wolfram Alpha engine could output if other corporate or scientific organisations were to use it to analyse their data. It's possible that this new kind of query could well exceed the hype (imaginary or otherwise).
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