Entries with tag "programming"

Around the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I was getting to know a friend of Scott's named Kyle. He was a really creative guy — at the time, he was making awesome film score-like music he called Crashterpiece Theater. Sometime around my first year of college, we fell out of touch. He was on my buddy list the whole time, but for some reason we just never spoke.

Last week I noticed his away message contained a link to a little mini-game (more of a toy, really) he'd written called Big Vine. I tried it out and really liked it — very Tim Burton-esque. I messaged him to say so, and as we talked, I learned that he's now a game developer working at Maxis/EA Games — he worked on The Sims. I checked out his website and discovered that he's got all kinds of interesting projects under his belt. Unsurprising, really — it seems like a natural progression from the talented Kyle I knew back in high school.

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Version 1.0 of the Ruby-based web development framework, Ruby On Rails, was released last week, which prompted me to revisit it. I'm very happy — they seem to have eliminated most of the complaints I had with it (mostly things like instability and inefficiency), and it now appears to be a perfectly usable development platform. Last time I tried it, back around version 0.12.1, it had some issues like deadlocking with 100% CPU usage when it encountered a syntax error in your code, and doing redundant things like saving all your objects in the database with every page load even if they weren't changed. Both of those are fixed now, along with pretty much all the other more minor gripes I had with it, so I think I'm ready to embrace it on BinRock.

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I spent pretty much every waking hour this weekend reworking the photo gallery. What a sad way to spend my time off — doing exactly what I do every day when I am working.

It's interesting — even as I checked my watch and realized I had been sitting on my bed in front of a computer for 12 hours straight, it didn't feel like work. It was actually kind of exciting, and what kept me going was the desire to see the result. Perhaps it's pretentious, but it really did feel just like a sculptor must feel as he works. It was very satisfying to start with something rough and ugly and steadily refine it, seeing it take shape in your hands, and watching it slowly come to resemble what you have in your head.

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For the last month or two I've been toying with Ruby On Rails, a web application framework based on the Ruby programming language. It seems like a very cool way to build web applications; coding is much easier and actually fun, and maintenance should be simpler. It's cool enough that I'm actually considering rewriting the blog and photo gallery in Rails.

Originally I figured I'd just reimplement the existing setup so that, aside from some possible URL changes, most visitors wouldn't even notice the difference. But as long as I'm rewriting things from scratch, I'm considering rethinking the photo gallery's layout.

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I've always liked Red Chair Software, the company who makes Notmad Explorer, the software I use to transfer files to my MP3 player. Their software is way more intuitive than Creative's own software, plus they have fast service and are very helpful. This weekend I was reminded of all these things.

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A new bit of AI has been developed which can teach itself new languages. You feed it some text, and it analyzes its structure looking for patterns, and thus learns the language's grammar. Once it has learned it, it can produce new, meaningful sentences in that language. That's a very cool use of two of my big interests—artificial intelligence and linguistics. I couldn't find any more information about this project aside from the single webpage linked above, but I'll have to see if more turns up, because I'm very interested in learning more about how it works. In particular, I wonder how it addresses the issue of vocabulary.

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Today I discovered the slides for an interesting talk given back in 1997 by Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) titled "The Next Fifty Years of Software". He makes some intriguing assertions, such as "Nathan's First Law of Software:" Software is a gas, that expands to fill its container. This in turn drives hardware development, and is what makes Moore's Law possible.

The part I really liked, though, was where he starts talking about the storage requirements of the human genome, etc. For example, the stuff that makes you genetically unique fits on a 3.5" floppy disk.

From there he proceeds to discuss the "ultimate computer," the human brain. He brings up something I've pondered as well: once computers reach a complexity comparable to the human brain, will it even be possible to program them directly as we do modern computers? Or will we have to devote time to teaching them, like we do with people? As he says, human takes 20 years to boot up.

What the hell? Interfaces? Reflection? Parameter Covariance and Contravariance? Mixins? I thought I knew how to program. Who made up all of these words all of a sudden?

I just discovered MIT's OpenCourseWare, which appears to be a repository of the course materials for most or all of MIT's courses, available for free and without registration on the web. I went straight to the Computer Science section and immediately found two courses on Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2002, Spring 2003). They actually appear to be the same course, but taught by two different teachers, and the materials seem pretty different. It will probably be interesting to go through both of them.

This website might be a godsend, since I tend to be pretty good at learning things on my own. Of course it's very helpful to have a knowledgeable professor to explain it and to ask questions of, but I can certainly pick up most of it from the course material alone. It's like it was made specifically for people like me — too lazy do do well enough in school to get into MIT, but willing to do a little extra work to learn some of the stuff anyway :)

Update: Actually, I hadn't seen the XTutor section for each course, which seems to be a full set of recorded audio lectures by the professors, along with matching lecture slides, full transcripts, and lecture handouts. There are also weekly online interactive homework problems. In other words, that's pretty damn close to what I would get by taking the course in person. Now I'm even more excited.

The things one finds while browsing WikiPedia at random. I came across the programming language called COW (WikiPedia entry), which is written in a language that cows can understand. Since the only word that cows know is 'moo', all commands in COW are variants of the word 'moo', with differing capitalization.

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SeaCode is a startup whose plan is to buy a $10 million cruise ship, park it three miles off the coast of California (just barely in international waters), and fill it with software developers hired in places like India. By registering them as "seamen," they fall under international law, and US laws like having to pay payroll taxes and requiring immigration visas don't apply. They will work 8-10 hour shifts, 24 hours a day. "Try to get American software engineers to work at night," says Cook. (heh.)

I realize that legally, there's nothing to be done to stop this kind of thing. But I just don't understand how such obvious attempts to skirt the law can be accepted idly. I kind of miss the days when mob justice took care of things when the law couldn't.

(Poetic justice now dictates that my end will one day come at the hands of a frantic mob in a style fit for The Onion's horoscopes.)