Tim Robinson

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:02:05 +0000

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order:

How can you ensure that a viewing keeps the Vader reveal a surprise, while introducing young Anakin before the end of Return of the Jedi?

iOS '86

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:02:06 +0000

The Day Python Embarrassed Imperative Programming

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:00:05 +0000

The Day Python Embarrassed Imperative Programming:

My company uses Haskell, because we do not have much manpower.

We do not get paid enough, so we take many contracts.

We cannot afford QA teams, so we use a sadistic compiler.

We cannot dedicate too much time to any particular project, so we prefer to learn dense idioms (which takes time upfront, and saves time later), rather than learn sparse idioms that take more time to implement every time and debug individually.

We do not keep a project in live mode after we have handed it over, due to little manpower, so any bugs that we have to cure at our own cost must be caught in development.

Visualizing range trees

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:03:06 +0000

Visualizing range trees:

Unfortunately, due to their fractal nature, range trees a bit hard to visualize.

People will do what they want to do

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:03:05 +0000

People will do what they want to do:

The headwaiter just draw an “X” over their booking, directly on the computer screen!

“That’s very interesting,” Richard asked the headwaiter. “How come you do that?”

”Well, you know,” the headwaiter answered with a big sigh. ”The guys that create these kinds of systems … they have …. Well, you can’t do things the way you wanna do them.”

Joe’s First Computer Encounter

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:03:06 +0000

Joe’s First Computer Encounter:

Joe tells me he’a never used a computer, and my eyes light up. It’s very rare in San Francisco to meet a person who’s not used a computer even once, but such people are amazingly useful. It’s a unique opportunity to see what someone who hasn’t been biased by any prior usage reacts.

Programmer (jgc.org)

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:02:05 +0000

Programmer (jgc.org):

I choose Programmer for both its simplicity and accuracy. I am working as a programmer helping to speed up and protect web sites, and other programming-related job titles seem overblown.

I like being a programmer too, instead of a Lead Architect/Senior Developer/whatever. I like having an impossible-sounding problem, then being the guy who invents something out of nothing to solve it.

Visual C++ 1.0 (1993)

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:02:05 +0000

Visual C++ 1.0 (1993)

Visual Studio 11 (2012)

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:02:05 +0000

Visual Studio 11 (2012)

You could have invented “You could have invented…”

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:02:06 +0000

You could have invented “You could have invented…”:

Introduce an easy to understand problem,

Attempt to solve the problem, but get stuck doing it the “obvious” way,

Introduce an easy to understand insight,

Methodically work out the rest of the details, arriving at the final result.

What's Wrong with the For Loop (2007)

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:02:06 +0000

What's Wrong with the For Loop (2007):

In the two for loops above, the goal was to take a list of values and reduce it to a single value. Functional programmers call these operations “folds”.

Traders at Work

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:03:05 +0000

Traders at Work:

Q7:If you could give just one piece of advice to a new trader what would it be?

Don’t do it!

Just kidding! But you really need to be realistic about what is possible. Far too many people come into this business thinking they will pay off the mortgage by the end of the month.

Approval Tests Library - Capturing Human Intelligence

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:02:06 +0000

Approval Tests Library - Capturing Human Intelligence:

Write a test and save the expected results to a file
Re-run the test and compare the new results against the file
If the new results are different, fail the test, then either:
1. Fix the test so it matches the expected results, or
2. Update the expected results to match the new ones

London Stock Exchange prices in real time on Google Finance

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:02:06 +0000

London Stock Exchange prices in real time on Google Finance:

Thanks, Google! (Although I did get the impression that not a lot was going on with Google Finance.)

CPU and GPU trends over time

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:00:00 +0000

CPU and GPU trends over time:

The free lunch is over…
But overall performance is still increasing as the number of cores goes up
And GPUs have fantastic floating point performance

This is broadly what we already knew, but it’s helpful to see it backed up by Statistics.

Rediscovering the RSync Algorithm

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:02:05 +0000

Rediscovering the RSync Algorithm:

It’s a shame rsync isn’t better known on Windows. Devs inevitably use robocopy, which isn’t the same thing (it either copies the whole of a large file, or none of it), and it would be handy to have an rsync implementation that didn’t need Cygwin.

Also, bonus points for writing code samples in OCaml.

Smallest possible syntactically valid files of different types

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:00:05 +0000

Smallest possible syntactically valid files of different types:

int main(){}

Read CSV with .NET FileHelpers library

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:03:05 +0000

Read CSV with .NET FileHelpers library:

Real Men use String.Split(",")

Hacking Hacker News

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:00:05 +0000

Hacking Hacker News:

What Hacker News really needs is some sort of filter for “only show me stories that Joel would find interesting”

Minecraft Lego sets, summer 2012

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:03:06 +0000

Minecraft Lego sets, summer 2012:

I hope they generate each set randomly.