Some fool is attempting to read a book a week in 2008. Silly!

Joyce on Jesus

"Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it."

Pynchonianism-ness

Great yarn about a guy's take on Pynchon.

Writing programs to solve a problem is something akin to developing a language in the context of the problem to be solved and creating a sufficiently flexible and powerful vocabulary to describe and solve issues related to that problem.

The expressiveness of a language is the effectiveness with which this can be done. Programming paradigms, such as procedural definitions, object oriented modeling, functional languages, logic programming and other paradigms are philosophical ideas for providing tools for solving these problems. Lisp is supposedly so powerful because it makes the process of creating these higher language abstractions easier. How about something like Parrot then? How easy is it to write a language on top of Parrot to solve problems? Surely not as convenient or a simple as Lisp, but easier than writing an language without any help whatsoever...

Would it make sense say, to create a language to model sounds and provide a convenient grammar for defining musical performances (to ease live performing for example) and use Parrot as the language target? If so how would you model this? What constructs would you need? What would the grammar look like?

These are just ideas. Shows how little I really understand :D

I still cry over you.

Old drafts in blogger don't often make sense

I'm continually trying to understand what all the signs mean. I watch everyone pointing, their mouths agape, some people sweat, and their eyes quiver deep in their socket seats. I follow the path splayed out before me, but it's really just a miscommunication and a series of poorly judged at signals.

It's official.. I'm educated.

Completion Term :: Semester 2 2007
Degree :: BSc - Bachelor of Science
Degree Status :: Awarded
Specialisation :: COMPA13978 Computer Science, PHYSB23978 Physics
Date of Completion :: 07/12/2007
Name on Testamur :: SNARKY CHARLES BOOJUM

Beauty and truth in physics

Another TED video! Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics. Enjoy!

A day audit

7/12/2007 - 7:30pm

Just finished dinner. Sitting here watching really crappy cable TV - drinking a glass of yummy white wine (from Marlborough!)

7/12/2007 - 8:30pm

Still sitting here watching crappy cable TV. Watching Jamie Oliver in the kitchen - and shouting out loud at some of the luscious dishes he's cooking up. Pow! Reading stuff on the InterWeb. Drinking another glass of increasingly yummy white wine (the same bottle :D)

8/12/2007 - 12:05am

Oh wow. All sorts of things happened that I can't tell you about. I've spent some time reading about Donald Knuth and listening to some of his free lectures. The guy is some kind of demigod. I have guaranteed sex back in Sydney. 2 1/2 counts to be exact. Sickening. There is some incredibly dodgy movie playing on cable (what's new). I've done some drawing tonight, and will follow up with some reading once everything settles down. "I'm a mac daddy pimp. You know that. And now I'm going to cap your ass". Real talk.

8/12/2007 - 7:45am

I woke up and started reading "Memoirs of a Geisha". I have to say - it's not as great as everyone says it is. Everyone waxes lyrical about it.. a fresh zesty power punch of incredible writing. Not so. It's not a bad book, but the people who say things like "Oh, it's the best book I've ever read" or "I've read that book like five times. It's my favourite. It's amazing!" etc just haven't read any "fuck off" books. You know the type. You're lying on your bed reading, and you come across a line, and you starting holding your breath. Your eyes flick back and forth quickly and you read it a couple more times, and then before you know if you're twisted onto your shoulder blades kicking your feet up in the air alternating "Holy fuck!" with sublimely girly giggles. Those books. People need to read those. There are few sure things in reading, but these books exist, and "Memoirs of a Geisha" is not one of them.

8/12/2007 - 10:00am

I'm rushing around cleaning up my apartment to book out of here by midday. It's annoying. I don't enjoy packing.

8/12/2007 - 12:00pm

I'm out! and back into the old apartment. I can't be arsed unpacking. I'm going to go exploring Wellington.

8/12/2007 - 4:15pm

I climbed Mt Vic! Wow - what a beautiful thing. You get a 360 degree view of the lay of Wellington, and it's rugged man! It's an incredibly folded and creased land, and it's beautiful. It was an overcast afternoon, so we're talking filtered light, fleeting cloud shadows, fuzzy horizons. Mix with Radiata pines and serve with a side of sexy english tourists with buxom bottoms, and you have one fucking serene experience.

I walked down Mt Vic and flirted with the escarpment above Oriental Bay, and jaunted back on into the city. Went straight up to the Wellington Cable Car on Lambton Quay. I bought a ticket. Made small talk with the friendly Kiwi behind the counter. Grabbed a coffee. Made eye contact with all the good looking girls on the way back (many), and jumped into the waiting cable car. This took us up to the Botanic Gardens, and Carter Observatory. Skipped through the gardens. Saw the succulents (no San Pedro and certainly no Peyote). It started to rain lightly. You know that smell of earth, like the rain is washing dust out of the air, well the palette of the scene was changed too - more boisterous reds and purples, and deeper greens. Wrap all this in a pleasant hush as the rain splattered canopies high above me, and that was my afternoon.

8/12/2006 - 7:15pm

Grabbed a yummy pide. Scoffing it while reading about programming languages online. Watching some *really* crap movies on cable again. I'm going to have to stop that.

8/12/2006 - 7:30pm

Watching TED videos in bed. Quite apart from traffic noise outside. There is the odd unruly and overexcited tourist in the apartments across The Terrace, but apart from that it's pretty peaceful. This is a better apartment than the other ones I was in. Not as flash, not as quiet, but a certain moral uprightness is embued in the furniture and air here.

24 hours in Wellington. Done!

Bug Labs

Bug Labs is very very fucking cool. Check it out.

You have to check out the videos here at scobleizer.com! Brilliant. My inner techno geek is getting excited. See previous post here :D

Advice on learning Lisp

Stumbled across this today. I somehow followed the rabbit hole from Hacker News or maybe it was linked from there directly:

Dude,

I'm a working Common Lisp programmer. I have just GOT to be the stupidest Common Lisp programmer alive, so let me tell you how I learnt Common Lisp.

1. Buy ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham.

2. Read it. But if you feel your balls retract and your head starts spinning, just stop. Read David Tourestky's (sp?) Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation with Common Lisp. (or something like that - it's free and on the web). Go back to Paul Graham. It will be MUCH easier.

3. Next read Object oriented programming with common lisp by Sonya Keene. This is the best tutorial on object oriented programming ever.

4. Next read Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming with Common Lisp for experience on writing real world common lisp.

Some tips:

When learning CL use a trial edition of a commercial environmentment: www.franz.com www.lispworks.com

Ignore ANYONE that recommends learning scheme or reading books teach scheme (i.e. structured interpretation of computer programs or simply scheme blah blah total waste of time (okay except for How to Design Programs - that wasn't half bad)).

Regs,

Source page here.