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.

Uni is done

Uni is done. Finished. Kaput. Finito. Finis. Totally brilliant feeling. Sat my last exam this morning. Let's hope I pass everything :D I don't want to have to travel back from New Zealand to sit supplementaries!

Amazon Kindle

Reckon you could read Proust or Dostoevsky on this thing?

Financial challenge

How little can I live on in a week for basic living expenses? With increasing salary over the last few years, the amount I live on per week for simple things such as food, daily coffee, transport etc has blown out to well over $250/week. I'd guess that at least $200 of this amount goes to food. I eat out too much, buy too much alcohol (bottles of wine with meals is yummy, but very expensive), and buy too much coffee at the nearest barista.

The challenge is to see how little I can spend on necessary living expenses such as food, travel etc. The new job I'm starting soon will pay all living expenses, so I don't have a motivation to make this as small as possible. Instead I'll see how little I can spend on other things like holiday travel on the weekends (in NZ yeah!) and other day to day expenses. It's unrealistic to do this for a prolonged period of time, so I'll just start at a week and see how many weeks I want to do this for.

This starts tomorrow so I'll post the first set of results in a week.

1 day to go

This time tomorrow I will have sat my last exam for my undergraduate degree. I'll finally have finished my Bachelor of Science (Major Comp. Sci, Minor Physics). Qualified for a life of learning (not that anyone needs a degree for that!).

Then it's off to New Zealand in a week to take up a contract down there. First time working overseas as well. There are plenty of changes afoot!

Kevin 0x07

If Rudd wins the Australian federal election next Saturday he'll focus immediately on 5 major policy items, according to an article titled Rudd's winning plan in The Sydney Morning Herald. I want to focus on the 3rd item, and in particular the plan Rudd announced earlier in his campaign about providing every child in highschool with access to their own personal computer at school.

I think every technologist and anyone who is even vaguely interested in our freedom to use technology in the way we see fit, or anyone who is passionate about the technology their kids are using and learning about in school needs to do something to encourage the potentially new Labour government to think seriously about investing in free and open technology.

Software is the heart and soul of the technology we are surrounding ourselves with. iPods, PCs, Media Centre PCs, laptops, handhelds and PDAs, digital cameras, smart phones — all these devices and the services they provide are about the software running them. Free software, which is open by definition, should be looked at seriously for a number of reasons.

1. Education - Kevin Rudd wants to be known as the "Education Prime Minister". Free software supports education in a fundamental way, in ways that proprietary software can't. Every part of the system in truly "free" software is open to inspection and modification. The tools supplied on top of the system are as good as or better than any other platform — internet browsers, image manipulation programs, sound editing software, word processors, mathematics tools, graphing tools, programming tools, and the list goes on.


2. Freedom and Openness - freedom is considered a basic inalienable right in most modern societies. Free software supports that right unconditionally. The central focus on this as a major tenet of acceptable computer use results in a flow on effect into other areas of technology use in our society. If we are serious about this right it makes sense we would want to teach our kids about it. Using free and open software in the classroom makes the importance of this right implicit.


3. Usability and Utility - One laptop per child, the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions and the sheer number of open source programs available on GNU/Linux are all testaments to the increasing usability and utility of the open source platform.


4. Community - openness fosters community. Vendor lock in and proprietary software wrapped in NDAs and other red tape does not. The right to use your software as you please, understand how it works and modify it to share with your neighbour results in the sharing and furthering of ideas. No single company owns the rights to an idea or implementation of that idea. Effectively the people using the technology have the freedom to modify or extend the idea. These people using technology for a particular purpose form a community. Free software encourages the formation of such groups and empowers them. The one laptop per child project is a great example of this. Children are able to modify any part of the system on their computers they wish to, and redistribute it to their peers. The potential for adapting software in unforeseeable ways like this is incredibly exciting.


5. Cost - the ongoing cost of free software and the support for that software is very competitive compared to vendor supplied software. The reason for this is that free software creates an open market for support. Vendors don't own this service. Any party wanting to offer support for a free software platform can, and can compete against anyone else in this open market. The end result isn't 30 minute wait times on the phone, it's high quality service.


6. Security - free software doesn't rely on security through obscurity. Anyone can understand how the technology works, and can point out weak points and suggest or proffer improvements. Security comes to rely on excellent engineering rather than closed source code and lack of information. Linux for example has an excellent track record in security, and in responding to security threats. Other vendors are catching up in that area, but Linux is a shining example of how free and open software works to help improve security rather than diminish it.


7. Strategic considerations (e.g. vendor neutral) - Free Software is vendor neutral. By definition, investing in free/open software means investing in and building a flexible software platform. No one is contractually bound to use a particular version of software. Companies can upgrade when they see fit. They have the freedom to move to another platform whenever it suits them.

Does the Free Software community know about this policy plan? Write to the Free Software Foundation to make sure they're aware of it. If they can help Labour understand the importance of free software then perhaps this will be looked at seriously. What are the other parties stance on free software? What do the Greens think about it? Write to them and ask.

Investing 1 billion dollars in such a policy plan isn't just about buying thousands of personal computing devices for all students, it's about investing in a technology ecosystem. It's about building wireless networks, high speed internet connectivity, providing good security, building and customising software platforms for schools and classrooms etc. Free and open software has a place at any level in that system. Get writing and start talking!

I really should buy an expensive piece of electronic equipment such as a PSP and take it apart and put it back together. That might unblock some weird childhood thing.

Fermat's last theorem

Great documentary. So humbling to see the journey Andrew Wiles went on to find the proof of this. 7 years solid work, and then over a year to fix it - only to find a solution even more elegant than that originally devised. Stunning :)