primitive boots
Do you remember the Rocky’s Boots video game from the eighties? Of course you do. While the rest of us were struggling to survive to the end of the Oregon Trail, you were building rudimentary Rube Goldberg devices out of simple “and” and “or” operations to make Rocky the Raccoon kick the right sequence of little colored squares.
Primitive recursive functions in mathematics are kind of like that. Most simple calculations you can think of — testing whether or not a number is prime, say — can be built out of a few really basic functional pieces.
It may seem like a tenuous leap from a dancing raccoon to one of the most crucial insights into modern computing. Bear with me here….
the road to quineville
A quine is a program that prints its own source code as output, without using any dirty tricks like “go find the file this source code lives in, and spit out the contents.”
Most programmers cut their baby teeth on neat tricks like quines. Others spend their undergrad years using electrons as the fundamental unit of computation, and don’t get to programming-language tomfoolery until much further on.
So, better late than never….
fuzzy grad student
With an intelligently rambunctious second-grader, a trouble-seeking one-year-old, a full-time job, a book to promote, and another book to write, I’d have to be stupid to take on anything else, right?
Heh.
Now I’m a fuzzy grad student, too. (The terminology comes from my old undergrad days, when we’d universally refer to all the masters / doctoral crowd, regardless of facial hair situation or even gender, as “fuzzy grad students.”) How did this happen?
Read on to find out.
one!
Hard to believe it’s been a whole year. Back then, all she could do was eat, sleep, and poop. Now, she can walk. And talk! She knows I’m “Daddy” (actually, sometimes anything bigger than her is “Dajjy”), Mommy is “Baba,” sister is “Adeeeeee,” and a cat or anything else you have to be gentle with is “Sof’.”
Some parents teach their children a simplified sign language. In our case, Robin taught us her own signs. A tug of the ear means, “I’m hungry.” Slapping the knees simultaneously means, “Yes, very amusing.” Slapping the knees alternately means, “You’ve got about three seconds to pick me up or I start shrieking.” And when she grabs her bare belly at bath time, we’re pretty sure she’s saying, “I appear not to be wearing a shirt any more. I find this hilarious for some reason.”
We did manage to get a couple of our signs to sink in with her. The standard stuff you’d expect: point at the mouth for “Eat,” touch the hands together for “More,” and reach out one-handed to say, “Give me that.” But my favorite sign that she picked up from us is this: when we do our best Homer Simpson and say, Don’t stop a-rockin’! she grins wildly and shakes her head from side to side.
i think it translates as...
separating city slickers from their money
Another months-overdue post. Catching up on my posting backlog, though, which is is more than I can say for nearly every other sector of my life. This one’s about my summer vacation.
Well, I say vacation. But it wasn’t quite that, since my family came along, too. Har, har.
We’d been trying to find something to please everybody. Big sister wanted a pool. Little sister wanted an endless supply of booboo. Mommy wanted a spa. And Daddy wanted something bucolic and Northwest-y, so that (har, har) I could hole up and write—my idea of a break from writing stuff I have to is writing stuff I want to.
So we found Kah-Nee-Ta, a mysteriously-named casino slash resort on reservation land. Perfect! A little something for everyone, including my dad, who was in town from Texas.
Read on to find out what happened.
the great divide
from the overdue files
Art, or science?
Software, that is. Is it ahhhrt, or scientifically delicious?
Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz, programming’s juggler laureate, took up the Great Question on July 24th at the Open Source Conference in Portland. I’m such a lazy blogger that I’m only getting around to talking about it just now.
sidekick man rides again
For those of you who were worried that Sidekick Man had retired from superhero-ing, fear not. He’s just been on the lam, outsmarting the fiendish weasels at the RIAA. Read on to hear about his triumphant ride back into the sunlight.
what it's like to write a book
So, what’s the book about? In short: testing software. More specifically, it’s about testing a piece of software by remote control: clicking icons using code instead of fingers.
There’s a whole other blog for talking about the technical fine points. By contrast, this post is going to look at the warm, fuzzy side. We’re going to talk about what it’s like to be on this side of a keyboard cranking out a book.
Read on to find out how the brain sausage is made.
i've written a book
Wow. Feels good to say that. Just finished it Sunday.
Here’s the cover. Click it to visit the book’s Web page.
It won’t be ready for purchase until the talented technical reviewers finish steering me around any last potholes. Give us a couple of weeks.
Update 2008-6-25: Technical reviews are done, editing is done, and it’s off for one more glance from the copy editor before it goes off to typesetting. And it’s linked from the Pragmatic “Upcoming Titles” page now. Yippee!!!
apparently, we like lame self-deprecating "humor"
So you’ve seen stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, right? If you haven’t, don’t bother. I’ll spare you the inane details. Do you remember that Simpsons episode when Homer watches an Arsenio-like comedian and hoots joyously at the TV, “It’s true! We’re so lame!” It’s just like that. A bunch of mealy-mouthed self-loathing, topped with a sprinkling of stupid stereotypes.
What’s even more ridiculous is that bloggers and the media are falling all over each other to kiss the butts of this site’s “writers.” Even the New York Times, which should know better, is practically peeing its pants trying to show how cool it is by exposing how lame we all are.
The worst part about the whole thing, though, is that SWPL injects a bunch of things that affect all of us into a list of stuff that only lame-ass WASPs are supposed to care about. Like universal health care. Or mistrusting sociopathic corporations. Excuse me, but isn’t a healthy skepticism of any large, totalitarian group something that people of all skin colors care about?
five days of fever
Wouldn’t that be an awesome title for a rock song? Unfortunately, it’s also the title of a really shitty way to spend a long weekend.
There I was, with the last few chunks of raw material ready to be shaped and dumped into the ether to satisfy my ever-hungry editor. And then wham. And when I say “wham,” I don’t mean that George Michael suddenly showed up and started singing, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Because that would’ve been awesome. No, I mean wham, this fevered fog just whumped right down onto me, and it didn’t let up for the next five days.
As luck would have it, I was on foot that day. It’s only a mile or so home from the train station, but I actually had to stop at the coffee shop halfway there for a restorative cup of tea. What am I, some effete Victorian good-for-nothing who simply cahhhn’t make it a few blocks without a cuppa? Apparently.
And yet, I was still too proud to beg the wife for a ride home. Besides, the baby had just fallen asleep, and I don’t care if you are George Michael and both your legs are broken and there are flaming tornadoes outside—ain’t nobody gonna come pick you up if the baby has just fallen asleep after a hard day’s evil.
So I spent most of the weekend hiding under the covers and whining. If I’d tried to write, it probably would’ve come out seury dkfuhg sergke dficxvvkerse ivxdfse xcvllerlkij. Actually, maybe that’d be an improvement. Anyone wanna come sneeze on me?
omg, lrn 2 capitalism!
Got an invite a couple of weeks ago to shop at the Nike commissariat employee store as a guest (thanks, by the way!). Since almost every pair of shoes I own is older than my seven-year-old stepdaughter, and since my sneakers are basically a couple of rubber molecules held together by threadbare shoelaces, we saddled up the gas-guzzler and drove into the fray.
Holy cow, I’ve never seen this many people this devoted to shopping. I thought the standard practice was to know what you needed (e.g., a simple pair of running shoes without all the air-pocket gizmos), look for a good price, and make the purchase. Apparently, I’m doing it wrong. It looks like what you’re actually supposed to do is roar agressively around the parking lot as if there won’t be any shoes left in thirty seconds, load your poor shopping cart up with as much swoosh-covered crap as you can, and complain about the checkout lines.
Afterward, we thought we’d get some lunch. Somewhere quiet, local. Something simple, savory. A bagel and coffee. Whatever.
The good local places were, respectively, no longer there, not open yet, not open yet, and closed for a private party. Even Starbucks was out of everything but meat. What kind of “free market” is this? The only stores that appeared to be open at lunchtime on a weekend were a big-box Nike and a big-box Costco. You can have any lunch you like, comrade, as long as it’s beef jerky served in a 64-pack.
If I’d wanted bread lines, I’d have taken my time machine back to the USSR. If you want me, I’ll be bartering with my neighbors for potatoes and butter. You know, real capitalism—not the ineffective corporate kind.
