MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative is pretty cool. I just discovered the MIT 6.046J: Introduction to Algorithms home page. Here you’ll find notes (PDF), audio (MP3) and video (RealMedia) for the lectures. It’s been years since I learned this stuff, but it’s never too late for a refresher course.
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
At my first OOPSLA in 2004, I became so enamored with the Wiki that I eventually used one to author my trip report. This time I decided to give blogging a go (full report here), but I’d like to retain one important feature of my previous trip report style: a section called “Things to Investigate”.
One of the great and terrifying things about OOPSLA, for me, is that I find myself unable to remember all the things I now absolutely must learn. This is at once both incredibly exciting, and daunting. Most assuredly, I will not have time to research all these topics, but I want to record them (for posterity, if nothing else).
The full title of this tutorial was, “Totally Awesome Computing: Python as a General-Purpose Programming Language.” I signed up for this talk primarily because it was given by Chuck Allison, whose name I recognized from the C++ community.
Chuck started from square one, which was great since I’m a total Python n00b. However, I won’t attempt to describe all the details of Python syntax here. (There are plenty of resources online already.) Instead, I’ll focus on a few things that I found new and interesting.
Perhaps I’m tempting fate here, but I’m about ready to declare victory.
I have finally gotten to the root of a problem with one of my linux boxes (this very web server, actually). The machine had become increasingly unstable over the last 6 months, and unfortunately this was coincident with the addition of some new hardware and umpteen software changes, which effectively obscured the real culprit: leaky capacitors.
It appears that I am not the only person to have problems with leaky capacitors on this exact motherboard. The good news is that I’m now up and running on new hardware, and things are looking good.
This will be the third motherboard I’ve had in this system. The first one caught on freakin’ fire.
Some guys have all the luck.
Guy talks mostly about Fortress, which I’ve previously blogged about. The interview was conducted at JAOO 2006 in Denmark.
For more, including a nice podcast, head over to SE-radio.net.
In response to KFED Finds Out About Divorce Via Text Messaging check out this pair of comments:
Floodle:
FEDEX
floridiot:
UPS I did it again
I installed Flashplayer 9 Beta manually because the Debian experimental package didn’t seem to work. Here’s the procedure:
wget http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_linuxplugintar zxvf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gzcd flash-player-plugin-9.0.21.55sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/pluginscd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/sudo ln -s ../../mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so .
Restart Firefox and type about:plugins into the location bar. You should see something like this:
BTW, the Beta works great for me.
There are a huge number of Santa or Christmas-related ads on my site lately. I can only guess that this is because of my family (and domain) name. I find this quite amusing.
Seems like Adsense could use some tweaks in the relevance department.
In his keynote, Guy Steele spoke about a new language he’s developing at Sun called Fortress (official site at sun.com). The research is part of DARPA’s High Productivity Computer Systems initiative.
Growing a Language
Guy Steele gave a famous talk at OOPSLA ‘98 entitled, Growing a Language, and applied this philosophy to Fortress. Languages evolve over time. We should expect mistakes and plan for warts. Thus, said Steele, we need a lightweight corrective system — replaceable components with some kind of built-in version control (Note: it was unclear if Fortress had realized this vision). He stressed a desire to avoid a monolithic standard library. “It would be great if there were a dozen implementations of complex numbers.”
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