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  • starting a busy Sunday quite early with …

    … brainstorming and sorting lots of ideas.

    Actually I got up at like 07:00, because of an acute case of senile insomnia here on my side. I don’t suffer from that too often, just like 2 or 3 times a year. I rather enjoy a heavenly sleep, I have to confess.

    I had neglected my personal and company book keeping for weeks, and I couldn’t delay that for yet another day.
    I felt rather fresh after 2 hours of sleep, having enjoyed quite a good part of The Godfather II with son#1 last night. He fell asleep in the middle, and I decided I would be more productive w/o the movie destracting me; I only watched the movie yet another time because son#1 had sought my company for that, which I loved.
    So I got up, started brewing lots of coffee, enjoyed the new shower gel, emptied the trash, and attempted to clear my mind with brainstorming and sorting lots of ideas.
    Once I would be able to wake up son#1, I would let him teach me Computer Aided Mind Mapping and create my 1st ever computer mind map together with him. I have been rather looking forward to that since yesterday. Son#1 has grown quite a little and started being a man, sort of in a way. I am proud on him. Not that he and/or his mother let me contribute a lot, so clearly: I’m not proud on my contribution to raising him during the last couple of years, but rather just on him as my son. Whatever… – I hope: YKWIM.

    A couple of minutes ago mother of son#2 called and they are going to show up here for joining us for Sunday morning breakfast, so my mind clearing time is coming to an end right now.

    To be continued…

  • Thomas Fahle’s article on App::perlbrew

    I seriously find Thomas Fahle’s article on his own blog (see the blog imprint!) on App::perlbrew a rather good piece of work.

    I always appreciate, if authors have an extensive literature list, by which they show, from where they know, what they know.

    I also find it rather interesting, that Thomas mentions, how important it is to use “hash -r“, and I searched the articles, he mentioned in his literature list, but it wasn’t mentioned there.
    To be honest with you, I assumed I wouldn’t find an article, where that is mentioned beforehand.
    I can actually refer you to an article, where it got mentioned on 2010-07-02:

    App::perlbrew – Manage perl installations in your $HOME or wherever you want

    That article certainly showed up on ironman.enlightenedperl.org.

    Of course I can’t tell you, whether Thomas Fahle had read that article at all, and he just forget or missed to add it at the end of his literature list, and whether his advice comes out of his own professional expertise. But I just thought, I wouldn’t easily let him easily get away with this bad attitude of his.

    But you now have at least two articles, where you find this good advice – so don’t you forget it!

    Nota bene:
    I do know for sure though, that Thomas Fahle doesn’t really like the style of »the author« of that other article. You’re not suggesting I should add a comment on Thomas Fahle’s blog, telling him he might have missed an article in his literature list, are you? You might actually do so, if you think that’s a good idea.

    Getting carried away a little – leaving perl grounds…

    Another nota bene:
    I also do happen to know, that »the author« of that other article has made a similar experience back in the early 1990s: he had had a rather cheeky colleague then, calling himself a Ph.D. (gained in the U.S.S.R.). »That author« had used Finite State Machines within their company for the implementation of GUIs, not really making a secret of that. You are certainly right in that Finite State Machines are not rocket science, Finite State Machines for GUIs aren’t rocket science either, but you will probably not be able to create a long literature list for Finite State Machines for GUIs. That’s the issue.
    All of a sudden then that U.S.S.R. Ph.D. mentioned Finite State Machines to their management and to their company board – and without giving any proper respect to »that author«. The name of that U.S.S.R. Ph.D. is Martin Hartwig. As usual within the GDR system than he was a very proper and very long-term member of the GDR communist party. Actually as proper, that he was able to organize a visit permit for a Western visitor to rather sacred places of the GDR research system. So presumably he wasn’t quite an ordinary member of the communist party then. You shouldn’t consider the GDR communist party as just a colorful shiver of younger European history, which didn’t create too much harm to the GDR population. O, no! The GDR communist party did actually create a lot of harm then. But we don’t want to go into detail on that here. Martin Hartwig always wanted to appear as a solid and trustworthy member of society. We doubt he is. A big “thank you!” to Thomas Fahle for giving us the opportunity to create this little shock to both these guys. It’s all about bad attitudes.

    Strange memories appearing at strange times. Together with more experiences of the bad kind they did cause nightmares and long lasting harsh difficulties once. And in the end they destroyed a family, and a boy grew up without a close father.

    Pls excuse this author for getting carried away at times, but I guess you sort of enjoy it occasionally.

    Update / 2010-07-26:
    A furious commentator confused members of the GDR communist party with Russian spies. I’m not sure, whether that’s just because of a low IQ (but then low IQ guys don’t follow the ironman blog or this one) or is that out of lack of basic political education?

  • THE industry calls the iPad the porn-pad, why would that be???

    THE industry loves the iPad, iPad owners make THE industry’s
    economical figures explode.

  • What I learned at the Emerging Languages Camp

    journal.stuffwithstuff.com » Blog Archive » What I learned at the Emerging Languages Camp

    Re-shared from a tweet from Matz, who in turn …

    Amos Wenger (ooc)

    Any domain has two levels of knowledge: the core ideas for the domain, and the cultural wisdom around those ideas. The first tells you how to do stuff. The latter often tells you which stuff not to do. Any well-versed programming language person can tell you about both recursive-descent parsers and generated parsers. They’ll also tell that generated parsers are the “right” way to do that.

    Most of the time that advice will save you from wasted effort, but sometimes I think it keeps people from going down paths that may actually be fruitful. Sometimes the thing that everyone knows is true isn’t. (For example, every language I know of with a lot of real-world users actually does use a hand-written parser.)

    Amos is a young French iconoclast. If he’d been born in a different time, I expect he’d be a brick-tossing anarchist. One advantage that attitude gives him is that he and the others working on ooc pour features into the language while the rest of us are still sitting around fretting about minutia. I think a lot of us could use some of that “let’s just fucking do it” spirit.

     

  • The Fault Tolerant Shell

    The Fault Tolerant Shell

    Found this through one of Yukihiro Matsumoto‘s tweets.
    You know him as  the co-author for The Programming Language Ruby and also as the inventor of the language itself.

  • son#1 teaches me mind mapping – I’m so proud!!!

    During my last conversation with my lawyer (she is cute and pretty tough, I hope she is not going to take too much money, but we are going to see; she e-mails with me and she sends me the communication with the other party as PDFs, I am amazed!!! she is a digital native!!!), I asked myself, how often I would have to explain her that situation. Afterwards it came to my mind, I should have created a mind map together with her, and just for fun I did a little research and I also involved her there. And you know what: she told me the names of the software, she has already been using. I was embarrassed, at least a little. Alright I installed Free Mind, and I am a little stuck with it.
    Weekend comes, son#1 shows up again, …, I ask him, whether he know the term Mind Mapping, and yes, he knows it, I am kidding with him, asking, whether he can show me (and teach me), how to do it, and you know what: he said: yes. Yes, he will do it. That was last night or so, around our watching Godfather I.
    Now today I set up an account for him on my MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (and of course he loves that, who wouldn’t, it is a hot Mac!!!), I dragged Chrome in his dock, removed a lot of the unnessary stuff there, explained him, how to use the “right mouse button” with the mouse pad and how to scroll with the mouse pad, a few things. And now he gets into that, and I am looking forward to son#1 teaching me mind mapping. I am really amazed. That will be good for the two of us.
    I’ll keep you updated, watch this location!

    Update / 2010-07-24 18:28:
    Although son#1 and son#2 are actually hard to confuse, this is actually about son#1.
    Son#1 is 13 years old (he learned mind mapping at school, I guess with a teache from SW Germany as well), son#2 is 3.9 years old, I am >40.
    And another thing I should add:
    Whenever they started calling that sort of stuff mind mapping: one of my teachers on high-school actually taught us that sort of stuff ages ago. And I guess they also did at the Agora of Alexandria.
    What a luck, this sort of stuff cannot get copyrighted!!!

  • Parrot – everything we have heard so far seems wrong

    Emerging Languages camp – day 1 | Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity

    Allison Randall gave a talk about what’s currently happening with Parrot. It seems they are going for a new rewrite of most of the subsystems. One of the changes is going from a CISC style op code system to a RISC style. Parrot apparently has over 1200 op codes at this point, and they want to scale back everything to about 20-30 bytecodes instead. As a preparation for this, they have ripped out the JIT and will revisit most of the subsystems in Parrot to see what can be done. Allison also gave the audience the distinct impression that Parrot is still quite slow for user programs.

    It looks like everything we have heard so far and what we told others seems wrong. Isn’t that embarrassing?