tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32944807292705817112008-06-13T16:17:42.823-05:00Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-44953808363432415692008-06-13T09:43:00.002-05:002008-06-13T16:17:42.854-05:00

On my most recent visit to paulgraham.com, I was delighted to find three new essays for my reading pleasure. I imagine Paul Graham writes each one for me, and I always enjoy reading them, if only to disagree with them, which is what I did when I read Lies We Tell Kids. In particular, I disagreed with many of the conclusions, or at least the points made along the way toward conclusions, so I

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-4081372342440088142008-04-23T16:27:00.007-05:002008-04-24T16:00:48.533-05:00

The image to the right was not created using processing. However, it did serve as an inspiration for the latest in my series of natural-looking patterns made with cellular automata and Processing 0135. My latest masterpiece is called "zebra" and I bet you'll never guess what it looks like. I changed the colors around from "goo" and added a further limit that each pixel can only swap with the

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-81073728870975616442008-04-18T12:36:00.006-05:002008-04-18T13:03:04.425-05:00

In my real life, I have a wife, a one-year-old boy, and a two-year-old girl that occupy my attention approximately 100% of the time. Yes, even if I'm soldering or hacking or tinkering or writing, I'm usually thinking about them. As a nerd, I feel somewhat sheepish admitting this, though I know there are plenty of other nerdy dads out there, so... My wife has this parenting site called

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-32267558810407293372008-03-25T13:50:00.004-05:002008-03-26T08:40:24.103-05:00

Perl 6 is a programming language I've discussed before. Like anyone else who spent more than five minutes on the Perl 6 IRC channel, I got a commit bit to Pugs, but Pugs isn't really moving. Perl 6 has some traction on other fronts: Rakudo is moving along at a good clip, Parrot keeps getting cooler, and Perl 5 keeps getting more Perl 6 syntax built in. There are variants of Perl 6 syntax, too:

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-42437841895261770622008-03-11T15:31:00.005-05:002008-03-11T16:52:12.913-05:00

Earlier today, a coworker asked me if I thought some people were just destined for mediocrity- to be one of the crowd. Average. Well, my answer is yes. The vast majority of people suck at the vast majority of things. Who cares? I love to bumble along. I bite off more than I can chew, then chew for a while anyway, then maybe keep on chewing, or maybe spit it all out and try something else.

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-74269566474188361432008-02-29T14:24:00.006-05:002008-03-01T10:37:37.652-05:00

In the previous post, I talked about why I like Perl: Perl fudged the boundary between scripting and application development Perl gave smart people a way to share their smartness: CPANI also talked about other, better languages, mentioning Python and Ruby in particular. Python and Ruby fixed a lot of Perl's syntax problems, inherited from scripting languages. Unfortunately, I really like many of

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-66772856480375514842008-02-29T11:30:00.006-05:002008-03-01T09:42:06.231-05:00

Perl is the name of a programming language I like. Meaning, I like the name, and I like the language. Perl opened an ecological niche for programming languages that may have since been filled with other, better languages, but Perl was first. The other languages even have fun names. Python and Ruby come to mind in particular. The niche is hard to describe- people call them "scripting"

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-45175339278328260602008-02-21T22:05:00.006-05:002008-02-22T13:55:08.413-05:00

I'm immensely satisfied Processing's ability to make pictures. Today's installation is something I like to call Green Goo (tm). It's much the same as previous applets in that it uses local rules to update each pixel. In this one, we start with a randomly dispersed field of green stuff on a gray background. Each pixel of green stuff looks at its neighboring pixels, and asks each of them, "how

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-28841940627331541822008-02-17T21:12:00.003-05:002008-02-17T21:22:01.380-05:00

Hopefully most people who read the title for this post will immediately think to themselves, "Thingyness is a made-up word for a made-up idea. Thingyness doesn't even exist!" If you fall into that camp, you can stop reading after this first paragraph, since that's pretty much all I'm trying to say. Thinking of a particular slice of the spacetime continuum as a "thing" may be a useful convention

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-34141832737373488792008-02-11T21:27:00.001-05:002008-02-25T22:39:37.708-05:00

While others are refusing to say anything, I am shouting as loudly as I can into a broken microphone, courtesy of my hosting provider, who turns out to kind of suck. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to respond to aboyko, who listed all the wrong reasons for writing in an online journal. My reasons are as follows: I write in this journal so that I can be wrong publicly. Being wrong all alone is a

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-7387772815319869932008-02-08T18:00:00.000-05:002008-02-08T17:46:01.942-05:00

Taking some time out from inventing the FPGA, I read dchud's post about linking data, and it made me think, in turn about a Perlmonks post that I read last week (specifically the part in the beginning about expressions versus values). That, in turn, made me think about a paper by Claude Shannon, which in turn made me think this linking thing is much like my brain. I digress. Which is both true

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-9018402593869801252008-01-30T20:00:00.000-05:002008-01-30T17:53:18.729-05:00

This post is a response to the "high level CPU" challenge found here. If you have comments for the public, post them to your own blog. If you have comments for me, send me an email: dbrunton@gmail.com. It's hard to know where to start with yosefk's post. Perhaps a different post entirely. His definition of "high-level" is as good a place as any. The adjective high-level has meaning in

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-41396487464804846762008-01-28T22:15:00.000-05:002008-01-29T09:29:21.274-05:00

So, after reading dchud's post about the last applet, I got thinking about various mash-ups I could, well, mash. I'm still playing around with some variations on clustering and obstacles (something he mentioned in conversation), but realized I needed to make the original a little bit dumber before making it any smarter. Thus, I have replaced the previous applet's behavior of moving cells that

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-43170685532782032602008-01-25T19:00:00.000-05:002008-01-25T13:35:22.130-05:00

I've been getting asked a lot (at least twice) about why this site isn't updated more frequently. There are three reasons, really. The first is that I've been doing a lot of writing with a pencil, on paper. I know, shocking. The second is that I've been doing some work on physical things (e.g. soldering iron, circuits, and wood. Yes, the kind of wood that's made from trees). And the last is

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-75871078615289777392007-12-27T17:00:00.000-05:002008-01-25T13:37:24.101-05:00

Christmas is such a wonderful time of contemplation of the Birth of Our Lord and shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. In keeping with this day of reflection, I did not begin playing with my brand new Propeller Education Kit until last night. I spent all day on a plane, or it would have been yesterday morning. It is already evident that this chip from

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-58332691546697075432007-09-10T16:28:00.000-05:002008-01-25T13:38:47.536-05:00

For every post on this site, there are five or ten that I write and never post. My favorite topic for these never-posted masterpieces is to answer this question: What do programmers do? Before answering the question, "write programs, of course!" I should stipulate that the person who asks such a question is usually not a programmer (except when it's me asking the question, and then I pretend

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-6520523146471952422007-09-07T19:08:00.000-05:002007-09-07T15:37:42.490-05:00

John H. Conway's Book of Numbers is pretty, and the book is clever. Even after a second read, I still don't quite grok some of the Conway Games (e.g. Hackenbush), but I think I just need to circle back to Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays or On Numbers and Games. I love this book. I even love puzzling over the parts I don't immediately get. I love the pictures, tricks, colors, shapes,

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-14878178721410584232007-08-02T09:21:00.000-05:002007-08-04T10:34:04.025-05:00

This is a long overdue review. I encountered Infinity and the Mind several years ago, wanting to learn a bit more about infinity (duh). Having long been a fan of Rudy Rucker's fiction, I was actually surprised to find out he also wrote non-fiction. I think Infinity and the Mind is a great book by a phenomenally entertaining and insightful author. It served as a jumping-off point for me, into

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-38565188608593970442007-08-02T08:13:00.000-05:002007-08-02T08:29:04.740-05:00

Near the end of I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter takes a single, derisive look at panpsychism, lumping it in with other ideas that don't make sense (p 275). Rudy Rucker, when asked, "What is your dangerous idea?" responded with panpsychism. I love his description of it: "Mind is a universally distributed quality." Hofstadter and Rucker are two of my favorites. One derisive of the idea,

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-13912023020830107322007-08-01T16:52:00.000-05:002007-08-01T17:05:29.794-05:00

Programmers are comfortable with clarifications. These clarifications occur in three varieties: hacks, optimizations, and refactoring. If the specification of a task changes after the programmer has already completed the programming for the task, there are times when adapting to this change can be done without starting the task. Programmers can add a feature to existing code without reworking

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-39671633362188583372007-07-30T12:09:00.000-05:002007-08-01T09:45:34.305-05:00

The programmer lives in a simple world. There are machines, and tasks. The task articulates an abstract need. The machine understands only primitive instructions. Between the two is a great gulf, occupied by the programmer. The programmer builds a bridge over the gulf from both directions. The task must be specified, and the machine's instructions must be abstracted. The former results in

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-75966308607971258122007-07-18T16:34:00.001-05:002007-07-18T16:45:48.258-05:00

Kronecker had no way of knowing the real trouble with infinity. When he and Cantor were arguing about it, the geniuses who would make the first computers were still in their diapers, or nappies, or Windeln, or whatever they called them in their particular little slice in the space-time continuum. Kronecker thought infinite sets were unnecessary. Possibly even damaging. Well, that's putting it

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-39521676700438023082007-07-11T12:54:00.000-05:002007-07-11T14:13:15.622-05:00

Man, I wanted to like this book. It did have its good points. It touches on a lot of interesting topics (from fireflies to Bosons). It provides a picture what's it's like to the author's kind of research- both good and bad. And it does provide a lot of jumping-off points for further reading, whether it be cybernetics, catastrophe, chaos, complexity, or other fads that start with "c".

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-79240554909477614782007-07-09T11:30:00.000-05:002007-07-09T13:00:41.713-05:00

The slew of pop-science books I've read recently has wreaked havoc on my Amazon.com recommendations (while I didn't actually purchase these books from Amazon, I did claim ownership of them). Suddenly, they are convinced I want to be an atheist, and are recommending Letter to a Christian Nation, The God Delusion, God is Not Great, and God: the Failed Hypothesis. Huh. Leaving aside the notion of

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3294480729270581711.post-9602063002368112922007-07-09T10:13:00.000-05:002007-07-09T11:30:35.489-05:00

I have recently read a number of enjoyable books with some cosmology in them. I'll post the review for the most recent one in a few days. In the meantime, this month's bibliography: Chaos: The Making of a New ScienceSync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous OrderI am a Strange LoopDecoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains

Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07276307284746752706noreply@blogger.com