"It Should Run for President"
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 25 May 2007 17:34:00 GMT
Two music reviewers traded iPod shuffles, then disparaged each other’s taste in music. It’s hilarious.
Four Times Annoyed
Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 26 Nov 2006 07:59:24 GMT
This last week I got some interesting bad news about my eyes: apparently my pupils over-dilate in darkness or semi-darkness. I have my first old-man disorder at the ripe old age of 25. On long drives at night I will have to turn the dome light on to prevent my eyes from perceiving every light source as a giant luminous splotch with an echo above or below it. This is also why I needed new glasses recently, but why I didn’t notice until I left my job and started working nights. There is no cure for this problem except time; as I age my pupil dilation should get less responsive, which will counteract this problem.
I just finished reading Demian by Hesse. A great book, except for all the cult stuff near the end. There are a number of passages that I really identified with, but the strongest was this:
“Sometimes when I ran through the streets in the evening, unable to return before midnight because I was so restless, I felt that now at this very moment I would have to meet my beloved—as she walked past me at the next street corner, called to me from the nearest window. At other times all of this seemed unbearably painful…”
I was very annoyed that I could identify so thoroughly with a character who goes on to basically endorse Anton LaVey satanism. Tsk-tsk.
I was thinking today about programming in Erlang and how much I enjoy it, but at the same time, though I enjoy my big functional languages, not one of them has a decent Mac library; most of them don’t even have decent Unix GUI libraries or web frameworks. Erlang at least has a promising-sounding web framework but I am tired of web programming for the moment. It’s so very occupational.
I became annoyed thinking about OCaml and how much I had liked it. OCaml is basically the marijuana of functional languages—you start there, and then you get into the heavy stuff like Lisp, Haskell and Erlang. Or else you remain trapped with OCaml, perhaps consuming liters of the Russian vodka of languages—C++—at the same time. “Well, it could be worse.” Yes.
I am disappointed that nobody has anything to say about my quicksort post. I suspect that one is for the ages, and in a couple years, someone will be quite glad it’s there. Nobody pointed out that I am doubling the constant factor in my partition, or that I should use median-of-three for better performance against pre-sorted lists. I expected Lance to show up and demand some merge sorts, which I haven’t coded since my second year of CS.
For myself in response to the Brick Science article, I wrote a small linked list library in C. It turned out to be about 55 lines of code, and it took me about 15 minutes to write, which reassured me after reading that the author expects 155 lines/hour. I would not expect anyone to achieve that in a reasonable language, but with C you can really fluff things up with meaningless brackets and wasted type declarations. Even Lisp, which is the most text-liberal functional language, is a factor of two or three improvement over C. I remember days at Clearwired where I was productively producing about 10 or 20 lines of Python an hour. Of course, HTML is a bit cheaper.
I have become a real dick about movies. Elitism is the opiate of the Dan, but I have tried to be conservative about which things I am an elitist about: heavy metal, programming languages and religion being the primary fields, but also somewhat about politics. I have more-or-less ejected politics as a synonym for theft, graft, stupidity, and waste, no matter the incarnation, so into the open slot I have tossed movies. My brother hasn’t helped, we have been alternating classics I have loved for some time with known-good classics of his interest, and both learning a lot. Plus now we have a lot of pretentious hatred for new movies. It’s a perfect fit with the rest of our hatred set (music and television).
I am now going to attempt to read another classic book, since I usually read about four non-programming books a year and Demian is number one for 2006.
On Mekong Delta
Posted by Daniel Lyons Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:15:43 GMT
Mekong Delta has also been very busy trying the classic adaptation and they are pleased to announce it is possible to play it.
—Progress Report 5, Official Mekong Delta Thrash Pages
G-d I love this band. And metal in general.
Guitar Hero
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:29:36 GMT
I don’t often play video games but Guitar Hero has caught my attention. And it’s only been out long enough for one sequal to come around.
Playing Guitar Hero gives you the sensation you’re actually creating music. I used to really like Frequency, which operates on the same principle except for shit techno. Guitar Hero, on the other hand, is about butt rock. Now that’s something I can get behind.
Apparently all of my friends in Albuquerque are huge fans of this game, which means spending time with them is going to involve spending time playing it. My only complaint is that all the time invested in it could instead be invested in, like, playing guitar.
Doug Lee
Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 14 Sep 2006 04:33:37 GMT
It’s very difficult in this world to know when you are good at something. Often you try something, put your whole heart into it, and almost nobody seems to appreciate it. If anybody in this world understands this, it’s Doug Lee.
Doug Lee, former vocalist of Mekong Delta, I salute you. Even though my favorite album is The Principle of Doubt, your vocals are the voice of Mekong Delta.
The amazing feeling I have, having heard the new Delta material on the Thrash Pages, looking forward to not one but two new albums from my favorite band in the near future, is tempered with an element of uncertainty. A new vocalist hasn’t been selected yet. I’m hoping (and expecting) that Ralf will select someone whose voice can soar over the complexity like the previous vocalists, but it isn’t going to be Doug unless someone on the internet knows where he is and can put him in touch with Devoraz on the Thrash Pages.
About Me
Links
Syndicate
