One sign/measure of a well-designed application s/w is the amount of context that needs to be held in memory/mind/brain when you are modifying/enhancing functionality. Or even just fixing bugs.
Month: February 2012
Reading modes
1. Quick skim to glean the basic hypothesis of the article/text
2. Careful read to check the logical consistency
3. Extra careful read to see if it’s well-writter(usually, a function of brevity and coherence)
4. Editor mode.. look at spells, grammar, punctuation.. actually read out aloud etc..
I mostly indulge 1 or 2. Am trying to reduce the mode1 reading and increase mode 3 reading.
Let’s see.
Chennai Impressions — part II
has been a big revelation. Am seeing things in a very different light. More
cynical, more objective. Today some propaganda playing some song here.
Few observations:
Rheoteric involves
1. Presenting correlation as causality
2. Overwrought metaphors
3. Meme/idea/thought Repetition
4.
While the ADMK, seems to take a more communist/socialist approach, the DMK seems to take the “Tamil”, self-respect, authoritarianism approach.
Julia random number generation
Generating a Plain Text Corpus from Wikipedia
AtD *thrives* on data and one of the best places for a variety of data is Wikipedia. This post describes how to generate a plain text corpus from a complete Wikipedia dump. This process is a modification of Extracting Text from Wikipedia by Evan Jones.
Evan’s post shows how to extract the top articles from the English Wikipedia and make a plain text file. Here I’ll show how to extract all articles from a Wikipedia dump with two helpful constraints. Each step should:
- finish before I’m old enough to collect social security
- tolerate errors and run to completion without my intervention
Today, we’re going to do the French Wikipedia. I’m working on multi-lingual AtD and French seems like a fun language to go with. Our systems guy, Stephane speaks French. That’s as good of a reason as any.
Step 1: Download the Wikipedia Extractors Toolkit
Evan made available a…
View original post 505 more words
Browser internals..
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowserswork/? Phew exhausting… I’ll never look at web programming the same way again… also will go back and read up on modular decomposition tree from graph theory again..
S/w engineering disease
So much for the case for fixing bugs as early as possible, testing as much as possible before release. and TDD being a tool to help with that….
http://lesswrong.com/lw/9sv/diseased_disciplines_the_strange_case_of_the/
Though the point of having a TestSuite is that it reduces the amount of context, you have to upload into your brain, when you modify/add functionality to old code. Giving one look at the test cases will give you a better idea than reading through the code to figure out what changes will affect what related features. Test-Driven is one extreme form of doing it and is not recommended for everyone.
my ideal blog post
That’s the kind of blog post i wanna write…:http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#vitamin-d
Runner’s high is for real
Holy zarquon.. runner’s high is for real… i.e to say it’s not an over-wrought metaphor. The first thing to go when i drink, is my control over my pronounciation. I either jumble it(syllables,words, you name it) up. Not much slurring but just spoonerism. Anyway, today after some quick rounds, i was thinking and was recalling a quote in the context of that thought.. I recalled the right quote, but i was reordering the words and it took me 2-3 tries to get the order right.. Note, all of this just recalling(i.e: verbalizing only in the mind/brain and not actually vocalizing..)
