Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror is the most prolific of the programmer bloggers that I read on a regular basis. His content is hit or miss but today’s article, Everything’s Fast For Small n, is worth it for this little animated sorting algorithm comparison:
I want a garage.
From the GNU Coding Standards:
If you do support Windows, please do not abbreviate it as “win”. In hacker terminology, calling something a “win” is a form of praise. You’re free to praise Microsoft Windows on your own if you want, but please don’t do this in GNU packages. Instead of abbreviating “Windows” to “un” [sic], you can write it in full or abbreviate it to “woe” or “w”.
On another note, I need to stop suffixing all of my post titles with “Of The Day.”
At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section:
longjmp()andsiglongjmp()make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used.
Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too).
My friends and I started a blog for our long running club of snobbery: Scotch & Politics. Brendan posted an excellent piece today entitled “Why I Don’t Like Blogs” and Mike brought his thoroughly engaging Daily Briefing into the mix. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Some people have been asking for pictures from the wedding. I’ll add photos to this collection at Flickr as I upload them.
What a weekend. I got back last night from my trip to Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama. My friend from college, Thomas, got married to his gorgeous girlfriend, Jennie.
It was a helluva trip. We went to Waffle House a million times, drank every night and saw the biggest aquarium in the world. We even got in an accident and stood on the side of the freeway in the sweltering Georgia heat for an hour and a half. All of this was before the wedding even started.
The wedding was fantastically lavish and incredibly swanky, not to mention an absolute blast. Thomas and Jennie make a beautiful couple and their friends and family are second to none. Everyone I met was incredibly nice and generous, which was a nice break from New England “hospitality.”
It was, however, incredibly hot in Alabama in August. I wish someone had told me that would be the case. Birmingham is impossible to get around; all the streets look the same. And all the streets are really three-lane highways; half of the time we were driving was spent cutting people off to get to the right lane for our turn. I can certainly understand why no one walks anywhere in either Atlanta or Birmingham.
I flew back on Continental Express, so I got to fly in a (relatively) small plane. It was a nice experience but the flight attendant was a little odd. She did the usual “turn off your electronic shit” thing but then insisted that people remove their headphones even if the device to which they were attached was off. One guy had the gall to argue with her, so she got on the PA and threatened to have him met at the runway by FAA/TSA/FBI agents for questioning. It was a little vindictive and not very becoming of a person who purports to provide good customer service.
Bruce Schneier points to a paper that explains why terrorism doesn’t work. I’ve always wondered why people think that terrorists are out to kill everyone. From Schneier’s post:
People tend to infer the motives — and also the disposition — of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, you assume it’s because he wanted to — and is a violent person — and not because he’s play-acting. If you read about someone getting into a car accident, you assume it’s because he’s a bad driver and not because he was simply unlucky. And — more importantly for this column — if you read about a terrorist, you assume that terrorism is his ultimate goal.
… the most insightful part is when Abrams uses correspondent inference theory to explain why terrorist groups that primarily attack civilians do not achieve their policy goals, even if they are minimalist. Abrams writes:
The theory posited here is that terrorist groups that target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has an extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism — the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties — (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed. Target countries are understandably skeptical that making concessions will placate terrorist groups believed to be motivated by these maximalist objectives.
In other words, terrorism doesn’t work, because it makes people less likely to acquiesce to the terrorists’ demands, no matter how limited they might be. The reaction to terrorism has an effect completely opposite to what the terrorists want; people simply don’t believe those limited demands are the actual demands.
I’m back from the dead! Here’s what I did:
It was all a blast. Now, back to real life.
A while back Kerri and I, along with her sister Margaret and Margaret’s seafaring boy friend Dan saw a guy named Willy Porter at the Regattabar in Cambridge. He was very good and one of the tracks (from that night!) that I really liked is the unreleased “Bradley Wilson”: