I’ve been coding Python for most of the day. Well, in between housekeeping duties. I have a vague sense that my love of Python has reached a plateau. What bothers me most is that the data model is quite complicated. The distinction between sets, frozensets, tuples, and lists leads to a lot of ugly code, [...]
I have been watching the three series of “Yes Minister” and two series of “Yes Prime Minister”. I do not quite have the energy to describe it fully, but one important component is the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby, a civil servant who often replies to questions from his minister with convoluted and verbose answers. [...]
I had a guest spend last night at my place. In the garage. Late afternoon I decided to close the front door. There on my doorstep was a small white rabbit. “Pinky”, I later learned he is called. I decided not to invite Pinky in, but rather treated him to apple slices before I made [...]
I have not been posting for about two weeks, not because I was extremely busy (I wasn’t), but because I have been extremely ill. There is not physically wrong, but I have been having terrible sleeping problems. I cannot fall asleep at all. When I finally do manage to drift off at 5am or 6am, [...]
The algorithms I usually work with are pretty simple. They are mostly variations on depth-first or breadth-first search, and the difficulty comes from the complex data structures. Most of the details of how to do things have been worked out. So, it is quite enjoyable to implement a slightly more involved algorithm. Yesterday and today [...]
During a break today I watched parts of Pixar’s “Wall-E”. As with many movies I think I like it better now than before. It has had time to mature in my mind. Whenever I watch a movie I tell myself not to try not to judge it immediately. I find that over time my view [...]
When I was younger, about 14 or 15, before laser discs came into general use, we had cassette tapes. The quality was not always the best, but I kind of miss them. At some point someone lend me a cassette tape with strange, very strange, very very strange music. I no longer remember who or [...]
In the early nineties our little research group had a couple of servers, one of which was called “mort” after the Terry Pratchett character. TP was very popular around that time in the group. When we replaced the machine, I suggested we call it “umfi” which — I claimed — means “death” in Xhosa. Today [...]
I spent a significant part of the day preparing for my Software Engineering course. My prospective teaching assistant suggested half-jokingly that we use multiple-choice questions (i.e., monkey puzzles) to make the marking easier. I dismissed the idea, but after a little research I am seriously considering this option. MCQ (as they are known in the [...]
I must have taken a stupid pill yesterday. In the northern hemisphere Orion sets before the dogs or the rabbit, just like in the Southern hemisphere. The only thing he is chasing, is the bull. Today was devoted to watching Futurama commentaries, preparing notes for my model checking course, and thinking about automata. So there [...]