Very good book on Turing's famous paper but my favorite part was the ancillary coverage of mathematicians and computer scientists that were influenced by the Turing machine.
good read on complexity theory but over my head in places
I recently started a couple new projects (Rails 3 + mongoid) and I've noticed a pattern in the way I handle coded fields. My key example is something like the following: you have a field, say status, that can have…
I'm studying for the computer science Ph.D. qualifying exam and so I've started going back through my algorithms book (Intro to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein). The first chapter was, of course, about motivating the study of algorithms.…
For a project that I'm working on at my day job, we have a governmental client for which we are building a pretty large and complicated online/offline Ruby on Rails application. As part of this app there are tons of…
So based on some customer feedback on a project I'm currently working on, I added a validation requiring that one of the dates be in the past. The validation is pretty straightforward: gist 188474 After re-running the test suite though,…
So I've been working on the Darwin hobby project again recently and decided to find out where the program is spending all of its time. It turns out that there are some really nice profiling tools in Haskell (GHC to…
Had some fun this weekend writing Haskell in response to this blog post. Code is on GitHub. It has some performance issues and it's really my first real program in Haskell, so it's a little rough around the edges, I'm…
AITP Ruby And Rails Talk Here are the slides from the talk I gave on Wednesday. Enjoy!
Awesome conference. Met lots of great people and the roundtable and ensuing conversation at the end were the best part. We need more of these kinds of conferences. Here are the slides from my talk: POSSCON - Enterprise Open Source…
I'll be speaking at the new South Carolina OSS conference in Columbia, SC on July 30th -- more details at their website. I plan to talk about the open-source technologies that we use at the SC Budget and Control Board…
So we decided to use the new dirty record feature of Edge Rails to record the history of records in our new app at work. Turns out that nullable integer fields are always dirty if their current value is NULL.…
I've been teaching a Statistics course at USC for a few years now and so, being the geek that I am, I decided a couple of semesters ago to write some course management software in Rails. I've worked on it…
So I decided to give the latest Ruby Quiz a shot. I created an Algebra module to deal with finding the root of a function -- using Newton's method. gist 470188 and here is the more specific code to calculate…
I know it's geeky, but I love it. It's great practice -- http://refactormycode.com/. The general idea is: people post code that they think could be written better and then other people refactor it and get rated on it. How cool!
I can't take credit for this idea and I can't remember the blog post where I read it... but the idea goes something like this: most development groups have cowboys and farmers. Cowboys live on the bleeding edge of technology…
It's funny what a hobby can turn into. Listening to Matz at RubyConf 07 made me reminisce about how I got started programming. He was asked "do you consider yourself to be a scientist or an artist?" to which Matz…
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