My blogging seems to go in fitful spurts puncutated by days of inactivity...
The Tcl/Tk conference in Portland was great. It's quite possibly one of my favorite annual events.
There are always interesting talks and presentations. Will
Duquette, Steve Landers,
Jean-Claude Wipler, Jeff
Hobbs and many others are always doing really interesting work.
In the week since I've gotten back from Portland I've tried to get started on a
NaNoWriMo
entry for this year, but one week into November and I've only got a couple of pages written. I'm
still miles and miles away from the 50,000 word goal with only one nagging problem: I don't have a
plot idea that I'm terribly excited about yet. I suppose that might explain my sluggish writing so
far. Anyone have plot suggestions?
I've spent quite a few evenings working on Project
Eueler math/programming problems. As of right now I've solved 70 problems for a total of 959 (out of 1,607
possible) points. That puts me in 113th place overall and 3rd place among Tcl'ers.
On Wednesday night Shauna sprung on me the idea of selling our house and buying one a couple of streets over
(in our same subdivision). I didn't tell her no; I suggested she look into it further and gather more information.
Well, when Shauna wants to get something done she's not one to dilly-dally. Within less than twenty-six hours of her
floating the idea we had a signed, sealed & accepted offer to buy our neighbors home on January 16, 2006.
Rachael wants to see pictures. I don't have any,
and Shauna hasn't joined the ranks of blogging family members,
so perhaps Rachael can pester either
one of our realtors...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, November 06,
2005
at 21:03
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There is a list of Tcl bloggers
being put together. I made it into the "blogs that never or rarely
mention Tcl but are written by Tclers." Perhaps if there were more people
blogging regularly about Tcl we could have our own Planet Tcl like
the Planet Lisp folks have.
If there were a category for blogs programmed in Tcl, I'd definitely
qualify, since I naturally just had to reinvent the wheel to my own tastes.
I haven't ever added categories to tag specific posts with, but
Google
tells me that I do occasionally talk about Tcl.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, November 09,
2005
at 23:14
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I'm hosting another meta-blog in a format similar to
Planet Cleverly:
m0smith's planet.
I work with Matt and he has more blogs than I have siblings!
Matt actively seeks to avoid Jakob Nielsen's
8th top blog design
mistake: mixing topics. That's why incredible illusions are
hosted on a different blog than (possibly) the world's first plot of a GEDCOM file.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, November 15,
2005
at 18:50
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Growing up, once I was old enough to begin dating, I remember my Mom
observing that "still waters run deep"...
* * *
In the spirit of trying to be a better Tcl
Blogger I guess I should note that a comp.lang.tcl post I made last
week was selected for this weeks
Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! (first time since
June). Cameron Laird wrote:
Michael Cleverly lucidly exemplifies one of the ways Tcl
can take your breath away, this time by providing a
remarkably expressive framework for parsing data that has
no apparent connection with the language.
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse...
More impressive, though, is that Michael and others give
at least four alternative approaches to the parsing problem,
all of which Melissa Schrumpf trumps with her expertise in
TestStand.
My "lucid insight" was in observing that the file the original
poster needed to parse could, with a handful of supporting [proc] definitions,
be thought of as completely valid Tcl code which can be [source]'d.
* * *
I've heard people refer to Tcl as The Chameleon Language
before. On the surface of it Tcl seems rather simple. After all, there are
only eleven simple rules
that define the entire language. Seems almost like a quaint toy in the face of
real industry-strength enterprise-capable
languages.
But such simplicity is tremendously powerful. Tcl, though simple, really
is deep in the sense that my Mother talked about. One can mold the syntax
of the language like clay and cast it to be whatever
he wants.
That's why when I look at a DHCP server's leases database file I see ready-made Tcl code
staring back at me. Life really is too short for syntax, so it makes sense to add some sugar and let Tcl do all the heavy lifting for us. Not only breath-taking, but tremendously liberating, once
you see things this way...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, November 15,
2005
at 19:47
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Tonight I solved my 77th Project Eueler problem and am, for the time being, in 100th place
overall. As per the scoring system, I'm now rated as being "67% Genius."
Project Euler, hosted at mathschallenge.net is an applied mathematical/programming contest. That's the sort
of thing that a lot of people might find terribly tedious, boring, or down
right scary, but I thoroughly enjoy the challenge. The goal is to write
programs to solve particular mathematical problems or puzzles—a caveat
being that programs should generally run in under a minute. (I confess that
on a couple of occasions I've taken a brute-force approach that took
longer.)
There are thirty problems I have yet to solve. To date most of my
solutions have been coded in Tcl, though for some I've dusted off my C &
Lisp skills (as atrophied as they are). In some cases the quickest
route to an answer was to have Tcl code generate C code which could
be compiled on the fly & executed.
If you are interested in programming & problem solving (in any
language(s), some problems being very amenable to shell scripting even) I'd
encourage you to sign up and take a stab at some of the problems.
A complete list of problems is available on the mathschallenge.net website.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, November 17,
2005
at 23:38
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Well, today was rather disappointing. There is
only one
college football game that matters each year (at least INMNSHO):
BYU vs Utah.
A nailbitter through the fourth quarter, the game went into overtime
after BYU kicked a field goal to tie things up at 34-34. The U. scored a
touchdown in OT making their fourth consecutive win. But a 41-34 loss is much
better than (another) 34-31 loss. Too many bad memories with a 34-31 score.
:-(
Even more disappointing, Becca's "RED chili" was nowhere to be had.
Just like a typical Ute fan to pull a bait & switch like that! ;-)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, November 19,
2005
at 23:09
40 comments
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Via Point of Law
I see that some of our neighbors to the north apparently do not understand
even the basics of set
theory as taught in grade school:
A federal government department has cancelled a three-day-old edict that essentially banned the hiring of able-bodied white men over the next several months.
The directive had said managers at the Public Works and Government Services Department could hire only the disabled, women, aboriginal people and visible minorities until at least the end of March....
A statement issued by the department yesterday suggested the policy had been "misconstrued by some as being non-inclusive. This was not the intention."
Truly a great moment in affirmative action...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, November 22,
2005
at 18:45
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When I read about a college student who is
more than half way toward his goal
of making a million dollars, and he is doing it just by selling pixels
on his website for
$1 each...
From the Wall St. Journal article:
It was just a few months ago that 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. He'd filled a notebook with ideas before jotting down this simple, if rather audacious, query to himself: How Can I Become a Millionaire? . . .
Instead of selling banner ads, text links or splashy videolike ads that fill a screen, Mr. Tew opted to hawk the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel. A pixel is a tiny dot of light and color, and each screen has tens of thousands of them.
Mr. Tew created a home page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. (Mr. Tew doesn't charge his advertisers anything when a visitor clicks on the ads.)
And it's working for him: "As of yesterday evening, Mr. Tew said he was $623,800 toward his goal, more than enough to pay for college and earmark some cash for his next entrepreneurial venture, he says."
... I wonder why can't I have dumb ideas that make so much money??
Why isn't my friend Little Jeff a
billionaire yet???
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, November 23,
2005
at 09:52
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