ungrasping it all

2.9 Quake in Portland, OR

Posted by ungraspiness Sun, 29 Jan 2006 19:12:00 GMT

Sitting at home around 6:14pm when I felt a sizable shockwave in my apartment.
Last night when it happened the Geophysics dept. of Univ. of Washington reported the center to be just under the Morrison bridge on the east side of the river where there's a freeway interchange. Today they report it as being 2 miles away in Laurelhurst park.

Posted in Life, Science | Tags earthquake, portland | no comments

This tastes good...

Posted by ungraspiness Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:56:00 GMT

...like strawberries

def parse_directories(dir)
  sub_dirs = []
  Dir.new(dir).collect do |item|
    path = (dir + '/' + item).gsub('//', '/')
    if File::directory?(path) and item[0].chr != '.'
      sub_dirs << path
    end
  end
  @directories.concat(sub_dirs)
  #Recursively find other sub dirs
  sub_dirs.each do |subdir| 
     parse_directories(subdir)
  end
end

Tags Ruby | no comments

Scientists confirm comet samples

Posted by ungraspiness Sat, 21 Jan 2006 18:23:00 GMT

Scientists have confirmed that particles from a comet and interstellar dust have been returned to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission. “The collection of cometary particles has exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator from the University of Washington, Seattle. “We were absolutely thrilled to see thousands of impacts on the aerogel.”

more…

Tags NASA, Stardust | no comments

Lisp and game development

Posted by ungraspiness Thu, 19 Jan 2006 19:43:00 GMT

Regarding the role of Lisp and game development (specifically on the PS2), Andy Gavin has this to say…

“Lisp was just the best solution for this job,” comments Gavin. “With leading edge game systems like ours, you have to deal with complicated behaviors and real-time action. Languages like C are very poor with temporal constructs. C is just very awkward for a project like this. Lisp, on the other hand, is ideal.”

As Gavin explains, “With Lisp, one can rapidly develop meta constructs for behaviors and combine them in new ways. In addition, Lisp allows the redefinition of the language to easily add new constructs; particularly those needed to deal with time-based behaviors and layering of actions. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing inherently slow about Lisp. It is easy to construct a simple dialect which is just as efficient as C, but retains the dynamic and consistent qualities that make Lisp a much more effective expression of one’s programming intentions.”

There’s more here.

Tags Development, Game, Lisp | no comments

Learning to 'Lisp' again

Posted by ungraspiness Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:49:00 GMT

It’s been a long time and now I’m reading a book called ‘Practical Common Lisp’ by Peter Seibel after a recommendation by a colleague.

It just feels right !

Stay tuned…

Tags Lisp | no comments

Friday 13th

Posted by ungraspiness Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:13:00 GMT

These are my most favorite days of the year after April 1st. Probably because I like the number 13 so much.

Some facts about the number 13:

The ASCII and Unicode value for carriage return.
The number of Plutonium slugs in Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
The number of cards in a single suit of a standard deck of playing cards.

Tags 13, numbers | no comments

Paul Graham on the traditional office

Posted by ungraspiness Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:28:00 GMT

“To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can’t measure their productivity.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn’t need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don’t care.

That may seem utopian, but it’s what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren’t saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don’t try to fool us just by being here a lot.”

...and on management blunders…

“Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not management won’t let them. How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you—and the company saying no? The most famous example is probably Steve Wozniak, who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP. And they turned him down. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But I think this happens all the time. We just don’t hear about it usually, because to prove yourself right you have to quit and start your own company, like Wozniak did.”

from What business can learn from Open Source

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