Category Geek

No, It Doesn’t Play Pong

Steve Jobs says
that he wants to keep third-party applications off of the
Apple iPhone:

Mr. Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third-party software developers to write applications for the new handset — from ringtones to word processors.
…

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

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77.1 µHz…

The frequency at which PZ Myers has been posting to Pharyngula, on average.

Me, I’m in the 4.4 µHz range.

How Do You Spell the Names of the Months?

One construct that I’ve seen (and used) a lot in Perl is a hash that maps month abbreviations to numeric values that can be fed to POSIX::strftime:

our %months = (
    "jan" => 0, "feb" => 1, "mar" => 3, ...
);

This is useful for parsing log files and such. It works, it’s quick and easy, and it doesn’t require a whole tree of dependent modules (which are always on the wrong side of the Internet) to be installed.

But what’s always bugged me is that this is the sort of thing that the machine ought to know already. And besides, it’s US-centric: what if the person running the script is in a non-English-speaking country?

Fortunately, I18N::Langinfo knows the names of the months. Read More

Unexpected Science Song

We all knew that They Might Be Giants
know stuff,
but even so, I was pleasantly surprised, while listening to
this month’s episode
of their podcast, to hear
Cut the Strings:

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Pirate Mode Code

I don’t know whether anyone noticed, but on Talk Like A Pirate Day, all the text on this site was converted to pirate lingo.

This was done through
that I consed up for the occasion. Feel free to steal download and use it.

When to Optimize

The First Rule of Program Optimization:
Don’t do it.

The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!):
Don’t do it yet.

— Michael Jackson

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A Statistical Approach to Deranged Creationist Liars

Over at the Bad Astronomy weblog,
Blake Stacey
wrote the following,
which is reproduced here with permission:

Come on, we’re scientists, right? How about we break out the mathematics. Just for kicks, I’m gonna model Coulter as a Bernoulli process!

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The Drake Equation, Creationist Version

(I didn’t write this. To the best of my knowledge, it’s by a guy who posts as astronomer on invisionfree.com’s Creation Vs. Evolution board. I just reformatted and tweaked it a bit):

(For those who don’t know, the
Drake equation
is an estimate of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations out there with which we can communicate.

The Drake Equation

N* * fs * fp * ne * fi * fc * fl = N

Where:
N* = number of stars
fs = fraction of sun-like stars
fp = fraction of stars with planets
ne = number of planets in habitable zone
fi = fraction of habitable zones where life does arise
fc = fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings
fl = percentage of the lifetime of a planet that is marked by presence of a communicative civilization

The Drake Equation, Creationist Edition

NG

Where:
NG = Number of places chosen by God.

How to Write A Good API

A lot has been written about how to design a good user interface, but very little about how to design a good programming interface (API: Application Program Interface, or a library). This is somewhat surprising, since an API is nothing more than an UI for programmers, and programmers are normally good at writing tools for each other.

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Reading Martin Gardner Pays Off

(Or: Life Imitates Logic Puzzle)

Lately, to measure out water for coffee, I’ve been filling whichever mug I intend to drink from, and pouring it into the coffee maker. That way, I know there’s the right amount.

This morning, I was making coffee for the drive in to work, and noticed that I had poured coffee from a regular mug, rather than the larger travel mug I was going to use. I wasn’t going to upend the coffee maker over the sink to empty the water and start over. I could have just estimated how much more water I needed to add, but came up with a cleverer solution, below the flip.

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