I personally prefer a reasonable coding assignment over a normal interview. IMO it’s reasonable and makes sense to have people write code as part of the vetting process for a job writing code.

Whoever did the test in the shortest time with the “cleanest” code wins. Everyone else loses.

Is this really a thing? I’ve never seen a hiring process setup as a direct competition before.

I have to agree with Helge Bahmann’s comment on the blog. inotify isn’t designed to solve the problem the author is trying to solve, and there are good reasons why it can’t behave the way the he wants it to.

If the author wants to see what a process is doing with the file system he should use something like strace and monitor the fs related calls. inotify doesn’t even tell which process triggered the fs change, so it doesn’t solve his problem.

A much better example, IMO, are these Markov generated Tumbler posts, trained with Puppet documentation and a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories.

I recently finished Karel Čapek’s “War With the Newts”, which I highly recommend. Fantastic sci-fi satire.

Now I’m in reading limbo. I’ve read a few chapters into several books that seem interesting (on fluid simulation, computer vision, knot theory, computation geometry), but haven’t had one really capture my interest yet. At some point I’ll just have to pick one.

Saturday I need to tune up my bikes, and then I’ll probably go to the coffee shop and work on some Lisp projects or go through the huge backlog of photos that I need to touch up, categorize, and upload.

Sunday I’m biking with a friend in the morning, and then I’ll probably be back at the photos or Lisp.

I’d like to start contributing to some larger Lisp projects (SBCL and StumpWM, or maybe porting common-qt to support Qt5), so I’ve been familiarizing myself with those codebases and looking through their issue trackers for problems I can fix. So far I’ve tinkered with them, but haven’t contributed anything back.

I am mildly dismayed by the amount of active participation it takes to enhance browser privacy. I’m not suggesting that all these extensions should be baked-in to Firefox, it’s more commentary on how out-of-control privacy things have become on the web today.

I’m not sure what to think of this.

On one hand, it’s an interesting problem and a neat idea, and I can think of some cool ways to enhance the output for specific languages (for example using plists in Common Lisp to store hints for the natural language generation, or the same using annotations in Python).

But on the other hand, I’m a little concerned about the lack of examples, and I don’tunderstand the criteria they use to evaluate the quality of the generated text. The two examples in the paper are nearly useless, IMO. One step removed from comments like “Add 5 to x”.

To be useful, the natural language explanations need to be at a higher level of abstraction, and without “general AI” there’s no way they can do that using only the syntax tree. So the problem circles back to the developer needing to add annotations and/or comments, which is right back where we are now.

Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics does a much better job covering fluid simulation, without the lame, “I don’t know what this is doing” crap.

The book doesn’t include source code, but it explains the math behind fluid sim really well.

A funny thing I realized a while back is that, for me, there’s very little difference between Linux and the BSDs, and to some extent even OSX.

Most of the software I use on a daily basis (Emacs, StumpWM, SBCL, Chromium, rxvt, zsh, etc.) is virtually identical between systems. There are some nuances, like GNU vs BSD userland tools, but for the most part it doesn’t affect me much.

OSX has a different UI, but even there most of my time is spent in Emacs, Chromium, or the terminal (with zsh), so it ends up being nearly the same, too.

I’d never heard of “snap” before, and I’m not sure I understand what it’s trying to do. Is it just a lazy way to publish closed source software on Linux? I really don’t see why I’d choose a snap over using my regular package manager.

This is really a non-issue as far as I’m concerned.

Browsers (either standalone or with plugins) let users turn off images, turn off Javascript, override or ignore stylesheets, block web fonts, block video/flash, and block advertisements and tracking. Users can opt-out of almost any part of the web if it bothers them.

On top of that, nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm to visit “heavy” sites like CNN. If CNN loads too much crap, visit a lighter site. They probably won’t be as biased as CNN, either.

Nobody pays attention to these rants because at the end of the day they’re just some random people stating their arbitrary opinions. Rewind 10 or 15 or 20 years and Flash was killing the web, or Javascript, or CSS, or the img tag, or table based layouts, or whatever.

I laughed when I saw this as historical. I was working on a Z Series security project last year. They’re everywhere.

I just got back yesterday from 8 days of bike touring, so I’m relaxing and getting used to being at home.

I’ve fallen dangerously behind in the Prolog class I’m enrolled in, so most of the weekend will be spent catching up on that.

I’m also hoping to finish reading Karel Čapek’s “The War With the Newts”.

Outside of eBikes, which I don’t know much about, the rest of the bicycle world scores pretty well on repairability, in my experience.

I built up my current bike from components, and I’ve done all of my own maintenance for years now, and although there are a lot of standards (some official, some not), most companies are really good about saying which ones they’re using and what they’re compatible with. And for pre-built assemblies, like derailleurs, hubs, and free wheels, most of the better manufacturers will have PDFs available on their website showing how to disassemble, clean, and reassemble them.

SRAM and Shimano are “okay” on this, but the mid-to-high end companies, like Paul, White Industries, Industry Nine, etc. are usually really good.

I feel like APL took terseness too far. Every code snippet looks like somebody was playing “code golf”. It may be great for demoing the language, but won’t it be a nightmare for real code?

And I could technically achieve (nearly) the same thing in Lisp by giving my functions and variables names like “ῴ”, but it’s easier to understand when it’s spelled out like “solution-matrix”. Just because everything can be abbreviated to a single symbol doesn’t mean it should be.

Also, as neat as these purely algorithmic problems are, what does real life code look like in APL? What’s an HTTP request look like? How would I parse a JSON blob?

From the outside, the controversy over PEP 572 looks like out of control bike shedding. I’m honestly surprised anybody on either side felt strongly enough that it would get to this point. AFAICT, it’s just syntactic sugar to streamline a few common idioms and avoid a common typo.

I only skimmed after the first few paragraphs, but I think each of his complaints applies equally to non-distributed version control.

I’m also skeptical of his assumptions. Building from source is a developer activity. A clueless (for lack of a better word) end user, like “Joe”, will be in over their head regardless of the VCS used. And generally speaking, for any non-trivial software, cloning from the VCS is likely to be the easiest part of the process.

Brutalism as an architectonic style is disgusting and oppressive as shit (intentionally). I spent quite a bit of time in a brutalist building, I felt like shit. Like how did intentional hostility ever become a trend?

Last week’s bike trip was even more awesome than I had hoped. We had a few mechanical issues, but we were prepared and everything worked out. We circled the Holy Cross Wilderness area, and the scenery was absolutely beautiful. Now I need to go through the roughly 800 pictures I took during the trip, and I’m hoping to get them posted to SmugMug later this week.

Besides the pictures, I need to catch up on the SWI Prolog course I’m taking. I read a little bit during the trip, but I’ve fallen far behind on the course work :-/

At my job I’m finishing up a couple small features and a couple bug fixes before our next release.

I don’t understand what I’m supposed to take away from this.

Don’t emacs and LaTeX work on *BSD? And even AbiWord and OpenOffice? Is it a joke? Is it making a point about using simple tools?