Es ist interessant wie man Texte mit vielen Links liest. Mir ist jedenfalls aufgefallen das, Ich bei den Texte von Assoziations-Blaster, die mit Hyperlinks nur so durchsetzt sind, zwischen Links immer Pausen mache. Ich lese also nicht den ganzen Satz sondern die Links immer Wortweise.
Auch sehr interessant was Netzmanipulation angeht insert_coin.
Ich habe die letzte Prüfung vom letzten Semester bestanden. Damit sieht es bei den Prüfungen vom SS04 garnicht so schlecht aus:
| IMG | F1/2 | F3/4 | T3/4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.0 | 2.3 (5.0) | 2.7 | 2.0 |
Some months ago I had a strange dream, strange because it was emotionally intense and unusual wrt what happened in it. I was not processing what happened the day before nor was it very surreal, it was not the “usual strangeness” of a normal dream.
I do not remember most of it, but three things stuck. I played at a piano, Michael (band leader at our church) played guitar and I sung a song. I did not know the lyrics but improvised on the spot, not having to think about words, they just flowed out of my mouth.
It was amazing, I did not know how to play piano, nor did I know the song. I just sat down and started playing & singing.
I was so happy making music, moved to tears in the dream. Waking up in disbelief that I could be that moved by a dream, I touched my eyes to discover that tears really were running down my face. Even now when I write and recall it, it is still very touching.
I did play piano when I was younger, but stopped at about ten. I do sing in the youth group at our church. So I would not rate myself high, but in the dream I just knew, I just knew how to sing and play as if I had done nothing else in my life. It is the second dream that touched me so deeply and I believe both were God touching my life, something he wants to tell me, not a order of his, but something he wants to share with me.
Until thanksgiving nothing came of it, I enjoyed it but took no action. At thanksgiving however we had a meal in the church and I sat at a table with our second pastor and the young (and attractive) piano player. The pianist told of spoiled children she is teaching, how she learned playing and church music. It took some weeks but today I asked her if she can give me piano lessons. Making my dream reality.
It [emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.
Neal Stephenson
I agree with him, the fact that that lisp does use only a few characters with a special meaning for most of the code and the fact that the two most used special characters are round makes most lisp code aesthetically pleasing. Some format code though, can be like going cyrillic
.It's not a secret that Naughty Dog uses Lisp to write its games like Jak & Dexter, and you can even look at the Lisp code that was used in Abuse (it is in the data files archive).
But it is more of a secret that at least two other games owned/distributed/whatever use Lisp for their AI. Age of Empires: Age of Kings uses as suspiciously Lisep-like syntax for their AI-scripts. report from the 2002 Game Developer’s Conference Question #6 near the end: &ldquoLISP is more a favorite of academics and rarely used by game developers, though the AI in Halo makes heavy use of LISP scripts.”. And to cheat in “A Bug's Life” you can edit "lisp\options.lsp".
This is a badly written text, basically it's just some links, I found on the usenet, surrounded by a few words
The Conditions System of Common Lisp is something I have not grokked yet. I had a look at some examples and tutorials, but they usually involved too much information and code, more than I thought is neccessary for “simple” things. Sometimes in OpenMCL, when an error occurs it gives you the chance to assign/change a value or define a function and continue. But the debuggers in SBCL and CMUCL never offered such restarts. Because I knew OpenMCL can do it, and that capability ist often praised in Common Lisp, I thought it is “simple”. But the Condition System tutorials were always complex, using CLOS, creating new classes with :keywords and such, not just one, two functions/macros to remember and if one needs more one checks the manual.
So I was very happy when I found Joel R. Holvecks Usenet Post Re: Debugging Lisp code (stupid newbie question). He explains exactly what I want, getting an error, fix it, and restart from a frame rather than using one of the default restarts (abort). No CLOS, just a macro and a special operator, RESTART-CASE and UNWIND-PROTECT.
I rarely read a book in one day, but “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman” was so good that I did. So I think it is highly recommendable, it's fun to read, the scientific parts are very lightweight and you get a bit of a insight into Mr. Feynmans life.
Sometimes when I read a paper or a book/paper about a great scientist, or simply some cool (mostly CS) stuff, I want to go out and develop the next great thing, write an application which puts some of the ideas, I just read about, in use. I am inspired by those texts, I want to do something, but nothing ever came from it, nothing. I hope someday something great will come from this, or I do something great, remember what I have read, how it inspired me, and think “ well it took some time, but at least something did come of it”
Probably it is not working out because you need to try and fail beforehand, build one to scratch it. Or in other words: It won't come from nothing, there is some work to be done upfront!
On a sidenote: There is one thing, nothing important, mostly of use for myself, i believe using emacs improved my typing. Maybe it's because it got in the way with I usually handle the keyboard. Previously I used key like END or PAGE UP, but with emacs I am using more different keychors.
If somebody reads this blog, it would be nice if you left a comment.
Some days I am thinking I am not reading enough and should get out and shop for some english book. On other days I am thinking I should organise myself better and not read so much at the same time. I am really reading a lot, but not what I used to read. I have read some of Nick Hornbys books and liked them, I read Glue and Porno by Irvine Welsh, but I have read the last book of that kind over a year ago. Coincing with my LISP obsession I started reading more “scientific” books/papers. At the moment I am reading
And there are more books & papers in the queue. But I read a lot onscreen aswell, news, blogs, etc. I consider it quite a lot and fear I might loose track somewhere and not grok a paper, loosing time to reread it, if I do it at all.
A another problem is that those books collide with the “required” reading for university, scripts and such.
One of my aunts found me in ICQ today, which is totally unexpected as most of my relatives do not use their computers for anything but work.
My first obession with keyboards was when I bought two german IBM Model M keyboards. Before Model M, I used the cheapest Cherry keyboard available, and before the Cherry I used and AT/XT keyboard which had a switch at the back to toggle between AT and XT PCs. The XT/AT keyboard is a monster in size, but it was my second keyboard and it has *click*, a quality which is missing from modern keyboards.
The keyboard I would like to have does not exist, nor would it be
supported by current software. It would be like the old keyboards at
university (eg. Stanford, MIT) computers. Those keyboards had an
extended character set, eg. they supported entering λ, ∧ and
∨ directly, not latex style \lambda \wedge, \vee
Such a keyboard would probably look like the Knight keyboard or the Space Cadet keyboard. Though it might produce cokebottles and one may need quadruple bucky to enter some characters. Mr. Crunchly might complain.
Using Emacs you will inevitably stumble upon the Meta Key Problem, most keyboards do not have a meta key, (i think SUN keyboards have one, but it is not labelled as such). So the Alt key is used instead. However Meta is just one out of three, due to MIT & Lisp Machine heritage Emacs can also handle Super and Hyper, but unless you have a very very exotic keyboard you won't have them. If you have a keyboard with windows keys you could make more use of them than most users do, not mimick windows behavior but use them as Meta, Super and Hyper instead (which still gives you the option to use them as “windows” keys). If you do not have these extra keys, you are bound to rebind other keys. So, do you really use CapsLock? Do you need two Alt/Ctrl keys?
Supposing the answer is no to both questions, you can fiddle
around with xmodmap &
xkeycaps. The most common
thing seems to be swapping Ctrl and CapsLock, so that Ctrl is next to
“a”.
If you use an non-american keyboard there is even more you can do to
ease programming, like making parens and other often used brackets more
accessible.
The other reason why I'm writing this is to point to John McCarthys paper EFFECTIVE INTERACTIVE USE OF LARGE CHARACTER SETS
Gestern: Welt Astra Tag mit entsprechend viel Astra. Heute: Kopfschmerzen, Übelkeit, ..., der Tag ist im Eimer. Wahr wohl doch zuviel, aber schön ein paar alte Schulfreunde wiedergetroffen zu haben.
This is a project visualizing the world map which many fools in the world imagine. If you can see this map comfortably, you are definitely a fool.
Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB) is what I wanted to read, Metamagical Themas (MT) is what I'm reading. The problem is I just found this out after having read half of MT, I was already wondering where Mr. Tortoise was. I just hope GEB is doesn't have as many pages as MT and is easier to read and not less interesting after having read MT.
Firefox can be a nice browser, but there are two things that annoy me. It seems like it can't handle many images, bigger than 500kb, at once. As today my system was unusable because it kept swapping like wild and so that at some point the kernel (or whatever manages memory eaters) decided to kill it.
The other thing is the download window, which was fine before 0.9, but now it is like a annoying popup window. Every time a downloaded it pops into the foreground, which is especially annoying when I start several downloads. Previously it just opened when it was not there yet, but stayed in the background afterwards. I “fixed” this problem by deactivating “Show Download Manager window when a download begins” under “Preferences” -> “Downloads”
There is however once feature they did improve, the DOM Inspector. I usually use it to prepare websites for printing, that is I start up the DOM Inspector by Control-Shift-i, and delete everything I don't want. It is very handy to get rid of ads, format tables to use the whole page and thus waste less paper. And if you can't find something in the tree, you can use its finde node feature which is just point and click. Quite neat.
Somehow this article: “Forgotten language enables nonstop gadgets”, reminds me of Master of Orion, especially the news story when you find ancient yet superior technology.
at least it's more interesting than obfuscating word, and writing useless crap.
