Recursion
So w
hat happens when your can of WD-40 is left out too long and the trigger gets stuck and won't stop spraying? Spray it with some WD-40?
Did you know that WD-40 stands for "Water Displacement - 40th Attempt"? Thanks Wikipedia!
Types of People
Found this in some notes from a while back (I believe it was at a series of classes at Faith):
VRP - Very Resourceful People
These people IGNITE Spiritual Passion (Mentors)
VIP - Very Important People
These people SHARE Spiritual Passion (Peers)
VTP - Very Trainable People
These people CATCH Spiritual Passion (Proteges)
VNP - Very Nice People
These people ENJOY Spiritual Passion
VDP - Very Draining People
These people SAP Spiritual Passion
(If someone knows the source I'll post it -- I can't remember)
Non-Conventional Advertising
To get in and out of town I must traverse about 2 miles of very built-up, very trafficky, retail- and service-dotted roadway. I was surprised to see over the last few years how often stores are using real, live humans as "flaggers" holding signs for their businesses or for special offers. Sure it's less creepy than dead people holding up signs, but my gut-instinct was that it would cost too much to pay someone and that the impact on sales would be minimal. Apparently my gut is wrong. According to this article I learned three things I'm surprised by:
- This is a competitive position
- People are fine with $7.50/hr for this work
- It can have a dramatic effect on sales
Don't get me wrong, money is money and I know that people will do all sorts of things. I just think it would be miserable work. Time would pass slowly as you stand in the cold with maybe a slight drizzle coming down. Cars beeping, bikes almost hitting you. Bleh... I'd much prefer the McDonald's job. On the bright side it takes no skill, you can probably listen to music and daydream.
On the other hand, I'm surprised that this really helps business. I can see how it may make some people aware of businesses that are squirreled away in strip malls. I guess I'm not part of the demographic who even uses strip-mall businesses for much of anything so perhaps I'm no more inclined to visit them whether they're having a special or not.
I don't know what my blog readers think, but I'm surprised. Any opinions? Any experience being influenced by or being a flagger?
Thanks to the Business Opportunities Weblog for the link...
So Pretty
It's truly amazing what beauty people can create. The Internet can be a fun place.
Wait for it to load and then move your cursor around and see what happens.
Because Perl is Too Straightforward…
...someone created Perligata.
Here's an example:
#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w use Lingua::Romana::Perligata; maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe. meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da. da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis. dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto fac sic nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso. lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis. cis.
is equivalent to:
#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w print STDOUT 'maximum:'; my $maxim = <STDIN>; my (@list) = (2..$maxim); while ($next = shift @list) { print STDOUT $next, "\n"; @list = grep {$_ % $next} @list; }
No Way…
I think I actually got a snippet of Symbian code to work on the first attempt! This is a first... Maybe I'm actually getting the hang of this. I just find the whole "descriptor" concept very odd.
Anyway, all I was trying to do was replace all plus signs with spaces. I normally wrestle with descriptor nonsense for a while but this time, I got it on the first try!
_LIT(TestData, "THIS+IS+A+TEST"); HBufC* heapBuf = HBufC::NewLC(255); *heapBuf = TestData; TPtr pHeapBuf(heapBuf->Des()); while (heapBuf->Find(_L("+")) > 0) { pHeapBuf.Replace(heapBuf->Find(_L("+")), 1, _L(" ")); } CleanupStack::PopAndDestroy(heapBuf); //Don't forget!
Bleh... stupid Symbian. Thank goodness I didn't have to change the length of the descriptor...
Updates
So I've been sloppy again and not updating the site.
Without further ado:
1) Safari Online was a little bit of a disappointment. I like the selection, the price is reasonable, the searchable formats are wonderful, the ability to cut and paste example code is stellar. So why disappointing? I don't use it. My reading is usually in the evening. I want to be able to sit back in the easy chair and read. My laptop is fairly comfortable but staring at a bright back-lit screen is most certainly not. It's just so much more comfortable to pick up a good old tree-based book and read that. Some of the advantages are still there. If I find something in my book, I can easily cut and paste it from Safari Online but now I'm basically just using Safari as a quick digital copy for all the books that I already have. Bleh... Not worth it. What would make it worth it? If the Kindle-gods worked with O'Reilly to make the entire Safari Online site browseable using your Kindle. I would buy it. I would pay extra. I would make a weekly pilgrimage to the Amazon headquarters. It would be great. But they don't. Furthermore, from what I've heard, on the software side, Kindle doesn't do tables, mono-space fonts, and some other things that really are almost required in order to read a technical programming/development related book.
2) Work has been busy. C/C++ has been pretty minimal... I'm getting much more comfortable with memory management issues and have been pleasantly surprised to see that most C++ code that I dig up out there basically looks like mine. I'm still definitely not an expert at decrypting some of the C++ deep magic code that I've seen, but then again, I bet the authors of most of that stuff don't even understand it anymore. C# has been a mixed bag. I've really enjoyed getting into the "new" features of 3.0 and 3.5 which I had been neglecting until recently. A lot of time spent on Stack Overflow has helped get m e up to speed with Linq and some of the other fun new language features. Generators, extension methods, anonymous functions... it's all sorts of fun.
3) I've been able to watch as the value of various investments that I can't easily cash out of has continued to dwindle. Thankfully, much of what I did have invested in long-term investments I was able to move to much less volatile funds but it's still been rough. On the bright side, the end of the world may be near as the Mayan calendar has it set to 2012. Obama would have the rare privilege of being the final President and (also on the bright side) wouldn't have to worry about his legacy as no one would care how big the national budget is at that point. Also, this would save me a lot of frustration with the whole Social Security thing. One can only hope...
4) Wife has been busy with her business. She's continued to embroider like crazy. I've been trying to push her to do more since she's only pregnant with 3 boys under 5 at home. 
She tells me that some day she may expand her business but not now. I think she's in a good situation. On NPR (motto: Unbiased news since 1970 or whenever it was we started getting funded by liberals!) there was an interview with a business owner in the same general "baby products" market. Her remark was that the "economic crisis" we're experiencing will likely drive a baby boom as people's lives and schedules slow down and more time is spent at home. But hopefully the economy picks up soon so they can afford overpriced baby products for their new brood. I got her a new iPhone so that she can become more of a geek. She really isn't nearly geeky enough and it bothers me. I was interested to see that even the Taliban are getting in on the iPhone action (see picture).
Time precludes further updates.
...Will write more later...
Variable Naming
Some in computer programming have insisted on using the prefix is for all boolean data types. I've been bumping against this lately. I think it's silly. It's a form of Hungarian notation which seems unnecessary considering that the compiler/interpreter in almost all cases will help us deal with type issues. For readabilities' sake, wouldn't it make sense to name something what it represents? For example, if the boolean variable represents the state of being done, I suppose isDone may be an OK name. But if it represents the state of something that may or may not have been done 3 years ago, a better name might be wasDone. What if we want special checking to take place if a flag is set? Should that flag be called isCheck? It seems silly -- maybe shouldCheck would work. What if we're talking about ownership or class relationship. isChild works as a name to indicate class relation, but hasChildren is a perfectly logical name to define the inverse relationship. I saw a few places that advocate the use of helping verbs (have, has, had, do, does, did, shall, should, will, would, may, might, can, could, and must) or verbs of being (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been) to prefix these names. This makes sense. However, we speak English and sometimes in English we drop helping verbs (think of did for example). Is something.didSucceed better or worse than something.succeeded? There are numerous similar examples.
I think in the end, naming variables to make them readable is much more important than following some convention. Or perhaps I should rephrase that: the convention we ought to follow is the convention of written English, not some tightly defined arbitrary subset.
Driving me Crazy
One thought for alleviating some of the tension in driving:
Imagine each driver on the road around you is your mother.
Really, people -- it feels better to drive places and not get there as quickly as you can because you took the time to treat others with courtesy.
