Ape::Tracks

Elsewhere

Grand Place at Night
Originally uploaded by Paul Ingles

I came across this image while reading a technical blog, and for a moment thought it was an unusual photo of Albert Square in Manchester. Then A. wandered in and also momentarily mistook it for Albert Square.

It's actually Grand Place in Brussels.

Unexciting News

Check out
Originally uploaded by DirkeB

Current routine:

Work, lunch, work, dinner, work/Resident Evil 4 Wii/Moorcock novels

Here's an exciting snap of me buying lunch (and future dinners) at 8th Day, taken by enigmatic man-about-town Dirke Beauregard.

8th Day had a DJ set involving wind-up 78 record players to publicise their rather good wind-up torches.

Gaddr, gädda, ged

This is a photo I took today of a pike in a Manchester canal.

Before spotting the pike I'd been reading 'A Wizard of Earthsea', in which the main character's 'true name' is Ged. According to Wikipedia an old English name for pike is "ged". A nice coincidence.

Many years ago I got to eat some pike caught in a Warwickshire river, cooked with lemon juice. It tasted like river mud with lemon juice.

(I've just remembered how much sewage ended up in that river. Bleugh.)

Linux : the myth and the reality

Linux : the myth and the reality Ouch. I think Sam's been a little too harsh, but Novell's video was a bit... awkward. I like the point (there's more than just Windows vs Mac) but in an advert with a dull, inadequate Windows person and smug hipster Mac person, the Linux person should really have had a beard, worn a Think Geek shirt, and not actually said anything. Why have two stereotypes when you can have three?

Link: All three of Novell's Linux adverts, with background info

What’s Not Necessarily Wrong With Ruby

Bitwise introduces 'What’s Wrong With Ruby?' with

Matthew Huntbach takes a long hard look at the coolest language on the planet and is distinctly under impressed by what he sees…

That introduction has more than a slight aroma of flamebait. In the actual article Mr Huntbach concludes:

Despite what I’ve written above, I didn’t find Ruby horrible. If I needed to use a scripting language, it’s the one I would now use. It’s cleaner than Perl, and I like its syntax better than Python. Its object-based nature works for me: object-orientation is not the silver bullet, but it is a better abstraction for managing complexity and modelling things than anything else we have. It has picked up some useful aspects from functional programming as well and put them into a language whose ability to handle interaction between stateful objects makes it more practical than pure functional programming (still to me, real elegance, but of an infuriating kind). But it isn’t as revolutionary or as cool as its advocates suppose.

I can't disagree with that at all. Ruby is generating a lot of hype because it can trigger great enthusiasm from the hordes of recently converted PHP and Java programmers. Ruby can also support trendy new paradigms like meta-programing, BDD and domain-specific languages with ease, so tends to get caught up in all the Cool New Development trends. It's zeitgeisty!

Skip over the academic language snobbery (that's a whole topic in itself...) and there's nothing really objectionable about the article at all. I find the description of a conference full of programing academics quivering with confusion about the ungodly goings on the real world rather amusing. People are using scripting languages! Oh my goodness! Why won't they listen to us?

I disagree with Matthew Huntbach's criticism of Ruby's array handling as unintuitive, however.

I’ll give just a couple of examples. In Ruby, if a is [1,2,3] and b is [10,20,30], then a+b is [1,2,3,10,20,30]. Why not [11,22,33], which Tim Sweeney in an earlier article suggests "intuitively makes sense"? What does a[x,y] (when a is a two-dimensional array) mean in Ruby? Not what I first supposed it might mean from other languages (otherwise a[x][y]), or even what I then thought it might mean (otherwise a[x..y]).

The plus sign has this functionality for Ruby arrays (all operators are just object methods in Ruby):

[1, 2, 3] + [4, 5, 6] => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] - [3, 1, 6] => [2, 4, 5] [ 1, 2, 3 ] * 3 => [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3] Ruby's array is a list that can contain any mix of objects. The plus operator is a method acting on the list object, not its contents. The least surprising results of adding two lists is a longer list, hence the default, sugary behaviour of plus.

Matthew Huntbach would get the behaviour he wanted by using the correct classes, Vector and Matrix.

a = Vector[1, 2, 3] b = Vector[4, 5, 6] a + b => [5, 7, 9] If you want to apply a method to the contents of an object, use a map or collection method. Ruby excels at this. One of the reasons Ruby makes me happy is that its array handling is so much more convenient than Perl's.

Ruby's behaviour will not always be "intuitive" if you've spent years working with C based languages, but I think this more often just down to unlearning old habits than flaws in the language itself. Ruby quite deliberately dumps the non-OOP baggage of C based languages. Ruby was written as a replacement for Perl but is not conceptually descended from Perl, or from C. Its purpose was modelled on Perl, but it's ancestry is more closely linked to Lisp and Smalltalk.

Although I think Ruby succeeded in following the principle of least surprise in most cases its fundamental differences from the C based languages do cause a few points of confusion. My own favourite is Ruby's evaluation of "truthiness".

In most C-based languages 0, "", undefined are false. Anything else is true.

$result = 0; print "Hello" if $result; => In Ruby only Falseclass and Nilclass are false. Any other defined object is true, including 0 and empty strings.

result = 0 print "Hello" if result => "hello" (Both approaches are justifiable but I'm now happier with Ruby's approach. 0 and "" are still, present valid data. In my contrived example above 0 is still a result)

Another gotcha is that every named variable is effectively containing a reference to the actual object. By default assignment copies the reference, not the object.

a = "HELLO" b = a a => "HELLO" b => "HELLO"

a.downcase! a => 'hello' b => 'hello' This is rarely a problem but occasional use of .dup is required.

Update: If you want to read more interesting responses to the Bitwise article then take a look at Why's admission that yes, he is what's wrong with Ruby, and make sure you read the comments.

This all coming from a guy whose current interest is the Aldwych programming language.

Ouch.

Update: Storm in teacup continues at Bitwise!

Zelda procrastination

When I was half-way through the final dungeon in Wind Waker I suddenly realised that I was about to complete the game. No more sailing around in the rain. No more pointless rupee collection. What if I never work out what those windmill things and strange sockets do in the town? So I stopped playing. I can always finish it later.

It's happened again - I almost beat Ganon in Twilight Princess on my first attempt, before realising that I was about to finish the game. After about 80 hours I had almost reached the end. What about the other hearts? I've not done everything properly - insects, poes, flight-by-chicken tricks. I've not raced against Yeta yet!

It's good to know what's left: The Twilight Calculator

So Ganondorf can wait. I'm off looking for golden bugs.

Year of the Golden Boar

Happy New Year!

That Snow Moon

That Snow Moon
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe.

It's not often Manchester has something interesting in the sky. Yesterday the moon was rather large and rather orange, so I tried to take a photo.
The full moon in February is sometimes referred to as the Snow Moon or Wolf Moon.

Suits

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work.

That would give me an interesting range of stuff to wear...

I can't stand wearing suits. It's like being in drag, or fancy dress. Disguising myself in someone else's uniform. Expensive, uncomfortable, impractical. I'm very glad I don't need to.

People who choose to wear suits (believing that suits impress or make them seem more professional) are unaware of the impression many people actually get. With any luck the damn things will die out in a decade or so.

Link: Mark Cuban - Why I Don't Wear a Suit and Can't Figure Out Why Anyone Does !

Missing Invader!

Missing Invader!
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe.

The Invader outside Piccadilly Railway Station disappeared over Christmas, along with it's concrete block. I've heard that the concrete block made it difficult to clear litter nearby so the whole thing was removed.

I'll try to find out what happened to the invader. Letters and emails have been sent.

Happier days: http://www.flickr.com/photos/binaryape/26612012/in/set-604388/

Update: Mystery solved