The Myth of the Muttering Madman is a project in self-realization.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

60 minutes of Earth

Why not televise Earth Hour?

Welcome to a new blind sense of community. I won't know if everyone is participating will I? I can travel into the city and watch the lights go out, but I'm hardly going to do that.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Linux Boy



I like this ad. I also find it interesting that IBM paints a picture where Linux is learning from "The Big Players". I particularly like that the opposite is more than likely closer to the truth. Still - cool concept and clean execution.

Google themes

are pretty purty/nice :)



Update: and the themes change with time of day (and apparently weather). It's a very nice little touch. The pic above was taken while it was late afternoon/dusk here. Now it's night and here's what my google page looks like now.



Another update: Oh, and another pic :) I'm so easily amused I guess. Check out the little fox who's decided to start star gazing. Lol.

Bush Leaguer - Pearl Jam

How does he do it? How do they do it? Uncanny and immutable.
This is such a happening tailpipe of a party.
Like sugar, the guests are so refined, (look like melting mice)

A confidence man, but why so beleaguered?
He's not a leader, he's a Texas leaguer
Swinging for the fence, got lucky with a strike
Drilling for fear, makes the job simple
Born on third, thinks he got a triple

Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way,...

I remember when you sang
That song about today
Now it's tomorrow and
Everything has changed

A think tank of aloof multiplication
A nicotine wish and a columbus decanter
Retrenchment and hoggishness
The aristocrat choir sings
"What's the ruckus?"
The haves have not a clue
The immenseness of suffering
And the odd negotiation, a rarity
With onionskin plausibility of life,
And a keyboard reaffirmation

Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way through the cities
Blackout weaves its way,...

I remember when you sang
That song about today
Now it's tomorrow and
Everything has changed

Monday, March 19, 2007

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Feynman point

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Subtyping Java Generics: A lion cage is not an animal cage!

from Generics > Subtyping.

If on the one hand you maintain that English is ambiguous;

But what about an "animal cage"? English is ambiguous, so to be precise let's assume we're talking about an "all-animal cage"...
and then follow up with a justification which for all intents and purposes seems to be based on that ambiguousness;
Since a lion is a kind of animal (Lion is a subtype of Animal), the question then becomes, "Is a lion cage a kind of animal cage? Is Cage<Lion> a subtype of Cage<Animal>?". By the above definition of animal cage, the answer must be "no". This is surprising! But it makes perfect sense when you think about it: A lion cage cannot be assumed to keep in butterflies, and a butterfly cage cannot be assumed to hold in lions. Therefore, neither cage can be considered an "all-animal" cage:
I think you have a problem.

I guess that's the price you pay for trying to fit a less expressive language (Java) into something as "ambiguous" as English? Either way, to deduce that it's perfectly natural to conclude that a lion cage isn't the same as an animal cage in such a fashion seems a bit far fetched.

How about admitting that type inheritance doesn't work here? A lion cage certainly *is* a type of animal cage goddamnit. I can see that mixing types like this could break polymorphism - I take the point that a butterfly cage wouldn't be suitable to hold lions, and vice versa. However it seems like an awful kludge to expect people to understand polymorphism in terms of single classes in one way, and then tell them that generics "improves" on this to prevent lion cages from trying to hold butterflies. Mother of Mary!

Update:

Haha! Hillarious. Let's invent another concept and call it bounded wildcards to fix this problem. This seems like a hack though doesn't it? My god:
While Cage<Lion> and Cage<Butterfly> are not subtypes of Cage<Animal>, they are in fact subtypes of Cage<? extends Animal>
I'm sure this has to do with covariance, but I don't understand this, and I'm pretty sure Larry Wall would cry into his moustache while agreeing with me (though he might like the punctuation character syntax :)).


Other Java Generics links:

Java theory and practice: Generics gotchas
The Java Tutorials - Lesson: Generics
Generics in the Java Programming Language

A conservative encyclopedia you can trust?!

Welcome to Conservapedia, a conservative encyclopedia you can trust.

Conservapedia has over 3,800 educational, clean and concise entries on historical...
Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses...

Finally a site where there is no censorship or bias, just good honest "cleansed", "conservative" content. I guess the need to use the labels conservative and/or "clean" isn't supposed to raise alarm bells that perhaps we're getting one particular (most likely warped) view of the world on this site.

What a ridiculous concept.

The Fall of Rome - W. H. Auden

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.


Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.


Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.


Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.


Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.


Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.


Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

What type of programmer are you?

Take the Programmer Personality Test.

I'm a PLTB apparently :)

What the hell does this mean? Who knows, but this is what the site reckons.

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.


You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.


You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

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