Brian Hayes’ latest article for American Scientist, “The Semi-Colon Wars“, is a readable little survey of pointless holy wars in computing: semi-colons vs. parentheses, big-endian vs. little-endian, and more besides. It’s fun, and his programming language genealogy chart is very pretty.
I found this color-based shopping aide today; I guess I kind of know in theory how it works, but I have no idea where I’d start if I had to reproduce it…
Warning: this is not for people who already have a weak grasp of reality 
I bought an Acer Aspire 3620 three and a half weeks ago, primarily because it was light (under four pounds) and cheap (nine hundred dollars). It’s been nothing but trouble; most recently, I’ve been wrestling with the fact that when it puts itself to sleep, there’s no way to wake it up short of power cycling it — which is rather embarrassing when you’re in the middle of a lecture, and it insists on doing a disk check as it comes back up.
I called Acer tech support twice last week, and again this morning. The guy in Texas had a solution that seemed to work the first time I tried it, but failed miserably on all repeats. When I called back with that news, he said I should send it in for repairs, since it was clearly defective. Four to six weeks; no replacement in the interim. I asked for an email confirming that he thought it was a machine-specific problem, and the bounds on the turnaround. When he refused, I asked to speak to a supervisor; he again refused, and then hung up on me.
So fifteen minutes ago, I called Apple and ordered a Macbook. They say it’ll be here early next week (Tuesday, maybe Wednesday). It’ll be my first Mac; I expect a chorus of “w00ts!” from all the students and colleagues whose Macs I’ve been mocking for the last few years. (“That’s not a real computer — how can it be a real computer with only one mouse button?” and “Here’s a quarter, kid; go buy yourself a real operating system.”) Wish me luck…
I’ve been excited by Windows PowerShell (formerly Monad) ever since I first heard about it, as it promises to bring the world’s first great component architecture — the Unix shell — into the 21st Century. There’s no doubt Microsoft is going to push it: its official home page and team blog are being updated regularly, and fan sites are already springing up.
I have no doubt that someone will start a Mono-style project to create a workalike for Linux. In this case, though, I think the open source community can go one better. To the joy of punctuation fetishists everywhere, PowerShell uses a Perl-like syntax. If I ran the world, I’d have adopted JavaScript’s wholesale. Most programmers (at least, most of the programmers who are likely to care about things like PowerShell) are learning it anyway in order to keep up with the web, and could well be the dark horse in the scripting language sweepstakes anyway. Sure, it’s a long shot, but so’s everything in this business — and this one would be a fun longshot.
This year’s Summer of Code recipients were announced last week. I wanted to browse the list off-line, but doing it on the SoC site would have meant clicking through 102 separate pages (one per sponsoring organization). No problem: Python’s urllib lets me download pages as easily as I’d read files, and with minidom, I can parse them, and pull out the information I want.
…except that the HTML on Google’s site doesn’t escape attributes properly: there are many uses of class=foo, instead of class=”foo”, and similar potholes. OK, my 10-line script turns into 20 lines to transform these so that minidom is happy…
…and then I run into the problem of character encodings and HTML entities. The polite, professional thing would be to spend 10 minutes remembering how to get the Polish-L-with-a-slash-through-it to display properly in Firefox, and print correctly. Instead, I add another ten lines to my script to translate the non-ASCII as I go, and bing, there’s the page I wanted.
So yes, it probably would have been quicker to click-print-back-down 102 times, but I’ve saved some trees this way, and can share my results with you.
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