Monthly Archives: December 2005

Education

Joel Agrees

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Anyone who has had the unfortunate displeasure of having a conversation with me about Computer Science education will have heard my views on how the education that the term “Computer Science” refers to has changed, for the worse. I tend to be a bit sensitive about it all, the reason being that I feel that the course I went into didn’t turn out to be what I expected. I learnt a lot at Uni and I hold nothing against the good academic staff from whom I learnt, and I hope that I helped those students whom I taught in turn (whom? who? I wish I really knew which to use when). I don’t think that CS at USyd is completely lost, it is certainly not as bad as what Joel describes.

When I read a recent posting from the seemingly highly regarded Mr Spolsky, who does write some things that I have a tendency to agree with, I felt vindicated of the pain I’ve inflicted on many people to read that Joel Agrees.

Sadly, I don’t hold my own views on CS education from a knowing position that Joel seems to be able to claim. I’m just a reasonably good CS graduate who felt that his CS education should have been better than it was. I can’t claim to know how it could be better or what it was once, I just know that I left with a feeling that it could have been something else.

Admittedly I wasn’t the best sort of student, and sadly I’ll always look back on my attempts at being a student as being mediocre. One day I plan to rectify this, return to university and do it properly – one needs some hope. Until such a time I’ll continue to feel academically inferior to most people I know, such is life.

England

Wendover Woods

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I took my bike up to Wendover Woods (map) today (well, yesterday now) and went for a trundle. Wendover Woods is a managed reserve with a lot of trails leading through it, trails marked for walking, cycling and horse riding. Most of the cycling tracks were pretty solid, but there were some quite soft and muddy sections. I soon regretted forgetting to put on my other bike tyres (the fat knobbly ones).

The parking area is located right at the top of one of the highest points in the Chilterns, a parking permit costs 2GBP on weekends (1.5 on other days) and the area is closed to cars after 17:00. Of course, being at the top of the hill means that every ride ends with an uphill trek! Some of them were a bit nasty, and I was sliding around all over the place on the muddy stretches.

Overall it was good fun, and my first off-road ride too. I would guess that the trails are a walk in the park of more serious mountain bike riders… I’ll have to see what else I find while I am over here and try to work my way up to something less for beginners!

I took some photos while riding.

Uncategorized

Enlightenment Tracks Me Down

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Looks like the enlightenment I was going to seek sought me out courtesy of Sam.

So not a strange feature at all, an expected behaviour.

Oh, and the half a million character regex… it is not my fault! Really. I’m just working with what I’ve been given, same goes for XML – it just isn’t part of the picture. I have crazy huge regexes and textfiles with no trailing newline, this defines the bounds of my reality. However, I must say that it really is in the best interests of my employer (and thus myself) that people feel they need to do such things with regexes 😉


Regex, regex everywhere and
all the bytes did slow
Regex, regex everywhere but many more to grow

See what I have to say about my current mouse for a clue to my thoughts on the matter of switching to something more rodent based at this time.

General

Strange But Universal(?) Editor Feature

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I was wondering why some of my results were going wrong when doing some pattern matching in Perl. I have a file that gets generated by a script and has one big RE on a line that is read into another script and executed. For some reason the RE doesn’t match what it should… just then I accidentally discovered that it does match and then doesn’t match if I have had the file open in vim, so even though all I am doing is opening the file and then immediately doing a :wq (should just be a :q then I wouldn’t have had this problem, but I do also need to tweak the RE a bit at times) the file content is modified!

What is weird is I then tried the same thing in nvi and then in pico and they do the same thing! At this point I’m checking the difference using md5sum. Each editor spits out the same slightly modified file?!?!

What’s the difference? The file ends up one byte longer… all three editors add a ‘n’ to the end of the file without being asked to.

At first I thought it was something to do with line length (my RE is over 400,000 chars long) but the editors do this for files with a single line only three chars long too… so why do they do this? If three out of three editors tested do the same thing it indicates that it might not be a random decision. As far as I know the editors have completely different codebases, so it isn’t just a shared bit of buggy (unless something in a shared library is doing it). I have a suspicion that there is a reason for this and I wonder what it is!

For now I’ll just add the chomp to my Perl script (it should have been there in the first place) and seek enlightenment later.