lambdaphant’s posterous

lambdaphant’s posterous

Michael Matuzak  //  Programmer by day, booze drinking calamari cruncher by night.

Jan 25 / 3:09pm

Mostly Harmless

Last night I finished the last book in the HHGTTG, "Mostly Harmless". This book was much better than "So Long and Thanks for the Fish". Although a little slow at first it really picked up towards the middle/end. I don't really want to give anything away for those who are planning on reading, but let me just say this, for those of you who are tired of the series and are not enjoying the middle section of the 5 books, keep going. The crazy surprise ending is worth waiting for. Also Aurther has a daughter named Random.
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Jan 23 / 10:20pm

Charts and Maps - Bury Pierre

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Filed under  //  music  

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Jan 22 / 9:05pm

IRCcat + cowsay == hilarious

Today I managed to get some of the developers at work to hope onto IRC. Most of us talk to each other through AIM or Gtalk, but personally I think that IRC provides an easy way to announce messages to the group and is much better than isolated conversations on AIM. Plus if you really want to you can private message someone. After setting up the channel and letting people know about it people start to trickle in. We were pasting apache errors, pasting bash commands, and asking general questions. So far it was working out great. We weren't even abusing it by goofing off that much.
 
Then someone mentioned cowsay. I have never used cowsay before, but I knew what it was. A coworker brought it to my attention a couple weeks ago. This is when I got the best/worst/best idea ever. I remember seeing IRCcat, the IRC bot that the good folks at http://last.fm use, and thinking of how useful it would be. Basically the bot logs into IRC and opens a port on localhost. Whatever you netcat to that port it sends to IRC. This allows you to setup hooks for your favorite version control system and have it announce commit messages, tail logs, monitor your network, and relay these messages to your entire company (those that are on IRC anyways). All very useful stuff, but not very funny.
 
Back to cowsay.
 
 
$ sudo apt-get install cowsay
 
 
$ cowsay -e '$$' WE BALLIN | netcat -qo localhost 12345
 
Instant awesome.

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Filed under  //  cowsay   irccat  

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Jan 19 / 6:12pm

Esquimaux - Yellow

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Filed under  //  music  

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Jan 15 / 7:45pm

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

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Jan 14 / 10:36pm

SICP exercises 1.14 and 1.15 are now commited and other randomness

I did 1.14 in Open Office Draw, which turned out to be a bad idea. I really should have used graphviz to make the tree, and will probably go back and do it in graphviz anyways. Oh well. There are a lot of things I am not really liking about Draw and this problem would have been way easier to do in graphviz. A Draw like program for making diagrams and wireframes is nice sometimes, but Draw itself feels cumbersome. I will be in search of a better application for that purpose.
 
Today I realized that I need new music and in my search remembered http://www.thesixtyone.com/. Last year I signed up with an account and never used it. Now I've used the site a bit and so far I like it. The UI is a bit weird at first, and I was having trouble finding things. Some things about the site aren't really intuitive. I also don't like the modal box that pops up after ever new song when you are listening to songs on the rack. That being said so far the music is new and decent. I want to build up some status on the site to see what sort of recommendations I get. I've noticed that sites like last.fm (while a pretty awesome idea) recommend me stuff that I don't really like or I already listen to. Hopefully the sixty one will be better than that.
 
During my SICP quest I learned about successive squaring today. Successive squaring is defined as if n is even and if n is odd. This quickens things up when finding exponents.
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Filed under  //  math   music   SICP  

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Jan 12 / 8:09pm

why i still like reddit

I was a pretty early reddit user, so I got to see what it was like in the very beginning. It was for a while the number 1 site that I would hit. The news stories were great and interesting, the discussion was mostly civil and intelligent, and they had great programming articles that I really learned a lot from. Then it got popular. Everyone started using it, not just hackers. My mother-in-law started using it. Nothing against my mother-in-law. I love her and she is one of my favorite people in the world, but I don't think she is interested in programming articles. The point is it became famous to the majority. For reddit this was great. It allowed them to make money, keep jobs doing what they love, and have fun. There are a lot of comments that end the story there. Simply saying that reddit was once good now it's bad and I've moved on to something else blah blah blah... Ok so reddit isn't what it used to be. It has more noise, and the quality has dropped. Big deal. Reddit gives you the tools you need to filter out most of the noise with sub-reddits. The trick is you have to find the right sub-reddits to watch. The real gems are the sub-reddits that have 


1. Something you are interested in
2. Low number of subscribers. 

This weekend I was doing some programming in Scheme and I was a bit frustrated. I mainly use vim as a text editor and being a programmer I spend most of my time in my text editor. I even use vimperator(firefox plugin with vim key bindings) because I have gotten so used to vim's controls and it lets me move around my web browser faster(which is the other application I use the most). I normally do not get frustrated using vim, but having used emacs a bit I missed the close interaction between scheme/lisp interpreter and text editor. 

I did some googling looking for a vim plugin, but was unable to find anything useful. So I turned to vim.reddit and asked this question, "Do any of you use vim for scheme programming?"

I got this answer, which is exactly what I was looking for. Then someone posted the plugin directly. 

There are 743 subscribers on this sub-reddit. That is very small in internet terms, especially for a high traffic site like reddit. That being said they gave me a great answer and that is why I still like reddit. 
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Filed under  //  reddit  

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Jan 11 / 9:34pm

What a nice pup

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Filed under  //  photos  

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Jan 11 / 9:22pm

God Hates a Coward

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Filed under  //  music   video  

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Jan 11 / 8:58pm

Found a group on HN to go through SICP with

It is completely coincidence that I started going through the SICP course right before a group has been established on Hacker News. I'm really happy that people are interested in going through the course as a group. It's not really that I am unmotivated to work alone, but being able to talk to people who are around the same chapter and doing the same exercises should prove to be helpful.
 
It is my hope that after this course a similar group will form that wants to go through the MIT Intro to Algorithms course. There have been a couple people on the sicp irc channel that have expressed some interest, so hopefully we can make something of that.
 
What I really like about working in groups is that it also gives things a schedule. As nice as it is to work at your own pace having a schedule that you stick to can be useful as well. I'm ahead of the schedule now, and am going to try to stay ahead. I don't think I've ever been so excited to do homework before. Going through the exercises is pretty fun. I just finished up the Pascal's triangle one which took a bit of thinking. It ended up being really simple, but for some reason I was over thinking it. After some really bad attempts I had to stop myself and just let it sit for a while. I then went back to it today and read the mathematical instructions, and just transfered that over to Scheme. That took about 5 minutes. I guess when you have been working too hard you just need to let a problem sit instead of banging your head against the wall over and over. In this case the problem was really simple and I just was trying to rush through it.
 
Here is the answer that I came up with:
http://github.com/emkay/sicp-exercises/tree/master/chapter1/ex1-12.ss
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Filed under  //  programming   scheme   SICP  

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