Morale-oriented programming

I want a new language. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be a new one; just rename an old one. But I want this language to do something that no other language has tried to do, something easy but too-long overlooked: help a programmer fell good about him/herself. Expressive syntax? High-level abstraction? Just-in-time compilation? While […]

Review: The Elegant Universe

I recently finished reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, and I enjoyed it so much that I thought I should write a bit of a recommendation for it. As you probably gather from the title, it’s essentially a book about the state of modern string […]

Euler 79 is in the can

Wrote up euler 79 today. From what I see in the forums, most folks just did this one with pencil and paper. Given the nature of the problem, this makes good sense, but I felt obliged to program. In the end, my code was another brute force of the search space, so nothing too interesting […]

Euler 78

Finished Euler 78. My solution is here. The problem dealt with partitioning: how many distinguishable ways can you make collections of indistinguishable objects. My initial thoughts on the solution revolved around some notion of permutations of partitions, and it was totally wrong. As it turns out, there are a number of recursive definitions that allow […]

Euler 77

I finished Euler 77 this morning. No great insights on this one; I basically just brute forced my way through the search space. I am somewhat dissatisfied with my solution in that it essentially requires a guess at a value which the answer will be less than and, ideally, close to. I didn’t find an […]

PitaTranslate 0.9 released

The title says it all. The only new user-visible feature is a settings dialog (with only one setting!), but there were some significant structural changes made for the next planned feature: access to history. A cache of prior translations has been in PitaTranslate for a while, but it was used purely as an optimization. Letting […]

EuroPython 2009

About two weeks ago, I attended several days of the EuroPython 2009 conference in Birmingham, UK. The conference is a community-run event, with some very dedicated pythonistas putting it together, and it seemed to go quite well. The venue was the Birmingham Conservatoire, a music school, so there was the occasional mixing of computer nerds […]