nostrangerstolove.java
Submission to the practice problem of the 17th Annual University of Evansville High School Programming Contest:
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Atom feed for Folklore.org’s Newton stories
I mentioned last post that ten stories were added to Folklore.org’s hidden Newton section. Well, since then, another one has been added. I’m kind of annoyed by the fact that the feed for that section still doesn’t work, so I need to remember to go the index myself to check for new stories.
So, I made a feed.
http://quiteajolt.com/projects/newton/newton.xml
It’s an Atom feed, updated at the top of the hour (assuming there’s an update), containing the ten most recently added stories. I haven’t really put the generator through its paces, so it’s probably pretty flaky, but I’m subscribed to it myself, so hopefully I’ll notice if something goes awry. Enjoy it until Folklore.org’s actual feed is operational.
If you’re interested in the implementation details, the scraper is written in Python and uses Beautiful Soup to parse the page and PyFeed to generate the XML. You can view the code itself at http://quiteajolt.com/projects/newton/makeRSS.txt.
Borogoves
Went through the old posts and spruced everything up so that they at least look no worse than they did in the old theme, I think. Had an oddity with my image styling with Safari 3 and rows of thumbnails, like in this post, where the images load fine the first time, but after the page is refreshed, at least one of the images (almost always the first or last, and usually both) ends up squished to about ten pixels or so in width. Resizing the window causes the shrunken pictures to increase in width to about fifteen pixels, and refreshing after that may or may not cause one or more of the images to return to their proper size. Works great in the latest Minefield nightly, though, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s in the minority. Gotta love floating elements.
To give you the illusion that I’m not shafting you on content for the second consecutive post, while inspecting my Folklore.org post, I decided to check the site to see if there had been any updates, even though the RSS feed hadn’t been updated. And, surprise surprise, there are currently ten stories about the Apple Newton available for your consumption. No real humor or person stories yet; they’re actually more technically oriented so far, talking about such page-turners NewtonScript and the memory model.
The stories have been on the site since at least March 25, since there’s one comment stamped with that date on the story about recognizing Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” The new stories did not show up in the RSS feed, and in fact the “This is a test” entry has been removed from the feed, and doubly in fact the “This is a test” entry has been removed altogether. However, the comments entered on that entry are still in the comments RSS feed (as is the “Jabberwocky” comment I linked to earlier), and in one, Andy Hertzfeld said that he’s currently working on a separate RSS feed for the Newton stories. Here’s hoping it’s finished soon and that more stories follow.
Shades
I’ve decided to go with Barthelme as the new theme. Haven’t really made any structural changes to it, but then again, my previous theme was just a thin coating over Kubrick, so I’m not exactly forging new ground here on the frontier of using canned themes. Barthelme was one of the only themes I found that fit my three most important criteria: (1) don’t suck, (2) don’t make me retch, and (3) work.
First of many
Well, it’s been less than a month since my last post, so there’s some definite progress on the regularity front.
Tonight I updated WordPress to version 2.5, which of course is not particularly notable for any reason, but I did so by checking out the 2.5 tag using svn instead of following one of the more common methods, like grabbing the release archive or using my host’s software installation feature. Colin mentioned the ability to do this to me, and I’m not one to pass up a couple of nerd credits. Some day I’ll find the redemption booth.
Had some fun with the upgrade, though, on account of some issues with the character encodings. The problem was introduced with version 2.2, and I thought I had upgraded to that or a higher version beforehand, but apparently I didn’t. Late to the party, alas. You can read more about the problem and the fix here if you’re interested. I ended up just doing the conversion manually instead of writing a query or using a script or plugin.
While I’m on the subject of the blog, some time hopefully in the next week, I’m going to switch themes. The current theme has several issues, such as the rather ugly wall of green you get when you maximize the browser window. I haven’t decided yet what the new look will be, but knowing myself and my design abilities and sensibilities, it’ll probably end up looking something like this. I also still don’t have a profile page, or really anything anywhere identifying myself aside from the footer and occasional comment.
This will also hopefully be the first of several major site updates I have planned, including a real home page instead of the two and a half year old placeholder.
Folklore.org shows signs of life
Posting about this will have limited effectiveness, seeing as I’d put an upper limit of two on my readership total, but by that reasoning I’d never post anything. And I really need to get around to writing regularly.
I love Folklore.org.
Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling. It captures and presents sets of related stories that describe interesting events from multiple perspectives, allowing groups of people to recount their shared history in the form of interlinked anecdotes.
The site currently houses 118 anecdotes related to the development of the Macintosh 128K, mostly written by Andy Hertzfeld. They range from management decisions to hardware and software development to amusing incidents. Wonderful place to waste a few hours, all in the name of history.
Currently, the Folklore site only supports a single project, about the development of the original Macintosh, but that will be changing soon.
This hint of things to come has been on the about page for more than four years, but no sign of a new project ever surfaced. Further, it’s been ages since the last story was added to the site (unfortunately, the stories don’t include time of posting, so I don’t know exactly how long, or even which story is the most recent).
So imagine my surprise when my RSS reader alerted me to the publication of a new story, intriguingly titled “This is a test.” Perhaps it could be a harrowing tale of how a Macintosh prototype was tested for critical functionality but violently failed!
This is a placeholder story to test entering new stories. I hope that it works…
Or perhaps not. But the project that the placeholder story is filed in is interesting, because it’s not “The Original Macintosh,” but rather “The Newton, The First PDA.” So it seems that Folklore.org is being revived with stories about the development of Apple’s unsuccessful device. Exciting times we live in.
Functions I one day hope to use in a program, Part I
int fuword(const user_addr_t addr);
man page [fetch(9)]
The fetch functions are designed to copy small amounts of data from user-space.
. . .
fuword() Fetches a word of data from the user-space address addr.
Also acceptable are the related functions fubyte and fulong. I’d probably have to be working at the kernel level to do so, something I don’t really ever see myself doing, sadly, but a man can dream.
Initializing a struct with a string array member in C
Last week, I was writing some C code which used a struct that contained, among other members, an array of strings, and I wanted to initialize an array of these structs for use elsewhere in the code. My initial attempts failed with compiler messages that I’d never seen before, so instead of taking the easy way out by creating individual structs, explicitly setting each member’s value, and then stuffing all the structs into an array, I tried to figure out exactly how to make initialization work.
My Erdős number is now 6
[wiki]
- C. Butterfield, R. Mason, and S. Thede. “Sentence Selection for Extractive Summaries in PARE,” Proceedings of the Midstates Conference for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science and Mathematics, Nov. 2007, pp. 53-62.
- A. M. Surprenant, S. L. Hura, M. P. Harper, L. H. Jamieson, G. Long, S. M. Thede, A. Rout, T.-H. Hsueh, S. A. Hockema, M. T. Johnson, P. Srinivasan, C. White, and J. Laflen. “Familiarity and Pronounceability of Nouns and Names,” Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol. 31, Nov. 1999, pp. 638-649.
- J. N. Patel, A. A. Khokhar, and L. H. Jamieson. “Scalability of 2-D wavelet transform algorithms: analytical and experimental results on MPPs,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 48, Issue 12, Dec. 2000, pp. 3407-3419.
- F. Dehne, X. Deng, P. Dymond, A. Fabri, and A. A. Khokhar. “A randomized parallel 3D convex hull algorithm for coarse grained multicomputers,” Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures, 1995, pp. 27-33.
- X. Deng, P. Hell, and J. Huang. “Linear-Time Representation Algorithms for Proper Circular-Arc Graphs and Proper Interval Graphs,” SIAM Journal on Computing, Vol. 25, Issue 2, Feb. 1996, pp. 390-403.
- P. Erdős, P. Hell, and P. Winkler. “Bandwidth versus Bandsize,” Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 41, 1989, pp. 117-130.
In this day and age, having a finite Erdős number essentially means that you have co-written a paper with someone on a subject whose field occasionally involves numbers in some fashion.
Internet history
The Internet Archive is a web site dedicated to building an “internet library,” an honest to God, actual library (recognized by the state of California and so eligible to receive federal funding) housing “cultural artifacts” from the internet. Perhaps the most notable of the IA’s collections is its archive of web pages. Since 1996, the IA has periodically taken snapshots of a vast number of web sites on the internet, anything its spider can get its crawly little legs on (save for sites whose robots.txt file blocks their archiving or owners request they not be archived). The archive can be easily accessed through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to enter a URL and view all the stored snapshots for that site.
Colin and I were looking at old versions of Google, back when it was but a fledgling search engine created by two guys from Stanford and not in control of the planet as it is today. I decided to look at the histories of the 100 most popular sites on the internet in the United States, as rated by Alexa. Below are some of the more interesting things that I found.
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