When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · June
· · · · 07 (3 entries)
Abstract Numbers Yadda Yadda · Following on the update to the binary search piece, I am in receipt of multiple emails, and the target of multiple web links, all saying, in a superior kind of tone, “The poor boy, that primitive Java stuff broke because he doesn’t have auto-magical big numbers like Lisp-n-Smalltalk had back in the day.” Thank you for raising my consciousness. If you’ll grant that the trade-off between fixed-size hard-wired datatypes and more abstract ones has been under discussion since Turing was a tot, I’ll grant that many attempts to pack the data in tight are symptoms of premature optimization. But space-vs-time trade-offs are just not gonna go away; deal with it. And I’ve had my working set blown to hell more than once trying to build the parse tree for what seemed like a moderately-sized incoming message, in a language that turned out to be just a little too high level. And the “My thought-experiment language solved that in 1976” mantra is boring.
Drunk Men On Bots · Yet another piece of good work in irritatingly-anonymous webspace. On Bots is at once instructive and beautiful.
Microformats Search · The Microformats kids all have really great hair, and the coolest acronyms; still, up till now, it’s all only occasionally seemed plausible to me. But this new Technorati microformat search thing, I look at it and for the first time really think “This could be big”. For example, look at kitchen.technorati.com/event/search/vancouver (even the URI is interesting). It looks like some “sort-by” buttons and authority and keyword filters would improve things; and if this catches on some Monday the spammers will be there by Wednesday. But still, we could be seeing it happen: small pieces combining to produce something really, really big. [Disclosure: I have a conflict of interest with respect to Technorati.]
