Here's a map of the trail
A while ago I took some pictures on the trail (I mentioned it before on this blog). It's like a local Serengeti.
 |
| Photoshoot at Shoreline, Mountain View |
For more professional photos of the birds at Shoreline go here. ]]>
Had a pretty good run.]]>
Here's a map of the trail
A while ago I took some pictures on the trail (I mentioned it before on this blog). It's like a local Serengeti.
|
| Photoshoot at Shoreline, Mountain View |
For more professional photos of the birds at Shoreline go here. ]]>
So why this entry ? Well, I've done another thing I haven't done in a while: I wrote yet another note in LaTeX solving some simple problem in a pompous way. I used Scala to implement the solution. Scala is coming along nicely, it feels natural to me and it has some powerful abstractions and features. There's definitely a buzz about it. A book on it is now available, the Eclipse plugin behaves well and there are open source projects that use it.
]]>
 |
| Photoshoot at Shoreline, Mountain View |
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby -w require "enumerator" Card = Struct.new(:suit, :face) IS_PLAYER = /^[SWNE]$/ IS_CARDS = /^([CDSH][2-9TJQKA])+$/ PLAYERS = %w{S W N E} SUITS = %w{C D S H} FACES = %w{2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 T J Q K A} deck = nil dealer = 0 ARGF.each_line() do |line| line.chomp! next if line.empty? case line when IS_PLAYER deck = Array.new dealer = PLAYERS.index(line) when IS_CARDS deck.concat( line.enum_for(:each_byte).enum_slice(2).map do |sf| Card.new(sf[0], sf[1]) end) if deck.size == 52 then # process deck hands = PLAYERS.inject(Hash.new) do |map, player| map[player]= Array.new map end deck.enum_slice(4).each do |round| (0...4).each do |num| hands[PLAYERS[(dealer + num + 1) % 4]] << round[num] end end PLAYERS.each do |player| hands[player] = hands[player].sort_by do |card| SUITS.index(card.suit.chr) * FACES.size + FACES.index(card.face.chr) end puts hands[player].inject(player + ":") { |string, card| string + " " + card.suit.chr + card.face.chr } end end when "\#" Kernel.exit(0) else Kernel.exit(1) end endI'm still new in this ruby world so if you see some ruby idiom I'm missing or some awkward antipattern that I use feel free to correct me in comments.]]>
Of course we got lazy, got out of bed too late, only had half a day in SF, had Nadia to take care of, so we didn't succeed to get to all locations. We started with the "Painted Ladies" in Alamo Square. Nadia was still taking a nap in the car there so no Nadia at the first location.
]]>We went to Europe in October for three weeks. We let my parents enjoy Nadia, while we first went to my x number of years (where x is the smallest abundant number that is not a multiple of 3) high school reunion. Was kind of weird to see vaguely familiar faces. Made me feel like an amnesia patient slowly regaining his memory. We then drove around Germany and Switzerland (some pictures of Zuerich here). We were supposed to go to Italy too but I was too lazy driving so we stayed at my parents place in Karlsruhe most of the time, swimming and doing bicycle tours.
I have to mention one little anecdote here from our trip (my wife insists): we went to the movies one night in Karlsruhe. We picked a newish movie theater in a fancy modern building that hosts the center for arts too. The movies were mostly mainstream american and at that time of night the selection wasn't that great. So we chose The Guardian. First surprise: tickets had seat assignments. We go to our seats and it's fancy, comfortable love chairs. They serve beer. Cool. Then the commercials start. It goes for a while. Pretty blend commercials that you see on TV too. Interesting they have cigarette commercials too. Didn't think I would see the Marlboro man again. So commercials still playing. We're hitting 30 min since we sat down. We both show signs of impatience. Then finally movie starts. First scene: a man and a woman have an argument in the kitchen. He insults her verbally and she hits him over the head with a frying pan. Hm. The Guardian ? Well, turns out we're in the wrong movie. The guy at the register misunderstood me. We had to walk out because both of us cannot stomach horror movies. So our night out in Karlsruhe was 45 min of commercials followed by a guy smacked by his wife with a frying pan.
What else ?
For some reason I haven't mentioned my 5 min of geek fame yet. I was the original author of a tool that became open source a while back. Cool stuff. I probably peaked back then. These days I do little puzzle snacks.
Oh, and one more thing: sometimes babies have it hard too 
.
Fascinating New Yorker article about the people involved in the solution to the Poincare conjecture. And in case you want to know more about the Poincare conjecture, you can follow James Tauber on his Poincare Project.
A coworker gave me this link to Eliezer S. Yudkowsky's home page with some great pieces to read. My favorite is his Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning.
]]>I needed a regex lib in this little cocoa app. There are regex packages available for cocoa (see CocoaDev). It seems though that Apple is using icu internally (you can guess that from the Predicates Programming Guide for example). I wanted to use that too. libicucore.dylib is on the system, compiled and ready to use. Unfortunately Apple doesn't provide the headers because the icu API is not final yet and Apple understandably doesn't want to commit to it yet.
So I downloaded the icu package that Apple uses and wrote my own obj-c wrappers for now until Apple officially exposes theirs. You can get the wrappers and a small how-to readme file from here. Use at your own risk.
]]>Chongqing is amazing. I'm ashamed to confess that I didn't know much about it before the trip. I got to learn and experience it, the sheer size of it (pop. 31 million), the density, everything. It's located at the point where the Yangtze and the Jialing rivers meet and it's a very hilly city with steep streets, endless stairs, funiculars and elevators that get you on streets thirty stories above ground level. There isn't much left of old Chongqing, it's a sea of skyscrapers these days (there's a saying that whenever you turn your back the city has changed). It's an economic powerhouse, expanding and changing like crazy, fueled by the electricity from the Three Gorges Dam (a pretty good documentary is coming up on Discovery Channel about Chongqing and the dam). People, people everywhere. Here are some pictures from our trip.
The last two days of the trip we relaxed in Shanghai, getting spoiled in the highest 5 star hotel in the world, the Jinmao tower. We stayed on the 77th floor.
]]>