Posted by Damien Pollet
Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:56:41 GMT
There has been cool stuff with fonts recently: the free fonts manifesto, Vitaly’s list of good free fonts, some updated instructions on how to install fonts for LaTeX…
Soooo yes, I admit it, I’ve been playing again with fonts under LaTeX… well okay, that was more like frustrating myself with baroque software and misleading documentation—I must have something like a Marvin in place of a standard subconscious… (who said Bender? I heard you!)—but hey, in the end it worked, so let’s call that play, huh? :-)
Read more…
Posted in Graphics | Tags font, latex, opentype, praise, rant | 4 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Sun, 05 Nov 2006 21:42:13 GMT
I just found about Golly on MacUpdate. It’s a simulator for the well-known Game of Life. I must say I’m bluffed: click on the image to see what it looks like from a distance…
Golly is open-source and available for many platforms including Mac and GTK.
Posted in Link | Tags fun, game, life | 1 comment
Posted by Damien Pollet
Fri, 03 Nov 2006 08:41:27 GMT
My current work involves visualizing software to help understand and evolve it; we’re ordering some books by Edward Tufte, in particular The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I’ll post a review here when I read it.
Posted in Reading | Tags book, review, visualization | 2 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:42:57 GMT
Here is a cool hack with the exceptions of Smalltalk that Lukas Renggli just explained to me.
Sometimes the code needs access to an object that is well-known but whose actual identity depends on the context. A global variable or a Singleton pattern would be justified because the role is global, but that can’t work directly if the actual object playing this well-known role changes in some parts of the control flow.
Read more…
Posted in Coding | Tags smalltalk, trick | no comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:13:51 GMT
Aaron Swartz has posted a series of interesting articles about the wrong, right, and fun things about learning and progressing. That hit home for me because I recognized many of the problems I have in implementing MySelf >> getLife :-)
Posted in Personal | Tags psychology | no comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:01:00 GMT
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags fun | no comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Sun, 01 Oct 2006 19:12:43 GMT
…explains Mark Dominus:
When we identify and document one, that should not be the end of the story. Rather, we should have the long-term goal of trying to understand how to improve the language so that the pattern becomes invisible or unnecessary.
Examples are the iterator methods in Smalltalk and Ruby, or the singleton using once in Eiffel…
(via lesscode)
Posted in Link | Tags design, language, patterns | 2 comments
Posted by Damien Pollet
Fri, 29 Sep 2006 18:53:34 GMT
…well, you extend it, of course :-)
This afternoon Stéphane showed me the Object haltIf: method in Squeak. The boring part of the code goes like this:
haltIf: condition
"... here be fun stuff (see below) ..."
(condition isBlock
ifTrue: [condition valueWithPossibleArgument: self]
ifFalse: [condition])
ifTrue: [Halt signal]
When the condition argument is a block, haltIf: will spawn the debugger only if condition evaluates to true. So instead of adding a self halt. in your code, you can put self haltIf: [ "hmm do I really want to halt here?" ].
The funnier part goes like this:
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Posted in Coding | Tags smalltalk, trick | 1 comment
Posted by Damien Pollet
Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:44:24 GMT
Strongtalk is a rethinking of Smalltalk-80 with an optional strong static typing system; it was bought by Sun before it could be released to become the basis for the Hotspot Java virtual machine. Now Sun just released it under a BSD-style license.
It currently only compiles in the m$ world but hopefully that will change soon.
Update: See also James Robertson’s report and David Griswold’s announcement on the Squeak list.
Update 2: Avi Bryant also mentions Strongtalk while answering to a post on Ruby performance by Joel Spolsky.
Posted in Link | Tags opensource, smalltalk | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Damien Pollet
Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:04:14 GMT
…going back home from the railway station when the city is too cheap to have public transports on sunday night and a rain draining system good enough to handle a 1h summer storm.
Posted in Personal | Tags rant | no comments
