EdwardCoffin

55 ms·

511.
by EdwardCoffin 14y ago
You answered most of the question I came here to ask. How about chording though? I'm under the impression that there are actions that are triggered by all three mouse buttons simultaneously. I'm hoping to give acme a serious try (I have i
512.
by EdwardCoffin 14y ago
Check out the entry on metasyntactic variable in the hacker's dictionary: http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html
513.
by EdwardCoffin 14y ago
Vinge's Marooned in Realtime has some neat ideas for space combat too. I think that Niven and Pournelle's book The Mote in God's Eye had some interesting ideas. As I recall, space combat involved spherical vessels pouring energy into each
514.
by EdwardCoffin 14y ago
Mine is similar: Time Machine all the time, and a periodic drive image using Super Duper to one of two external (actually enclosure-less internal) drives, one of which is always offsite.
515.
by EdwardCoffin 14y ago
Tutorial D: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification)
516.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
There used to be a website called CanonicalTomes that allowed people to suggest and vote on the best books on various topics. It's been defunct for a long time, but you can still browse (though not search) it through the Wayback Machine:
517.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
I consider my time with Genera to be more akin to archeology and code reading. I look through it for ideas and for examples. How did a group of really smart programmers build an environment that they really liked using? What ideas and te
518.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
Kent Pitman wrote a pretty good posting in a comp.lang.lisp thread, in which he described some of the tight integration that made Genera so good: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/... . This was one of the things
519.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
Using version control and frequently checking in your changes (I'm thinking several times a day, not a big checkin once a week) will allow you to pursue avenues of exploration, possibly realize they are dead-ends, and roll back to an earlie
520.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
I'm afraid I don't know C++, so I can't offer any suggestions there. I can recommend that you take advantage of the type system, since you have one, to enforce constraints in your data structures rather than enforcing them in code. By thi
521.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
I suggest starting with a simple, straightforward representation for the data model, and start programming the functionality you want. As you implement this functionality, you will encounter pain-points which make you wish you'd used a dif
522.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
Correction: in the first paragraph "one zone identity" should be "one's own identity".
523.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
You're welcome. I transcribed it for my own records, so I could do a text search on "reinventing the flat tire" (yet another Alan Kay bon mot) and find the context. I figured others might as well benefit.
524.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
A transcript, near as I could make out: "I have a slide saying computer science is an oxymoron, software engineering is an oxymoron. This has turned into a pop culture. Because it's a pop culture that is incurious about the past and actua
525.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
There's a good anecdote about Feynman and his sense of play in Danny Hillis's keynote for the 2000 Game Developer's Conference (video at http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr-Dan... ). At 10:50 he talks about asking a p
526.
by EdwardCoffin 15y ago
This is right from his site: >Neal, in Cryptonomicon why did you call Windows and MacOS by their true names but used the fictitious name 'Finux' to refer to what is obviously 'Linux?' Does this mean that you hate Linux? Since Finux was
527.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
Yes
528.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
IBM Smalltalk (now owned / supported by Instantiations) and ParcPlace Smalltalk both had a revision control system called ENVY. It maintained a separate database that contained all the different versions of source for all your projects, an
529.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
It's possible this may be due to false advertising. I bought the Canada maps version on June 16 for $4.99, and it turned out to be a two week evaluation edition, something that I did not see anywhere in the app description before purchasin
530.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
I'm not sure how to interpret this. I get the sense that you believe that Stross and Scalzi are rationalizing what you believe is learned helplessness on their part? If so, that isn't what I believe they are saying. I think that Stross i
531.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
There are two problems with this though: a) either jail-breaking or torrenting the book (if it is even available as a torrent) isn't something that the average reader would be able to figure out how to do (in my opinion) and b) it would ope
532.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
It's quite possible that sometime in the future, even the near future, an ebook library on a given subject will be the equal of a paper library on that same subject. Right now that is not the case for a significant number of domains, just
533.
by EdwardCoffin 16y ago
In 2006 I purchased from Amazon the special edition of Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep", an Adobe eBook (the only way this special edition was available). Last year, when I went to have another look at the eBook on my latest computer
534.
by EdwardCoffin 17y ago
This reminds me of something Seymour Papert talked about when he was interviewed in "The Media Lab" by Stewart Brand, talking about an African conference on The New Math: "... At a certain point the Nigerian delegation stood up and walked o
535.
by EdwardCoffin 17y ago
In the same vein as Coders at Work is Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers: http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Work-Interviews-Computer-I... The book is now out of print, but the author has a blog on which she is gradually posting all the
536.
by EdwardCoffin 17y ago
I've had pretty good luck using the MAA recommendations list for libraries: http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/?pa=content&sa=viewDocum... I recommend reading Theodore Gray and Jerry Glynn's Brain Rot article for some ideas on what math
537.
by EdwardCoffin 17y ago
I believe the latter is just a later, expanded edition of the former. I do know that they are all part of a series that he has been revising for two decades, starting with "Algorithms" which was in Pascal, then branching out to have editio
538.
by EdwardCoffin 19y ago
I'll second "Smalltalk-80 The language and its implementation". You can get the implementation chapter online now: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/64