May 16th, 2008
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This Tuesday 19:00, at Cafe Verderop in Delft - birthday party!
Whomever wants to walk in, drink some (free, I heard) beer, and chew the fat is welcome - and bring your friends!
More information here:
Kudos to Alper - he’s organizing the party.
I found this slashdot comment, posted by a manager that uses PHP a lot. It states, very eloquently, what’s wrong with PHP specifically, and a general way of thinking about programming in general that he calls the ‘works for me’ ethic.
In addition, it includes a number of solid observations about the validity, or lack thereof, on emotional reactions to programming language discussions. There have been certain insinuations I engage in such practices, so perhaps it might be of interest 
Copy of the comment reproduced below the break.
(more…)
What to do when you’re suffering from incurable Leukemia?
You live life.
‘Train surfing’. How DO you come up with it. Brilliant. Especially considering that that’s a eurostar high speed train. Note the high-tech magnet gadget he used. Fun stuff. The new king of Urban Exploration is here.
Here’s to making the best of things.
Two excellent pieces of news for you, my dear friends, readers, and random stumblers!
Today I have received word that I am, indeed, getting my engineering degree - &it’s been confirmed.
Another interesting piece of news:
You may remember my clash with the justice system regarding running a red light that I’m certain I never did.
The result of my challenge is in - I’m off the hook. The Officer of Justice in charge of the case agreed with my complaint that stuffing me with the responsibility for proving I didn’t do it 6 months after the fact is a farce of justice and a ridiculous way to treat your citizens.
In other news I lost a whole 3 bucks at poker yesterday, but I guess not having to pay 160 for a bunk traffic ticket makes that a fairly inconsquential event.
NB: For the poker fans amongst you, if you live around delft, send an email to pokerdelft@gmail.com and I’ll put you on a mailing list about poker events in and around the area.
New Venture is one of a number of entities in the Netherlands helping startups flourish. On the advice of Lesly Mulder of YES!Delft, the local incubator project sponsered primarily by the Delft Technical University, we’ve applied a rough draft of our business plan.
The best 10 get 500 bucks. Not exactly a reason to break open the bubbly if we were to get it, but validation-wise always nice to see confirmed that the idea is sheer genius*.
I’ll keep you posted on our progress.
*) I do not pretend to be humble..
xkcd delivers every time - obscure geek humour. not the usual old standby of either LoTR or star wars references. For example, for the one linked you need to know a bit about Nash/game theory (or at the very least have seen Beautiful Mind) and know a bit about Feynman (such as by reading Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!, a book I recommend, by the way).
If you so happen to know who both of these characters are, this strip has you rolling on the floor.
Some other highlights:
It’s really true, String theory, redux, Can’t put my finger on why but I laughed at this one the hardest, It’s good to be an atheist, True Romance, Political punchline, Not so much true romance, Whoa, that’s an insult, You have to read this one to get it, cat?, Livin’ the blog, Old meets New gaming. Enjoy.
Well, today is the day that marks the one hundreth spam comment caught in akismet’s filters.
No false positives. No false negatives - perfect score. That’s some serious spam catching performance.
A number of languages have a ‘truthy/falsy’ system. Such a system infers on all possible values a notion that they are ‘truthy’ or ‘falsy’ - that they act as boolean true or boolean false if used in a situation where a boolean is needed. For example, Python and Javascript both have ‘truthy’/'falsy’ rules.
I never really thought too much about the notion, but today Oliver pointed out a bug he spent quite some time chasing down which got me thinking.
Truthy/Falsy - what IS the point? Does anyone know?
Oliver’s bug in question looked like this (python):
if checkbox.isSelected:
doStuff
Spot the problem? Yup, that will ALWAYS ‘doStuff’ regardless of the state of the checkbox, because ‘isSelected’ is a function, not a variable. And non-null objects, unless they specifically defined themselves otherwise, are truthy. functions do not have any code in them to somehow be ‘falsy’ if when called they so happen to return false.
In fact, this is simply an overlap in purposes. The (apparent?) reason in this particular case for truthy/falsy is that the ‘truthy’ nature of functions vs. the ‘falsy’ nature of unidentified names allows you to check if a given object has a function available to it. An exists() built-in would be a much better choice though. It highlights exactly what you are trying to do, and it would avoid multi-hour bughunts.
I’ll say it again, folks: Saving yourself 3 keystrokes so that you have a bunch of multi-hour bug hunts to look forward to in the future is bad language design.
Is there any serious application of truthy/falsy besides ‘look pretty’ that I missed?
Between the many reports on java going GPL and the java community, at the risk of sounding colbert-like, Getting It, java is going places.
I am usually logged into ##java on freenode (IRC) and in an effort not to repeat myself, I’ll write up some basic java guides here from time to time.
Today’s missive is about the NullPointerException