Twice a year students at Cambridge University compete in rowing races on the River Cam, called Bumps. As the name suggests this involves boats attempting to bump into each other, and can be good fun to watch (and hard work to do). This isn’t a site about sport, and my main interest in them is how the results are traditionally reported. I love a good diagram, and Bumps results are one of my favourites.
Now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2, I ought to post some more. Unfortunately I can’t download extra hours for my day, which would be nice.
No, this isn’t about expensive kitchens, but it is similar to Delia Smith’s TV programme and book about basic cookery which included how to boil water. Iteration and recursion are two ways in which you can get a computer to do a given operation many times in order to solve a bigger problem, and everyone will be new to them at some point, so I’ll try to explain them here. The short (and not very helpful) version is: iteration is like a washing machine and recursion is like dreams within dreams.
Another face lift - moving from B2evolution to WordPress
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To a fan of Extreme Programming, requirements may smack of bad, overweight process. I haven’t yet had any experience of requirements’ cons outweighing their pros, so I shall now sing their praises and say what makes a good statement of requirements. Any XP practitioners out there reading this, please feel free to contradict me.
Imagine, if you will, a programmer in a software development house. She has a deadline to meet, her boss is screaming, the pressure is mounting, and yet The Process dictates that every box be ticked, every form signed in triplicate - she’s suffering from Methodology. Imagine another programmer doing some customer support. The customer’s really angry about how shoddy the code is; but more importantly it’s causing them delays and time is money. To add insult to injury, after two hours debugging, our hero realises it’s the same old problem again. Another attempt to reinvent a particular wheel, which yet again ended up producing a brick. He’s suffering from anarchy.
This is a slogan of Perl, but can also apply to problem solving in general. A simple problem in physics leads to at least three different solutions when you try to write a program. It depends on if you think of the problem as a maze to be traversed, an image to colour, or a relation to close.
If you live in Germany, you will have heard of Metro - a large retailer. They are collaborating with Intel, SAP etc. on the Future Store Initiative, which is a test bed of ideas for supermarkets of the future. Unless you have your own smallholding and hence are totally self-sufficient, you will have to buy things. So, what will it be like in the future?
After a huuuuge hiatus, I’ve finally re-jigged this with the aid of b2evolution - so there are now categories, RSS feeds of various types, archives by date, comments and so on. I’m sure there will be teething troubles - b2evolution seems powerful but sometimes hard to customise. Please let me know if something’s broken.
When people discuss ethics and IT, a common view is that IT is ethically neutral. It’s a tool, like a hammer, and it merely amplifies the abilities of its user. OK, so how did you use IT today? If, like me, you’re a toolsmith i.e. you write the stuff, what kind of a tool did you build today?