Category: Journal

Easter Bullets

I thought maybe [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/flying_squirrel/) may have obviated my need for [bullet posts](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/tag/bullets/), but I like writing them, so you may just have to keep putting up with them. It’s lazy writing, but sometimes I have stuff to say and can’t be bothered to compose paragraphs. Sorry.

* **Happy Easter**!
* A co-worker is one of the minds behind [Zombie Jesus Day](http://zombiejesusday.org). **Happy Zombie Jesus Day**!
* I actually went to **church** this morning. The pews were pretty empty for the early, which was kind of sad, but apparently they were serving a free breakfast at the same time, which might have accounted for the lower attendance. There seemed to be a much more respectable number of people showing up for the second service.
* They had a “Used with permission” notice of **copyright** license for bits of hymns printed in the bulletin. I was a little put out by this, mostly because at least one of the hymns in question was about 130 years old.
* Easter **chocolate** count: 2 fund raising chocolate eggs from the church (it’s traditional… they’re very sweet), 4 truffles from [The Village Chocolatier](http://www.villagechocolatier.ca/Welcome.html) in Bloomfield and a bunch of low-grade foil wrapped eggs that I had to eat so my mother wouldn’t.
* The sacrifices I make…
* No actual **bunnies**, tho.
* Just finished watching the **Doctor Who** Easter Special, [Planet of the Dead](http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/episodes/S0_06). Lots of fun. A bit silly. I enjoyed it.
* On the way into Belleville, I took to listening [**Brotherhood of the Daleks**](http://www.bigfinish.com/114-Doctor-Who-Brotherhood-of-the-Daleks), featuring a blue coated Sixth Doctor and [[wiki:Charley Pollard]]. In an interview on the disc, writer Alan Barnes describes the writing of the episode thus:

> [[wiki:Terry Nation]], whenever he was going to do a new Dalek story, there’d always be some basic gimmick to the Daleks, where they’d have something new or had something taken away. I literally wrote down a list of mad ideas, one of which was they turn into communist, one of which was they’re high on drugs, and one of which was they think they’re [[wiki:Thals]], and I ended up doing all of them.

Indeed. I thought it was fantastic. :D
* There’s a series of [**Red Dwarf Specials**](http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/news/2009/04/10/back-to-earth/). I stopped watching Red Dwarf sometime around season 7, but I’ll give these a shot for old time’s sake.
* They came out with another [firmware update](http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2009/04/new-sansa-fuze-fimware-add-support-for-slotradio.php) for my **[[wiki:Sansa Fuze]]**, adding directory browsing support. I bought one after they released a firmware update with [[wiki:Ogg Vorbis]] support. With those, it catches up with [Rockbox](http://www.rockbox.org/) in terms of functionality, and I don’t have to feel bad about my Sansa e200s dying.
* Now all I need is them to add a feature that shows me which podcasts I haven’t listened to and it would be my ideal player.
* I’ve been (so far indirectly) getting involved in Kitchener-Waterloo’s nascent [**hackerspace**](http://watspace.pbwiki.com/). Actually, I think I’ll save that for its own post…
* I should probably start packing and head back to Waterloo soon.

Wiki Page Links 0.2

I hadn’t really thought about it for a while, but over the last 24 hours I’ve received two separate emails about my [[Wiki Links]] WordPress plugin.

Since it’s a holiday and I’m in Belleville, I have a little bit of free time. I fixed a bug that one of the people reported. It wasn’t linking to pages with ampersands. So I fixed that and similar string encoding problems. For example, I can now link to Wikipedia pages with apostrophes (Handy! Like [[wiki:Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog]]).

Around Christmas, I got an update from a user, [Daniel Llewellyn](http://www.thehoneymonster.net/). The patch has been available in the development version and I’ve been using it for months, but since I’ve been distracted by the new job and stuff I didn’t get it into a release. He added pipe (“|”) aliasing functionality like in Wikipedia, and edit links to new pages. That will be in 0.2.

You can get the new version from [the official WordPress plug-in site](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wiki-page-links/).

Quote of the day 2009-03-31

From [The Record](http://news.therecord.com/arts/article/512523)

> It’s hard to link people across so many thousands of kilometres, so you have to sort of dig deep sometimes to find those common threads, and I think (it’s) maybe facial hair. Perhaps in the beginning it was a response to the elements, but certainly over time, a fashion statement is one of the unifying themes in Canadian culture.

I mean, Brian Blessed… Richard Stallman… these guys, whoever they are… Maybe I should grow a beard. Throw in [peace and harmony](http://www.holybeard.com/Home.php) and I’m sold.

Ad Astra 2009

I like [Ad Astra](http://www.ad-astra.org/). It’s a cute little con.

Got in last night. I was giving Holly a ride so I decided to take off early. Unfortunately, I forgot that I promised I’d also give Eric and Alex a ride. Oops. I was just passing under the 427 when I got Eric’s call asking when I could pick them up. They were able to catch a ride into town later, though, so that worked out okay. Which is good, since I’m staying in their room.

Friday night was mostly just hanging out. I ran into some surprising people. Today I’ll probably sit in on some readings and things.

### Notes ###
* I’ve signed Eric and myself up for the D&D 4e game tonight, so I’ll finally get to try that out. I haven’t played D&D in ages. I’ll let you know how it goes.
* Tamora Pierce gives a shout-out to Sventlana Chmakova. Wishes she’d write more Dramacon. :D
* Good creative writing panel about overcoming creative blocks and distractions. I’m finding that stuff relevant to coding stuff as well.
* Was hoping to sit down for a game of D&D 4e (was going to play a cat girl avenger). A medical emergency prevented that from happening. Looks like everyone’s probably okay, but we were a bit shaken by it all.

Ada Lovelace Day: Barbara Liskov

It’s [Ada Lovelace Day](http://findingada.com/). Here’s my post:

[[wiki:Barbara Liskov]] is a pioneering computer scientist and winner of the ACM Turing Award for 2008. She’s currently head of the Programming Methodology Group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Barbara Liskov in 1975] Back in the 70s, she designed a programming language called [[wiki:CLU (programming language)|CLU]], which established fundamental concepts about data abstraction that influence every object-oriented programming language (which, honestly, means pretty much every programming language–you heard me, Lisp weenies) being used today. Ruby, C++, C#, Java… they were all built on her work.

*I* know about Barbara Liskov mostly from the [Liskov Substitution Principle](http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2008/02/the_liskov_substitution_princi.html):

> Let q(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then q(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T.

Put another way (and you probably need to know a little bit about object-oriented design to appreciate this), subtypes must always be able to be substituted for a supertype. Programmers mess this up all the time, and it makes for god-awful messes in code, which is why we need Barbara Liskov to set us straight.

[Barbara Liskov]

* [Recent NPR interview](http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200903135)
* [Dr. Dobbs interview](http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/215801518)
* [Faculty homepage](http://www.pmg.lcs.mit.edu/~liskov/)
* [MIT computer science brochure from 1975](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/LCS-75/languages.html)
* [Other Babara Liskov posts for Ada Lovelace Day](http://ada.pint.org.uk/subject.php?subject=Barbara%20Liskov)