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RCW is putting together a list of organizations affiliated with waterloo people. seems pretty cool.. i've always been interested in finding out about tech companies started at waterloo. if you know of any others that aren't on the list, do tell.

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ascii world cup!

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i came across this article on OSnews today, and it seemed kind of interesting. the author claims that brooks' "no silver bullet" argument only applies to algorithmic programming, and proposes that we write programs in a different manner. from what i understood (and i could be totally wrong here), what he's proposing sounds a lot like VHDL, where outputs are a function of the inputs with no side effects, and everything operates concurrently (for the most part, anyway).

it sounded kind of interesting, and i wanted to procrastinate studying for my networks midterm tomorrow, so i hacked together a little framework to try it out, along with a sample "echo" program. the app echoes stdin to stdout (but only if stdin changes - if you type the same line twice, it doesn't re-echo) and ends when you type "exit". basically, the program is going to be a bunch of variables encapsulated in their own class, each with an update() method. it can register dependencies on other variables, so that when those variables get updated, the dependent variable also gets it's update() method called.

it seems kind of interesting, although i have my doubts as to whether you could really write large applications with this model easily. of course, i'm writing it in java, which doesn't help. a new syntax/language would probably simplify things a lot more, but i don't really feel like writing a parser for it. i'll probably try to write some more complicated apps later, possibly something with a GUI to make things interesting..

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is it just me, or does something like this remind you of sharing needles?

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this term has been (so far, at least) relatively light in terms of workload. until last weekend i was pretty bored since we didn't really have all that much to do. then came the weekend, and i've been up until 3-5am each day since working on (first) distributed and (now) the SE2 project. both are code-heavy, which i really like :)

the SE2 project is shaping up quite nicely.. it's always fun when your code has a physical manifestation like ringing phones and getting people to talk to each other. i just wish we didn't have to write the crummy 40-page design doc. meh well, gotta take the bad with the good.

midterm today, and another tomorrow, and another next wednesday. after that things should be back to the boringly-light state.

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.. to the article i posted earlier: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71096-0.html.

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i think i'm going to melt soon.

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http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70980-0.html. Discuss.

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Due to voluminous comment spam recently, I've added captcha verification for comments from non-logged-in people. Let me know if you spot any bugs or have any problems (if you're unable to post a comment, contact me using the contact form).

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i've uploaded photos from california to the photo album - you'll need to log in to see them. eventually i'm going to get around to making the stitched photos bigger and rotating the ones that are in portrait mode, but i don't know exactly when i'll get around to that..

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