Year: 2004

On strings

By the virtues of Perl Monks I came across an interesting entry in the blog of Dan Sugalski who is the designer of Parrot, the interpreter engine for Perl 6.

In that post Dan talks about strings. He explains a lot of problems that come with different human languages and how careful one should be when dealing with multilingual strings. It is an interesting and insightful read. There are few other posts on the subject too, in case you want to go further.

For those who decided to skip reading, I’ll repost his excellent advice free of charge.

Important safety tip–never get a tattoo in a language you don’t understand. “Baka” is not Japanese for “good fortune”

Morning fog

Morning fog

Yesterday at about 6:00am, just about the time I was getting ready to drive home from my night shift, I discovered that there was a very thick fog outside. It was practically impossible to see anything. So I stayed in the office for few minutes and tried to photograph it. Naive. With the same success I could have photographed a while sheet of paper and then tell everyone that it was fog. :)

After a few minutes the fog started to move away, so I made few pictures, which you can see here. All of them were made from my office window on the 5th floor.

The Hacker’s Diet

The Hacker’s Diet – How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition By John Walker.

The Hacker’s Diet, notwithstanding its silly subtitle, is a serious book about how to lose weight and permanently maintain whatever weight you desire. It treats dieting and weight control from an engineering and management standpoint, and provides the tools and an understanding of why they work and how to use them that permit the reader to gain control of their own weight. The book is intended primarily for busy, successful engineers, programmers, and managers who have struggled unsuccessfully in the past to lose weight and avoid re-gaining it. Computer-based tools and experiments in Microsoft Excel or the Palm Computing Platform are available, but a computer is not necessary to use the techniques described in the book; paper and pencil alternatives are provided.

Maybe one day I will be interested in reading this book. Until then, I’ll save it in my blog bookmarks. :)