peteg's blog

/hacking/mindstorms | Link
Wow, a computer-controlled back hoe.

Capote

/noise/movies | Link

At the Verona. For some reason the last session of the day was on early, at 8:20pm. Earnt Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar.

/noise/movies | Link
Syriana at The Ritz with Sean and Rob. I had trouble following it and wasn't particularly satisfied when I did.

/noise/movies | Link
Cul-de-sac.

/cs | Link
The Full Abstraction Factory. What a great name for a website.

/noise/movies | Link
Jarhead at The Ritz. It's a rehash of so many other (Vietnam) war movies, with some of the tributes verging on plagiarism (the drill sergeant's schtick from Full Metal Jacket's is raided beyond belief), others just straight cut-and-paste (an iconic sequence of Apocalypse Now is played to a roomful of marines, and the general torpor and specifically the arachnid fight of The Odd Angry Shot is evoked). I could go on. It's a bit of a shame as the themes the narrative explores are worthy ones.

/noise/talks | Link

Philip Wadler gave a talk at the University of Technology, Sydney today on the subject of his Links programming language (or more precisely, some details of his plans for it). I'm not sure just why he's in Australia; I heard along the grapevine that he was visiting Peter Stuckey (associated with NICTA) at the University of Melbourne. As Manuel and Gabi are in New York presently there was no UNSW connection, and the Sydney NICTA nodes aren't doing functional programming in any serious way. So... that leaves the category theory angle, of course, and that leads the Sydneysider to C. Barry Jay's door.

The talk was probably no different to any of the others he's given on this topic. What I find interesting is that the project is inherently messy, building on a lot of people's work rather than trying to investigate self-contained super-specialised research problems. It is as if Philip Wadler (amongst others) now thinks the question is not so much "how do I do X?" but "how do I do X for practical instances of X?". I wish them success from afar.

Sean told me that he also gave a talk at Macquarie Uni yesterday, which I didn't hear about - roughly on the unusual effectiveness of logic in CS, I'd hazard to guess.

/hacking/mindstorms | Link
I tried building one of the pneumatic pumps in CSSoh catalogue but was sorely disappointed by the lack of pressure I got out of it. It's possible that my Nickel-Metal-Hydride rechargeables do not provide enough voltage to make the motor run quickly enough. There's plenty of torque, just not enough air pressure...