The extended or derived class has all variables and functions of the base class (this is called ‘inheritance’ despite the fact that nobody died)
From the PHP official documentation
Stupid robots generating the Spanish Congress’ website
The thing to speak about this week in Spain is the end of the football league. But I don’t follow it!!
Let’s restart: the thing to speak about this week in Spain, regarding the “web world”, is the new website of the Spanish Congress, www.congreso.es. This new version was worth a bit less than 200 thousand euros. And it’s probably the worst HTML I’ve ever seen… just thousands of lines of tag soup. Just try to see the source code (right click in the page, and “View Source Code”)… even if you don’t know anything about HTML, you can see some really weird things, like a thousand of lines of CSS definitions that are stupid. It’s quite impossible to do it worse!
The truth is that it’s quite clear that some kind of robot has generated all this tag soup. Humans are not in this magnitude of stupidity. Finally, all the government’s websites must follow (by law) standards and usability guidelines: I guess they haven’t any idea of what this really means.
“Welcome to Spain”… What a shame!
“Tomato plants” sorting algorithm
Yesterday I was trying to program a Heapsort algorithm in C, just as a practice to remember how C was (as rough and pure as I remembered). It’s an interesting sorting algorithm, which doesn’t use extra memory, and has a good time complexity, O(n log n). In theory it is as good as the popular Quicksort, but it does have a weird behaviour with almost ordered lists (unsorting the items and resorting them later), using more time than Quicksort uses. This is the reason for its short popularity.
This behaviour has induced me to think about similarities between computer algorithms and nature algorithms. Some algorithms have somehow an inspiration from nature, like the Bubble sort which, as its name suggests, imitates bubbles inside a liquid. Others don’t reflect nature, and this maybe is not too good.
I have a lot of tomato plants growing on my balcony. There are too many small plants. Some of them will grow quicker, stealing the soil’s energy from others. Some will not have enough energy to develop. Natural selection. Energy movements, randomness, and quicker first states remind me of something like Simulated annealing. It’s not a honest algorithm, meaning its result is not perfect, and maybe some items get better positions that they should. But it’s an interesting path to develop…
“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that,
once it is competently programmed and working smoothly,
it is completely honest.”
Isaac Asimov
P.S: … or maybe I must keep my mind disconnected on Sunday morning, and spend the time watching some brilliant animated shorts.
Client requirements applied to national flags
A good example of what a client can suggest to change…
National flags with clients’ comments (Flash animation)
Sadly true!
Found via: Information aesthetics
Ubuntu rules
I can claim:
Ubuntu is the OS with the quickest and painless installation that I’ve ever installed in a PC
· I need only some hours to install Ubuntu (with some extra programs).
· I used to need a weekend to install Windows (with the pain of looking for drivers).
· I used to need some weeks to install older Linux versions.
I’m not the kind of geek who installs the OS of his computer offen. I normally install it when it’s really necessary (normally once every 2 or 3 years). But seeing the installation of Ubuntu, I can’t understand how people still think that Linux is complicated…
Alternative ways for interviewing candidates
Nowadays almost all the companies use standard methods for interviewing candidates. They still use some common techniques like tiers of technical tests to find the perfect person… who can have an incredible CV and outstanding skills. But later he could be a complete fool, or he doesn’t fit in the company atmosphere. During my University days I saw people getting better results (than me) in the “Nets” subject, without really knowing what is an IP address! And while working in different places, I’ve seen the same: people without really good tech skills being really good coworkers (trying to learn every single day, trying to create a nice office mood…), and people with impressive knowledge avoiding to share it, or being incredibly selfish. What I’m trying to say is that maybe it’s good to do some filtering regarding technical skills, but later you must focus on testing the person, and not in testing the professional.
Example 1: Last.fm could be a dream place for working. Specially if you love music, web and charts. Yesterday I was looking at their job offers and it was nice to find as a requirement: “with something that passes for music taste 😉“. Brilliant!!
Example 2: Some weeks ago my manager was interviewing some candidates for an “HTML layout specialist” position. I suggested him to ask them “are you lazy?”, and they should answer “yes” because “the lazy programmers get the things done quickly, and try to do the things in a neat way, to finish quickly”. Of course it was somewhat of a joke. But he got the hidden idea. And finally we hired a chemist, with some experience in HTML Strict mode and mad as a hatter, instead of a telecommunications guy with an overfull CV (mostly filled with glossy titles) and having bad manners during the interview. Eventually, he fits perfectly in our department, so it was a good decision.
Bandwidth thieves
Some people love using Google Images for finding images to use in their blogs. And they use the absolute URL, which means: they show the image in their sites, but they use YOUR bandwidth. In the last few weeks I’ve discovered quite a lot of webpages that use images located at my domain.
Some days ago I detected one, and I changed the content of one stolen image (a Dali’s clock) to another thing (a gay bears picture), and started laughing: the thief put the clock image beside a text which says something like “it’s time to change”… what a change! :-D.
But due to the quantity of thieves, I decided to create a script to “scare” them. It’s a small .htaccess:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://liopic.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.liopic.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.bloglines.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.google.es [NC] RewriteRule .*.(gif|png|jpg)$ http://valleylodgemusic.com/images/media/bears.jpg [R,NC] |
Basically it verifies if the image is NOT referred from my site (or some usual RSS readers), redirecting the request to another place. The funny thing is that if the thieves use Google Images, they’ll see the correct image. But later, when they decide to add the absolute URL in their sites, the “change” takes place… (and sometimes they’ll not realize it because their browser will have cached the image, making more fun for the visitors).
Final tip: Don’t steal!!
On keyboard layouts
Somebody at the office played a joke on me. This morning I found my keyboard with 2 exchanged keys: the “Y” and the “I”. It was interesting however. I tried to work without putting them back to their original positions, and the result was quite surprising: if I typed without looking at the keyboard, I did it well; but if I looked at it (even for just a second), I started typing incorrectly. And this is quite dangerous if you use VIM and try to “Ynsert”. So finally I’ve moved them to the correct positions.
But are the keys of the keyboard in the best positions? Of course not.
The current keyboard layout is inherited from the mechanical typewriters, where they configured the key positions trying to avoid hits between the arms of every character. Speaking about keyboard layouts, the Wikipedia has some information about them which is worth a visit. Specially I suggest reading about Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which is an optimized one for speed and ergonomy (reducing fatigue). And don’t miss the one-hand versions!!
Experience
“Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.”
A couple of years ago I was working on an (NLP aided) Information Retrieval system, for my PhD. It was somehow a prototype, with lots of wild modules merged. Now if I try to look back, I can see lots of mistakes in that system.
Yesterday I met up with Yenory, a PhD colleage who still works on developing that system. Better said, now she works on a quite better version, rewritten in C++ with STL. The old system is now called “Franky” (short for Frankenstein), how funny!
When we started 4 years ago, we had no idea of what path was the correct one. Now she is on the good path, thanks to the experience of making mistakes. But I warned her: maybe the current system will become another Franky in the future 😛 Life’s law!
Internet Spanish day
Today is the Internet day in Spain (but I’m not sure if it’s also in other countries). The Government has organized some events in Madrid (yes, in the Real World™), showing no idea of what Internet is. A Spanish newspaper was asking “Can you live without internet (in Spanish)?”… interesting question.
Internet for me is an incredible collection of knowledge. This is mostly good… for example, I discovered my first hobby (the game of Go) thanks to it. And I’ve met with a lot of new people (mostly clever people).
But sometimes it can be bad. I constantly see so in my professional world (web developing) where I met a lot of people who “blindy follows internet recipes”. Let’s explain this. I’m lucky of having an University background in Computer Science. But some people don’t have a background, and use Internet as a “consulting thing” to find information about the problem that they are working on. They usually arrive at a page with a recipe to sort out the problem, like “drop down menus made easy” or “install a CVS server in 30 seconds”. Next they blindy follow the recipe. And maybe it’s not a correct method to use… they see the tree, but don’t see/understand the woods. The worst part is that they have the unreal perception of being good professionals!!
I mean… it’s good having all this incredible amount of knowledge. But sometimes you need a background (real studies, books, and such things) to completely understand the recipes. For example, I play piano and flute, and have some ideas about reading a music score; I even compose sometimes, short songs. But I clearly know that I’m not a good musician.
“The cobbler should stick to his last”
(I’m sorry, I used internet to find this phrase, and I’m not a phrasist professional)