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