[Mon Jul 26 12:23:36 CEST 2010]

A friend just told me about Brainfuck, defined by Wikipedia as:

...and esoteric programming language noted for its extreme minimalism. It is a Turing tarpit, designed to challenge and amuse programmers, and is not suitable for practical use.

No kidding. Here is the typical hello world program in this language, including some comments to make it more "meaningful":

+++++ +++++             initialize counter (cell #0) to 10
[                       use loop to set the next four cells to 70/100/30/10
    > +++++ ++              add  7 to cell #1
    > +++++ +++++           add 10 to cell #2 
    > +++                   add  3 to cell #3
    > +                     add  1 to cell #4
    <<<< -                  decrement counter (cell #0)
]                   
> ++ .                  print 'H'
> + .                   print 'e'
+++++ ++ .              print 'l'
.                       print 'l'
+++ .                   print 'o'
> ++ .                  print ' '
<< +++++ +++++ +++++ .  print 'W'
> .                     print 'o'
+++ .                   print 'r'
----- - .               print 'l'
----- --- .             print 'd'
> + .                   print '!'
> .                     print '\n'

Ahem. A tarpit indeed. {link to this story}

[Wed Jul 14 20:43:47 CEST 2010]

I ran into an issue earlier today that I may as well document here. While talking to other people on IRC, I made a joke that involved the concept of infinity in the version number of a product. However, given that there is no infinity symbol on the keyboard, I wondered how to represent it on the screen. Well, Google to the rescue once again. I found the answer here. Just use the following combination:

  Ctrl + Shift + u 2 2 1 E

It works fine on any GTK+ environment, such as GNOME. {link to this story}

[Thu Jul 8 12:12:31 CEST 2010]

ComputerWorld publishes that a Chinese outsourcer is seeking US employees with an IQ of 125 and up. Mind you, the outsourcing company is managed by an American executive and it also requires an IQ of 140 or higher for any potential Chinese employee. Why the difference in the IQ? No, it's not because the company thinks Americans are less intelligent, like some might suspect. It's simply because the pool of potential American employees is smaller, so the company cannot be as demanding. In any case, what I found interesting was the comments about the idea of using IQ tests to screen job applicants:

An IQ of 140 is extremely high, representing about the top 1% of the population, said Garlick [Dennis Garlick, post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the upcoming book Intelligence and the Brain]. But he said that even though some studies have shown a correlation between IQ and job performance, IQ is a "crude assessment tool" when it comes to sorting out job applicants.

IQ tests tend to be inaccurate at the upper end of the scale as the questions become more complex and it becomes "debatable what is a correct anwer," he said.

IQ is also an indirect measure of job performance; a high IQ doesn't necessarily mean a worker will achieve a certain level in job performance, "because an IQ test measures abstract reasoning in a general context, and on-the-job performance requires abstract reasoning in a specific context," said Garlick.

But for a person who does score high on an IQ test, "you can reasonably say that the person is likely to be able to understand typical abstract concepts as they are applied in business, understand instructions, follow them, and then generalize them in a new situation," said Garlick.

{link to this story}

[Mon Jul 5 15:15:01 CEST 2010]

Steve Jobs' thoughts on Flash were all the talk of the town a few months back, when the iPad was released without support for the browser plugin. As one could expect, Adobe cried bloody murder and promised revenge. However, I must say some of Jobs' arguments just make sense: first of all, it is a proprietary technology (sure, so is most of Apple's technology, but that doesn't change the fact that Flash is indeed proprietary, and also in a field like the web where we should always promote open standards); second, Adobe talks about products that don't support Flash not being able to access the "full web", but this is only because certain sites out there prefer not to implement things in an open standard that is equally available for free; third, Flash has some reliability, security and performance issues; fourth, battery life is something to take into consideration; fifth, Flash would need to be rewritten to support so-called touch devices; and, sixth, Jobs argues that they "know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform".

Of all the reasons listed by Jobs (and, sure enough, many of them are just relevant to people running Apple products or interested in developing apps for the Apple platforms), I must say I especially like number three: Flash truly sucks. I do not run Windows but both on Linux and Mac, on Firefox or Chrome (the browsers I use), Flash gives me headaches on a daily basis. All I have to do is open a link to a YouTube or any other video a friend sends and watch both the browser and the overall system performance sink until I restart the application in disgust. Please, come up with a technology to replace this piece of art. {link to this story}

[Mon Jul 5 10:48:30 CEST 2010]

Although I thought about implementing this for quite sometime, the fact is that I did not need the trash folder feature in my email client until now that, due to a legal issue, I was asked to make sure I did not delete any messages on a particular topic. So, since I use mutt for my email and it does not have a trash folder by default, I had to search around for possible ways to implement this. It didn't take longer than 10 minutes. In the end, I chose a solution that combines two different configurations posted on the Web. Just add this to your ~/.muttrc file:

folder-hook .      'macro index d "=Trash"'
folder-hook =Trash 'macro index d '
bind index D delete-message
bind pager D delete-message

Basically, line one will automatically save the message into a new folder called Trash (feel free to change the name, of course; also, since it does not exist up to that point); line two will, on the other hand, totally get rid of any message that is saved within said Trash folder if you delete it; and, finally, lines three and four still allow you to bypass the trash folder by deleting a given message using the capital "D" command, instead of the lowercase "d". So, there you go, the same feature as with any other MUA but with far more granularity and control. You can also, if you choose to do so, apply the rules only to particular folders by replacing the dot (".") with the name of said folders, for example. In other words, that while mutt is not as user-friendly as the GUI email clients out there (there is no question about that, and I will not deny it), it is also far more flexible and configurable than anything else. It's a mail client for power users, to be sure. If everybody else wants to use Outlook, that's fine with me. Just don't shove it down my throat and force me to use something that doesn't do the job for me. Live and let others live. As far as I'm concerned, the same philosophy applies to operating systems. Use whatever you want to but, please, stick to the standards so I can also use what I like and works best for me. {link to this story}