August 2008
9 posts
Juicy
I always rap on and on about how hip-hop is the natural extension of postmodernism, but rarely offer up much on the subject. In an effort to start getting some of it on paper, I’m going to start tackling the topic here.
Saturday I went down to Mountain View for Rock the Bells. Mostly for Dead Prez. After their set, I get into the postmodernism speil with April, a poet herself, when a golden...
Grabbing a Site's Favicon
Grabbing a site’s favicon from Python code is slightly complicated by support of the standard
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/path/image.png"/>
and the older favicon.ico in the server’s root director. But parsing a site’s html using Python’s sgmllib is easy enough.
import sgmllib
def get_favicon_url(url):
"""
Get the favicon used for site at url.
...
How I Got My Summer Internship
It was late in the game when I got accepted to UT Graduate School. A lateness I attribute to every other applicant being much more interesting than me but ultimately deciding to instead go on and do something completely amazing.
So I had a week to decide, and everyone had already hired interns. Even my inside contacts couldn’t change that the hiring had already been done. So I resigned...
Optimizing Swample
There was one big lesson I learned about software development that I picked up in a Algorithms and Data Structures class at Rice. When implementing a large application, get something working first, then add features one at a time. In that vein, I got swample working and online quickly. But soon thereafter, I focused on optimization.
As I touched on last time, from the beginning I wanted to...
Launching Swample
The best advice that’s post-it noted to my monitor is “patience/do it now!”. I lean left or right depending on context. It’s been a lean right couple of weeks. It’s better to do something and be making progress than have a great idea. A step forward is a step forward.
So this past week, I wrote and launched Swample. It’s something Richard and I had been talking...
Post-Fix Definitions
The last line of my last post bothered me from the time I wrote it.
However, the real lesson is that I should have just posted the sketch. The desire for perfection is useless.
Not that I don’t agree with it, I do. I just couldn’t precisely define what I actually meant by it.
Mathematics is a field where perfection is everything. So it bothered me that I could say that the desire for...
Science Next to Art or A Theorem Deferred
I was writing some code last week to compute the period of the continued fraction expansion of the square root of the natural numbers. When I needed a condition to know when the repetition started to end my recursion. There’s a natural point when double the leading term appears that pops up in the tables.
√2 = [1; 2]
√7 = [2; 1, 1, 1, 4]
√97 = [9; 1, 5, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 5, 1, 18]
But...
Black Marble Composition Notebooks or Life Without...
For the last couple years of my time at Rice I kept all my class notes in one black marble bound composition notebook. Spring 2005. Fall 2005. Every class in the same book marked off. English notes on post-modern novels next to frantically scribbled “Let ∂>0.” next to the next little snippet of my next short story.
When I graduated I intended on keeping the same composition...