blog.s11n.net

++this->years (or: uptime: 36 years)

November 21, 2008 on 3:01 pm | In General | 2 Comments

Today’s theme is birthdays (namely mine), so i threw together an extended remix of the Happy Birthday Song for all of the other programmers out there who also have a birthday today…

Happy birthday to me,
i program in C
i avoid [most of] the segfaults
and my memory won’t leak.

Happy birthday to us!
We program C++.
All of Scott Meyers’ books:
read them, we must!

Happy birtday to Earl!
He programs in Perl.
He also knows Python
but he codes like a girl.

Happy birthday to John!
His language is Python!
His code’s well indented
and not very long.

And now back to me!
Today it’s PHP
to enhance all my web sites
and make them look pretty.

Happy birthday, dear Slim!
His tool’s the JVM.
Log4J fills his hard drive
and Eclipse eats his RAM.

Happy birthday to Tran!
His choice is FORTRAN.
He’ll crunch all your numbers
in a really short time span.

Happy birthday, you all!
maybe you code Pascal.
Though it’s long been obsoleted,
some giants just won’t fall.

Happy birthday, everyone!
It seems we’re near done.
To you: happy hacking
and may your programs all run!

All models are wrong…

November 19, 2008 on 4:02 pm | In software-dev | 1 Comment

George E. P. Box is credited with the quote “essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Amen. Today i came across this enlightening page about models in general, and the properties that “more useful” or “better” models all have (or should have) in common:

http://www.idiagram.com/ideas/models.html

The list of entries applies almost 100% to computer models, except that i will differ on point 9 of the list (a model must be Falsifiable), because i don’t think that a computational model must be falsifiable in that sense. A computational model/API may be unsuitable (and therefore “false”) for a given use case, but the computational model as a whole either is or is not, it need not be true or false in the conventional sense.

In any case, it’s an enlightening read for those interested in modeling or “studies in commonality” in general.