Julien McArdle

I was talking to someone the other day on IRC, and they were talking about how he saw his math class as being a waste of time. Too theoretical, not practical. It’s usually hard to see the benefits, until you realize that it opens up opportunities on how to solve problems.

Take today: I wanted to calculate Pi to a certain number of digits. However, I didn’t know how much computer storage, say, a trillion-digit long number would require. Math to the rescue!

We know that with one bit of computer storage, we can store a one or a zero. With each additional bit of computer space, the biggest size that that stored number can be doubles. For instance, with three bits you can represent all the numbers from zero up to (but not including) eight, but with four, you can represent all the numbers from zero up to (but not including) sixteen. Thus you can use this formula: Where maxval is the biggest number you can store given a number of bits. That maximum value is a decimal number. Keep in mind that all decimal numbers can be represented in the scientific notation: Where b corresponds to the length in digits of More >

A while ago, I had this idea of creating an open-source GIS application. It’s safe to say now that the idea is dead.

My job title changed some months ago – I went from being a geophysicist to full-time programming. I work with a small R&D team, which can lead to really challenging and satisfying work. Today, for instance, I put the finishing touches on an interpreter for this scripting language I created.

However, with this transition to the new job, my desire to do creative work (programming included) outside of work hours has all but died. I spend so much time exercising my brain at the job that when I arrive home I just want to sit down and relax. This feeling is the exact opposite of what I had when I wrote Rice Tea, or worked on Docks and the Piracy doc.

I need to find a way to reinvigorate myself. Or at least not feel so damned drained after work.

In unrelated news: I now have a significant other.

On my September 9th blog entry, I mentioned that I had lost 10 pounds since August 3rd. Well today marks the day that I lost another ten pounds. Yep – twenty pounds since August. My goal is to lose another 10.

At this point, I’d like to thank some very important people:

• Jason Scott, for telling me what I needed to hear. “It’s as if you just kept eating and eating!”
• Jeremy and Tina, for showing me that it could be done and how to do it right.
• Jon Pellow, for being supportive every step of the way.

The GIS app now has a name. It’s called Flou. I like it, and it doesn’t seem to be taken.

Qt has wonderful documentation, but that doesn’t make up for a lack of community. I’ve been developing with Qt for the past few months now, and it is the framework of choice for the creation of this application. Qt is a great framework, with great documentation. Anything you need reference wise is found in that bulk of documentation included with their IDE. There’s also a solid set of demo code bundled. The problem is that it isn’t enough.

Equate trying to learn Qt as learning a new foreign language; say the fictitious Tjahiri. You’re trying to write a book in this language, Tjahiri, of which you know nothing. You have a great dictionary, and a phrase book – but that’s it. If you have questions that go beyond the scope of these tool’s ability to assist, you’re stuck.

In any case, I’ve been practicing. I built a podcasting application that downloads from not just RSS feeds, but also Twitter and any other page accessible through a web server. Previously, my experience with Qt consisted of building a series of one off applications: five or six widgets, More >

In the last year, I’ve had the pleasure to program substantial amounts in C, C++, Python, Ruby, ASP (VBScript), and PHP. I’ve also used Microsoft Visual C++ and Qt as graphical frameworks.

By far, the most pleasant languages to work in have been Python. I love it for its utter simplicity and flexibility: it can make ordinarily large tasks two lines of code. Do you want to open a binary file and extract packets of little-endian unsigned four byte integers and character arrays? Two lines of code. I kid you not. Do you want to talk to a serial device? Use “import serial”.

XKCD Comic about Python

My initial gripe with the language was the use of whitespace to delimit what was meant to be inside a function/loop. Coming from C, which does not care about whitespace, it was a little offputting. But you get used to it, and frankly whitespace, which inherently enforces proper code indentation, makes more sense from a usability standpoint than concluding statements with a semi-colon.

My other gripe with Python proved to be unfounded: speed. Python implementations interprets code – you do not compile it. Not only that, but Python was much more abstracted from the hardware than C, More >