Archive for May, 2005
Sunday, May 15th, 2005
Foucault’s Pendulum Explained
For some strange reason, it took me over 30+ years on this planet to figure
out what a Foucault’s Pendulum is and why its invention was so significant.
Shame on me - Foucault (pronounced Foo-koh) was a brilliant man.
I put an end to that deficiency tonight and I found this cartoon by the California
Academy of Sciences to […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Science by dkaz
Thursday, May 5th, 2005
Garbage Collection in Lisp
Here’s a great quote from an online Lisp book that I was browsing through today
(the very last sentence cracks me up )
Lisp finesses the memory leakage problem by never allowing the programmer
to release unused memory. The idea here is that the computer can determine
when a block of memory is unreachable with complete accuracy. […]
No Comments » - Posted in Programming, Lisp/Scheme by dkaz
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
Backpack Launched
37signals launched Backpack earlier this week
to much fanfare in the blogosphere.
5 free pages for the free account does not particularly strike my fancy,
but I do have to give them props for launching another sweet looking
(and apparently very successful) Ruby on Rails/Ajax site.
No Comments » - Posted in Technology, Ruby by dkaz
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
Private Methods Useless?
Is there any good reason to write “private” methods in Java?
I’m not so sure.
Virtually every class I write these days ends up having a mix of
“public” and “package private” methods.
In a way, “private” is my marker interface for “not tested in isolation”.
Googling the topic this evening took me to an interesting c2 wiki page:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MethodsShouldBePublic
