Atheist look on Christmas
Something other then the usual technical posts…
As you might already know, I am an atheist. Yes, in my opinion there is no God, there never was and (probably) never will be.
Atheistic Christmas?
Being an Atheist with Christian friends I get a lot of questions. Recently a friend of mine asked: “Why do you celebrate Christmas when you are an Atheist?”.
This question, to me, is quite simple. First of all, because it is a tradition. I think its a wonderfull holiday. Ask around, what do people think about when you ask them about Christmas?
VMWare on your phone?
Recently VMWare, known from its computer virtualization software, has announced they are developing a dual-boot mobile version. This would allow you to run both Windows Mobile and Android on your phone.
But it isn’t going to be a dual-boot you know from your computer, they are planning on running the OS’es at the same time. This would allow you to switch between OS on-the-fly.
- You want to use a Windows Mobile app? *click*
- Oh, you want to use something on the Andriod platform? *click*.
I’m very curious how this will work out performance-wise, but the idea itself is great!
Via: computerworld.com.au
Eureqa
I’ve just stumbled across a new program: Eureqa
Its a program, developed by the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory, that can detect equations in sets of data. Its primary goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data.
Its best described using their instructional video:
I’ve been playing around with it, for example trying to find a good prediction equation for the Son of Darts competition I blogged about earlier.
The algorithm(s) used in this program are based around “symbolic regression“. It is a form of Genetic Programming (GA) where the computer processes a tree of possibilities recursively searching for the best suited building-blocks.
#songsincode
What is #songsincode ?
Last week I discovered a new hype on Twitter. The so-called “#songsincode”. It’s a huge hype under programmers and technical users. The best way to explain is probably by showing an example:
if( door == red ) {
door.paint(black);
}
This obviously is Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones (if the door is red, paint it black)
My own #songsincode:
Here is a collection of the #songsincode I created and tweeted:
Java Generics for Compare
I’ve been developing with Java 5+ for quite a while now. Not all developers are this lucky, some are still stuck with 1.4… some even with 1.3! But my clients all made the excellent step forward to Java 5 (some even to 6). The problem is, they moved the runtime/JDK but forget to move their developers!
In Java 5 the language brings some good improvements, the for-loop is easy to understand, and almost all the developers are using this by now. The problem starts with generics. There is a part most developers understand, the Collections API. Almost all programmers use lists now as: List<Integer> instead of a plain old List. This is a good start, but it must not end here! First, I must admit, generics in Java can sometimes be hard and confusing (when using <? extends X> and <? super X>). So I’m not going to talk about any of this ‘hard stuff’. Its the use of ‘easy’ generics that can our lifes so much easier.
For example the piece of code below: