Overanalyzed

New CPU Instruction

I’m going to propose a new CPU instruction. Purely theoretical for now, but interesting to talk about. At least I hope so.

My new CPU instruction is going to load into EAX the value of EAX from 10 seconds in the future.

Crazy talk, I know. But I’m going to ignore the “you can’t do that!” aspect, because that’s just silly rejectionism. Instead, I’m going to think about how to actually implement the instruction.

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On Applications, OSes, and VMs

I’ve lately begun to realize that when a common problem shows up, it’s often the symptom of something else. Such as when customers complain about the amount of rBGH in their food, manufacturers can decide to avoid it, not avoid it, or, and more intelligently, create two products and sell to everyone.

Writing about how my less savvy family members are terrified of anyone touching their computer, for fear of damaging the stuff they use, I got thinking about the problem that their issues are showing exists. Because applications do have that problem.

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On Security of Operating systems

I was reading about yet another zero day exploit for IE and Windows, on the heels of a security update for same because of an existing unpatched vulnerability that’s been causing pain to many over the past few weeks.

Honestly, you could write the above two lines any time over the past 12 years, and it wouldn’t look out of place.

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“It just works”

There’s been a lot of talk about “It Just Works” lately, probably due to the renewed popularity of the Mac platforms. I recall quite a few “just works” promises in the past. Plug and Play was supposed to be that. Heck, the very meaning of the phrase is almost identical.

The problem with “It Just Works” is “It Just Doesn’t”.

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Active and Reactive programming

Imperative languages like C and java and just about everything else I use are very demanding. You use the languages to say things like “do that”, and it does. Deeply fulfilling for a type A personality, I’m sure.

But it lacks something. Other languages, like lisp, prolog, etc.. have different concepts. I don’t know the computer science term for it, I think it’s “functional”, versus “imperative”, where you define what you want to happen, but not when. I think I can get a handle on it if I think in terms of actions.

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Colors

Purple is an odd concept.

We see it as a combination of red and blue… because we have roughly RGB retinas… but then we see 50%R 50%G as yellow, when there’s a real yellow that just triggers 50%R 50%G.. We can’t see the difference though.

But there’s no frequency of light that corresponds to purple. Makes the color wheels seem a little goofy, honestly. And suddenly bothers me to find purple on manmade rainbows, when real rainbows have indigo and violet, neither of which have any red in them.

EDIT: I recently discovered that the red cones in your eye actually do have a second peak in their response to color. Instead of a nice bell curve centered around red, it tails off more slowly in the high-frequency (green/blue) direction, and has a second, much lower hump above blue. This is why some people may see some purplish colors there, it’s signal confusion.

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Closures

This weekend, I learned about closures. Part of this has to do with the fact that I seem to be obsessed with StackOverflow.com; it was there that I found a question on closures with a link to an answer, and prompted my fire of discovery to go learn about them.

Closures are Functions-with-context. Usually used in formal proofs and the like, but also used in functional programming languages like Haskell. Languages like C are called imperative because they focus more on step-by-step action.

Anyway, the neat thing about a closure is persistence, or maybe independence, depending on how you think about it.
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Hacking Javascript

And here I mean “hacking” in the original sense of “making it work”, not “attacking websites”, as it is so commonly misused.

A lot of people don’t know that you can write javascript on the browser’s Address line. That javascript executes in the context of the page, so if you need to do some quick debugging, you can often just throw some script onto the Address line and off you go.
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Designing software

My own experience has been that one should shoot for simplicity, treat the business rules differently than design rules, and don’t put your data in your program. I prefer a toolbox approach, when you take it to the multiple subsystem level.
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Work Smarter not Harder

I hear that a lot. Or I used to. Now it seems like I mostly hear “work more”.

That’s not the point. Today it struck me how weird the phrases “work harder” and “work smarter” really are.

What’s your work? Mine is largely coding and software design, minus the social tax of meetings.

So there’s a pretty simple variable substitution. “Code harder”. Which sounds insane. It’s almost meaningless. “Design harder”.
What about smarter? “code smarter” or “design smarter”. Seems like a Good Thing. Totally opposed to KISS, so maybe not.

How “smart” should code or design be? Do you really want bobs_memcpy()? Class MemoryCopier? Seems to me that it should be as simple as it can be and get the job done, and no simpler. Sound familiar?

Asking for smarter code is asking for clever tricks. Asking for smarter design is asking for higher-altitude standards. Doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.