The ‘broken windows theory’ is a widely known theory, based on folks knowledge (which have been also tested in real life).
Consider a building with a broken window. If this window does not get repaired, other windows can break (over time, or by vandalism). In the long run, someone may break into the building, becoming a squatter.
Or a more usual situation. If some litter gets accumulated in a sidewalk or a lot, soon more litter will accumulate, until people start leaving whole bags of trash.
Since I bought the Ben NanoNote, I thought I needed to port something to it, as the biggest point with the NanoNote is developing to it, as its wiki says.
David Reyes, from Tuxbrain did a great work by porting gnuchess to the Nano and documenting it in his blog.
Of course, I want to port big things, but I’m not a great Linux guy, just average, so this tutorial makes a great starting point.
Stochastic hill climbing: Sisyphus pushes an image Last year, Slashdot published this interesting piece of work: Genetic evolution of the Mona Lisa. The idea is to approximate an image by a certain number of semitransparent polygons, randomly chosen. I liked very much the idea, and as every year I try to come up with some Christmas postcard related to maths or programming I gave it a try. So I wrote a LISP version… way too slow.
Has someone ever told you “Don’t re-invent the wheel”? Again and again I read somewhere around the net that ’re-inventing the wheel' is one of the worse errors a programmer can fall into. In fact, I’ve read it so often that the only thought of doing it makes me re-think over and over other ways of solving (or ignoring) the problem.
But here, I advocate my pro’s (the cons can be found elsewhere) for re-inventing the wheel, or at least not being frightened of it.
The Ben NanoNote: smaller than my wallet!
The Ben NanoNote: A computer smaller than my wallet If you are new here, have a look around and if you like what you find, don’t forget to subscribe.
Today I received by post my Ben NanoNote, from Tuxbrain. What is it? A palmtop computer, really small. It has also really small specs… small screen, small keyboard, little RAM, and so on.
My backlog of things happening is quickly filling, faster than I can even keep track of it. Just a quick overview
Summer trip to Iceland This summer we are going to Iceland for 17 days. It is some kind of tour-trip, where we have arranged accomodation and car rental and we just have to keep en route around the island to sleep where arranged each day. As an addition to this…