Journal de Jacques » Thought Bubbles

Clearing the Debts

Jacques Chester — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:23:27 +0000

My calculations say that between expected expenses, required savings and HECS debt payments, I need about 90 weeks to “clear the deck” and get into positive net worth territory. At which point I need to salary sacrifice like a madman, … Continue reading →

Two things I like about my resume

Jacques Chester — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:26:14 +0000

You can see a link to it on the left side (if you’re reading this on my blog, rather than Facebook).

The first thing I like is the style. I take no credit for this: it’s a template that comes with Pages plus some minor tweaks of my own.

The second thing I like is the blurbs. I spent a few days chasing some up before putting the resume into wider circulation. The idea of having “testimonials” embedded in marketing materials is as old as dirt; but so far as I know it hasn’t been used on resumes before. Yet resumes are probably the most intimate and important bit of “brochureware” in a software engineer’s life. It can’t hurt to jazz it up a little with fuzzy subjectivity.

Supercomputing Treaties

Jacques Chester — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:57:04 +0000

Today’s random thought: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was the most important development in the history of supercomputing. It has forced the continuous development of ever-more powerful supercomputers to simulate the decay of weapons that can no longer be actually tested. … Continue reading →

Sphere of Origin

Jacques Chester — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:02:21 +0000

In Australia, the annual State of Origin is a very big deal. Though it only deals with players from NSW and Queensland, it nevertheless divides the country into two camps out loud folks and probably does more to raise the profile of Rugby League in non-Rugby states than anything else.

Perhaps Rugby Union could learn from this. How bout an international series, played annually, called Sphere of Origin? Players born in the Northern hemisphere versus those in the Southern?

OK, so it might be a bit unfair that South Africa, Australia and New Zealand fall into the latter camp, but the Northern Hemisphere does get the use of the whole of European Rugby to choose from.

It could raise Rugby’s profile all over the world.

An easy prediction

Jacques Chester — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:53:21 +0000

I predict that, whenever a bold prediction is issued or the matter of prediction the future discussed, at least one person will deride such efforts and say that the future is, strictly, unpredictable.

Upsetting the natural order

Jacques Chester — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:58:39 +0000

A lot of progress (and sometimes, regress) in computer science and software engineering seems to come from rejecting, modifying or otherwise modifying the “natural order”. By natural order I refer to the generally accepted, industrial paradigm of how development “is done”.

A lazy student can easily find ‘revolutionary’ projects by simply fiddling with this accepted order.

For example, take the modern imperative/object-oriented paradigm for software languages. Subtract some feature, and explore the consequences. What happens when, for instance, you cannot use getters/setters/properties? I’m not sure, but it’d be interesting to know. What happens if you subtract assignment? And so on. In a way some functional languages changed thinking by subtracting changes in state.

Another thing you can try is to move something from one phase of program life to another, or to collapse phases. Lisp, for instance, allows the programmer to have instructions run at compile-time (ie, macros), rather than simply at runtime. What else can you move out of its natural phase? Take CPU scheduling. Currently this always happens during the runtime phase, but could it be moved? Can there be load time scheduling? Compile time scheduling?

I’m sure that you can think of many other such examples.

Crikey

Jacques Chester — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:33:06 +0000

How on earth did bachelors cook before the invention of the microwave oven? ’tis a thing of marvel!

Today's Thought Bubble

Jacques Chester — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:44:42 +0000

Today’s thought bubble is about learning. Recently while studying sets, I found that I had confused the concept of the element of a set (denoted using ?) and subsets (denoted using ? or ?). It made me think that many of my moments of dawning understanding have been marked by the discovery of error.

In psychology, a most useful tool for studying the function of the brain is error. Visual illusions are used to study the functioning of the visual cortex. By tricking it we can tease apart its intricate workings.

So today’s thought is:

Can common errors be used to tease apart the process of learning?

Today’s Thought Bubble

Jacques Chester — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 05:44:42 +0000

Today’s thought bubble is about learning. Recently while studying sets, I found that I had confused the concept of the element of a set (denoted using ∈) and subsets (denoted using ⊂ or ⊆). It made me think that many of my moments of dawning understanding have been marked by the discovery of error.

So today’s thought is:

Can common errors be used to tease apart the process of learning?

Today’s Thought Bubble

Jacques Chester — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 22:57:52 +0000

Inspired by sudden discussion in Australia of the relationship betwixt religion and politics:

I don’t mind politicians bring religion to parliament, so long as I can bring atheism to the voting booth.