More on my new obsession

[mmoa]

I am currently stuck in a computer lab again trying to figure out some new piece of code (not actually that difficult, but filling the right variables into the function is taking a very long time. Basically, the code calls for a set of data with a .tr_raw extension whereas the only data that we've got has a .tr or a .tr_lst. We've tried cheating (

Comments

[lihan161051]

It's like reading Castillian Spanish as opposed to the Attic Greek that is C++. Really lovely.

I know that feeling. I'm still in the process of migrating from my C roots to Cocoa and Objective-C, and finding many things that used to work elegantly in C that don't work with Objective-C's immutable-object types. It would have been easier to learn from the beginning than to leverage my old C experience.

Then again, my C was pretty strange by other people's standards. I have a penchant for recursion and bitwise logic and I tend to write heavily optimized algorithms, because I grew up on old 8-bit machines and had to learn a lot of those tricks to make my code run in 64K of RAM. (And it still bugs me that most languages now use 1, and not -1, for TRUE. Look at how integers work in two's-complement notation for why -1 might be a better choice. :D )

[mmoa]

I'm still in the process of migrating from my C roots to Cocoa and Objective-C, and finding many things that used to work elegantly in C that don't work with Objective-C's immutable-object types.

Ouch. That does not susprise me one bit. Part of our C++ course was learning how to decode C as many old-school physicists still like to use it and that was by far the worst part of the course - it was only one lecture as well. One thing it did teach me was not to get too devoted to one language, though I keep hearing C++ will be safe for a while yet. Nonetheless, I'm definitely getting into java and C# asa time allows.

[lihan161051]

::cringe:: Physicist C is a very special dialect indeed. :) I'm not nearly that bad. But some of my habits involve using as few variables as possible and passing things through lvalues and function parameters, to avoid having to allocate as much memory, and enclosing the variables I did need to declare within execution blocks that would deallocate them again when I was through with them. (And you'd be amazed what can be done entirely within a for () declaration. :D )

I'm really serious about lean and tight code. Even my Objective-C code runs really fast compared to what most people write. (The one major project I've gotten running so far has its window up and presentable before the application icon has time to bounce even once on the Dock in Mac OS.)

[mmoa]

Now you sound like my sort of programmer. I always aimed for as tight a code as possible, though I was rarely that successful as frankly, I'm not that good (yet).

Damn. I really missed out. Well I have an advanced C++ course come January so there'll be a chance to exchange techniques (I am deathly curious about what you can do with the for () declaration now...). Actually, I might (hope not, but if I finish everything else, that'll keep me busy for the rest of the summer!) have to get started on a basic protein-modelling code and as much as I like reading MATLAB, I don't think I'll get that far writing out a complex code in it so it'll be C++ all the way.

And yeah, physicists code is... special. Especially as some of them still admit to writing bits in FORTRAN and giving it to postdoc students to translate. Ah, modern physics...

[lihan161051]

On roaches:

Most cats and large birds love to eat them, and even cats that don't eat them tend to hunt and torment them to the point where they at least stay out of sight in the walls.

The larger ones (in the USA, at least, not sure about UK) tend to live outside and forage indoors only for food and water. In Texas, we see the larger ones inside mostly during droughts, when they are much more likely to be unable to find water outdoors. The ones that actually nest indoors are smaller species that usually nest inside walls and other inaccessible spaces.

The best things I've found for fighting them are the slow-acting baits that they carry back to the nest and share. I'm still trying to find ones that interfere with egg production so they can't reproduce, don't know if those exist or not.

Along walls is definitely the place for them, though. You're right about how they navigate. :)

[mmoa]

That's probably why we have quite a few stray cats in the area and surprisingly few rats, all things considered.

I reckon we've got two sepearate species in our house at the moment. There are smaller black ones that are here mostly because of the damp in certain corners (which there really isn't much we can do about being in North West England and all that) and the larger dark brown/reddish ones which are just icky and are here due to the frequently mentioned ickiness of my housmate.

Yeah I've heard tell of the ones that meddle with the egg production, but haven't been able to find any stuff specifically. I'd like to think it comes mixed with the powder I've got but I'll probably have to treck to one of the larger homeware stores to find it..