• About me

    Who am I?
    I’m a rather boring, geeky college student. Most of my time is spent at a computer, reading a book, or sitting in (mostly uninteresting) classes. My hobbies include reading, blogging, creating and running websites, creating amateur video games, arguing incessantly on discussion forums, and buying books on amazon.com because I’m too lazy to go to the library.

    Information for cyber-stalkers:
    Screen name: probabilityZero
    Real name: Mike Vollmer
    Occupation: First-year College Student at Sacramento State University
    Contact: email/gtalk: eblivion@gmail.com | yahoo: mikevollmer_42 | msn: eblivion@gmail.com | xfire: eblivion

Amusing computer science quotes

  • Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. ~ Alan Kay
  • Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. ~ Brian W. Kernighan
  • If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. ~ Gerald Weinberg
  • Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. ~ Donald Knuth
  • We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ~ Donald Knuth
  • It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. ~ Nathaniel Borenstein
  • The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. ~ Tom Cargill
  • PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals. ~ Jon Ribbens
  • A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable. ~ Leslie Lamport
  • The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. ~ John Ousterhout
  • There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works. ~ Alan J. Perlis
  • A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. ~ Emo Philips
  • A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. ~ Mitche Ratcliffe
  • Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.~ Rich Cook
  • To iterate is human, to recurse divine. ~ L. Peter Deutsch
  • It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to Basic; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
  • I bet you’ll all think coding is pretty cool. That is, if you find two digit multi-stacked conversions and primary number crunching a big hoot. ~ Willow
  • Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. ~ Jamie Zawinski
  • Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it. ~ Norman Diamond
  • Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. ~ Louis Srygley
  • The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can’t go far wrong. ~ Verity Stob
  • C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off. ~ Bjarne Stroustrup
  • I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. ~ Bjarne Stroustrup
  • There are only two industries that refer to their customers as “users.” ~ Edward Tufte
  • Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. ~ Larry Wall
  • Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra
  • It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. ~ Hofstadter’s Law
  • For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. ~ H L Mencken
  • Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation. ~ Bertrand Meyer
  • Debugging a Direct3D application can be challenging. ~ Microsoft’s Direct3D Immediate Mode overview.
  • A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Alfréd Rényi
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Amtrack police arrest man for taking photos for Amtrak photo contest

Amtrak has an annual photo  contest that has been running since 2003. Duane Kerzic was standing on the public platform in New York’s Penn Station, taking photos to enter in next year’s photo contest, when he was approached by Amtrak police. They asked him to delete his photos immediately, and he refused. He was subsequently arrested for not deleting these photos. After the fact he was also charged with trespassing.

According to Amtrak’s weekly newsletter, photography is allowed in public areas, which includes the area Kerzic was in while photographing. Hell, thanks to the photo contest they run, they’re encouraging people to take photos just as Kerzic did. History shows, however, that Amtrak police have a habit of disregarding this.

IANAL, but as far as I know there’s no legal way they can make you delete photos you’ve taken while not trespassing. Kerzic claims the officers never told him to leave the premises (as you’d expect them to if they actually thought he was trespassing), but considering he was standing in a public area with a legally purchased ticket I find it absurd that anyone could consider what he did trespassing or in any way illegal.

These sorts of incidents reflect very badly on police in general. The more I read about this sort of thing, the less respect I’m likely to have for law enforcement, and I’m starting to think that’s a good thing. Respect should be earned — just because they’re dressed in a uniform doesn’t mean we should automatically respect them. It’s important to stand up for your rights. I don’t know if I would have tried to argue with or resist the Amtrak police had I been in Kerzic’s position, but I think (at least in retrospect) that it would have been the right thing to do. If you’ve done nothing wrong and are being detained or arrested with no legal justification, I think you have the right — or maybe even the duty — to resist and stand up for yourself.

Posted in F***ed up | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Helpful online Python tutorials

I’m studying JAVA in school, but I’ve always felt Python was a more fun language, and I always recommend it to friends wanting to try programming for the first time. Here are a few good resources that can help you get going in your attempt to learn Python, whether it be your first language or just another tool in your programming arsenal.

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Too many LANs

One last night at my house — I went to sleep at 8:30am — and another one tomorrow night. I’m practically trading day for night here.

Posted in Other | Tagged | 1 Comment

Jon Swift blogs about bloggers

Jon Swift has a nice list of interesting blog posts. It’s a good read — and not only because one of my posts is listed. :P

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Too much freedom

I have a very long vacation from school (6 weeks total, started this week), and I had been mentally piling up things to do over the break. Things I wanted to learn, read, play, watch, etc. Now that the break is here I’ve done a bit of it, but I find that more often than not I’m just lazily surfing the net or refreshing pages on forums.

Objectively I know this isn’t much worse than some of the things on my mental list (playing Fallout 3, for example), but to me even playing a long video game is starting to feel like work. Well, not really work, but like an investment of time and effort — if that makes any sense.

I’ve managed to drag myself out of it, I think, but I still find it weird. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time online. Wait, what am I saying? I can’t believe I just wrote that…

Posted in Other | Tagged | 1 Comment

Alan Turing on religion

Alan Turing was the father of computer science, as well as an atheist and a homosexual (at a time when homosexuality was illegal and considered a mental illness). These two famous quotes are attributed to him:

  • “Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
  • “I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, ‘And the sun stood still… and hasted not to go down about a whole day’ (Joshua x. 13) and ‘He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time’ (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.”
Posted in Atheism, Other | Tagged , , | Leave a comment