My daily readings 12/23/2007

YouTube – Webcam + cardboard = joystick

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Math For Programmers

Reading Comprehension Will Make You A Better Programmer : So Jake Says:  Annotated

Writing is also hard, and you’ll find plenty of instances where the authors
come up short. The burden is on you to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that
you’re right and the author is wrong. If you’re not bending over backwards to
try to say “well, maybe the author was using it in the context of..”, you’re not
giving them much credit, and might not be putting enough thought into the
process. When you find yourself saying “this code is awful!”, try thinking of
how you would do it yourself. Sometimes you find that you come up with a better
way than the author. Sometimes you’re led right back to the same solution as the
author.

This is where a programmer’s critical thinking skills will shine.

Granted, it’s difficult to determine the ramifications of question such as,
“What would the impact of using this non-standard syntax be if I made 300,000
library users adopt it?”. However, thinking on such a big scale can only help
you as a programmer, and the bigger you think, the more you help yourself.

Granted, Feynman and Hamming weren’t reading the work of others, they were
interpreting their own work. However, programming provides plenty of
opportunities to ask yourself these kind of deep analytical questions. You just
need to know the right questions to ask.

Damn Cool Algorithms, Part 3: Anagram Trees – Nick’s blog  Annotated

I hesitate to call this algorithm “damn cool”, since it’s something I invented*
it myself, but I think it is rather cool, and it fits the theme of my
algorithms posts, so here it is anyway.

However, with a little more effort, and the above observation that we can
generate a histogram that uniquely represents a given set of letters, we can
generate a tree structure that makes looking up subset anagrams much more
efficient. To build the tree, we follow this simple procedure:

Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing Weave  Annotated

We’ve developed some ial use
cases that we’ll be exploring with Weave. To be clear, it’s not Mozilla’s
intent to provide robust applications for, say, travel planning. We intend to
provide the infrastructure and an consistent model for how a user can open up
their browser metadata to friends and third-party applications. These use cases
are just examples of the types of things we would like to explore, and have
others build applications on top of.