Halfbaked Ideas

I enjoy reading Tom Moertel’s blog. In his side bar he lists the Programming Fun Challenge. Here is one of the problems:
Combinations. Create a function combinations that, given a list of strings, returns a list of all the strings that can be formed by picking one character from each of the successive input strings. [...]

Russell Beattie is man with a point of view:

At one point I thought I hated programming because I was just so sick it… It turns out I don’t hate programming, I just hate programming in Java.
In fact, I’d say that many of today’s current hot trends in programming are a direct result of a backlash [...]

via Ars Technica
Scott McCausland, who pleaded guilty last September in 2006 to the crime of uploading Star Wars: Episode III to the site Elitetorrents.com, was charged with “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement” by the FBI. … He wound up serving five months in prison and is now on probation. The probation, [...]

I am rightly taken to the woodshed for my binary search implementation. The Erlane Project points out the utterly miserable performance of the code I wrote.
Briefly, what I wrote was conceived with a random access array implementation in mind. Not having such arrays available in Erlang (so far as I know) I just [...]

I finally got around to scratching an old itch today. I’ll describe the problem and the solution, on the off chance that someone may find it useful.
My ISP provides an email account I still use, even though web-based mail has various advantages. I just prefer the Mail.app interface over the gmail interface. The account uses [...]

[update: Joe Armstrong replied; see comments]
I’m having trouble running the lib_chan example from chapter 10 of Programming Erlang. Here’s what I’ve done, step by step. The console listings are from a machine running Ubuntu linux 7.04. I get similar results under OS X.
First, I downloaded the latest source code.
drc@dawn:~/erlang$ wget http://media.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/code/jaerlang-code.tgz
–18:43:49– http://media.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/code/jaerlang-code.tgz
[...]

I happend to read a new (to me) blog, Thoughts on life, computers, and eternal happiness. The lead post featured some Erlang code, presented with very nice syntax coloring. I asked the author how he managed that.
Emacs. Of course. He had used a package called htmlize.el. Emacs never ceases to surprise me with new [...]

I read the following in chapter seven of Beautiful Code. The author wants to make some points about testing, and opts to use binary search as a compact but non-trivial example.
If you have never implemented binary search, or haven’t done so in a few years, I suggest you try that yourself before going forward; it [...]

PragDave has a nice article on test driven development using Eunit. Eunit is very lightweight, easy to use, and useful. Check it out.

Another Euler problem. It has a cute recursive solution, and the problem looks like something that might have real applications, say the scoring of a decision tree. I’ll leave the description of the problem to link above. Might as well send Project Euler some link love. And it would be tedious to provide the nice [...]