Edward G Nilges's blog

This is a test, a most egregious test, for yesterday's blog attempt produced a message about suspicious content.

I can produce suspicious content at warp speed but in the blog I was innocently havering on about the correct way to think about data structures.

The weather continues bitter cold, for these parts, for Hong Kong and Shenzen have been visited by the frost Dragon of Manchuria, Hielongjiang from the cold Black Dragon River.

...gets worse and worse. Now 20000 people are reported dead.

I love the beach and plan to go again, but I'd read an article some time ago...if the water disappears suddenly, as it did in several places during yesterday's disasters, RUN, do not walk, away from the shore.

Government publications in Fiji spelled it out: don't gawk on the strand if the water disappears.

These waves travel at high speeds, and while the Pacific ocean has a warning system, the Indian ocean has none.

I found a reason to develop Travis, an abstract class for array iteration and tree traversal, over the holiday weekend, for further evolution of the Build Your Own compiler.

In developing its initial design I realized that IF I want Travis to manage threads created on its behalf, I'd get involved with managing a collection of threads, and in the dispose() routines of Travis "instantiations" (concrete classes, that is) I would have to call a MyBase.dispose() that would in turn wait until all threads created by the instantiation are done!

I was working, today, on a tool to visit all controls in a VB.Net form while emitting events for control visits. It worked fine as long as I set its property to not spawn independent threads, but it worked not so great when I did set this property.

I realized that because the controls and subcontrols were being visited "postorder", with all children of any form, group box, or other control with a nonempty collection of Controls being visited (by starting a thread using a new traversal instance) BEFORE visiting the parent, at all levels, I'd made an error.

From 1987 to 1992, I was a programmer at Princeton University and during that time met several Remarkable men and women.

The most noteworthy encounter was in 1991, when John Nash was brought to my office and I discovered a bug in the old Microsoft C compiler on John's behalf: he'd (correctly according to the standard) used 2^31-1 as a limit value but the Microsoft compiler had failed to evaluate the 2^31 value correctly (it was itself using Long precision).

...is an old Hollywood film made around 1959 in Hong Kong. I found the DVD in Hong Kong itself.

William Holden, in the beginning of the movie, walks off the USS President Wilson, a passenger vessel that use to ply these waters before the advent of cheap air travel in 1960, onto a pier still recognizable on the north side of Victoria Harbor, into Kowloon's central district of Tsim Sha Shue.

I enjoy working with the .Net threading model: it is clean and elegant, and it requires an exacting combination of imagination (to conceive of possible problems) and good taste (to design elegant solutions).

I think it was Dijkstra who first deconstructed the nonsense and mystification surrounding threads, by replacing various arcana with a simple metaphor...which resulted from his dedication to correctness and good taste.

It is an old programmer's habit to say "we knew all about x in the old days and x was stolen from us", where x is the latest fad, from structured programming to OO with deep inheritance.

In some cases it is true. A spiritual mentor who used to work, in the Fifties, on the old IBM 7040 mainframe told me that his team wrote several compilers for hard problems, where the users (railways in this distant era) couldn't identify all requirements. On an already old 1401 mainframe I developed a "data base" with flexible formatting and selection in 1974.

I have to go down again to Hong Kong tomorrow since my Vaio has been repaired by Sam's Maxlink in the "computer city" at the Ferry in Tsim Sha Shue.

Sam's boys have replaced the keyboard and motherboard since I shorted out both with a spill.

It's gonna cost me 2000 Hong Kong clams at 7.7 to the US dollar but I refuse to upgrade until I can afford something really cool.Given my track record I should get the "ruggedized" laptop used by our forces in our (illegal and unjust) invasion of Iraq.

It always seems to me that women raise the alarm. Programmer abuse continues because so many programmers are insecure about their technical and business abilities, and they allow others to define them.

Has anyone ever noticed what I call the HR "song and dance"?

Many programmers confront the narrative, that their "technical" abilities are first rate, but their "social" and "business" skills are deficient.

This is partly true and partly a song and dance, because the fact is that in many companies, "social and business" skills are a useful catchall for denying programmers simple fairness.

Oops, forgot to mention that I share them with Ed and Daniel Read.

Instead of trying to legislate job security, legislate universal health care, legislate job training, and legislate an end to the war in Iraq.

My experience: I was set down in San Francisco by Cruel Fate last year with no money, an Apress book contract, and no job. While hunting high and low for a tech job, and at the last minute when I was down to the Great Coin Hunt in my budget hotel, I got a call to work for ten dollars an hour doing Aids fund raising at a temp firm.

Hi, this is Edward Nilges, author of Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler (APress May 2004), father of two grown children, and artistic personality in a technical field.

My younger son, who has a distinct tendency towards the gnomic, said of mathematics in high school, at which his performance was stellar: "I don't like it [math], but I am good at it, and it makes sense".

Pretty much sums it up. In particular, the applied mathematics of programming are like Spinoza's g-d: they inspire a non-reciprocal love.