Monthly Archives: June 2008

Another Interesting Thing For My Theoretical Podcast

By Robert Fischer | Published: June 29, 2008

From Citizen Astronomy, ScienceNews: From a scientific standpoint, Galaxy Zoo started paying dividends almost from day one. “This is not something we expected,” notes Chris Lintott, an Oxford University scientist and “zookeeper.” The hope was that hundreds of people would log on. To date, almost 150,000 have. And the idea that many of the images [...]

Posted in To Be Categorized | 2 Comments

Bug Or Feature, You Decide: Groovy MetaClass Programming

By Robert Fischer | Published: June 26, 2008

Those Groovy adepts who want to skip to the punchline can check out my best-seller JIRA ticket: “ExpandoMetaClass sometimes, but sometimes MetaClassImpl“. For the rest of us, check out some odd behavior in Groovy. class A {} def a = new A() a.metaClass.greet << { println "Hello, World!" } a.greet() Looks great. Looks like a [...]

Posted in To Be Categorized | 17 Comments

Music To Make Love To Your Old Code By

By Robert Fischer | Published: June 25, 2008

Edit: BTW, the title of this post is a reference to “Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By“. Almost every developer I know puts on their headphones when they’re really getting into coding. Now, I’m assuming that everyone is listening to something, and I’m curious to know what it is. Here’s my list.

Posted in To Be Categorized | 9 Comments

Functional (Meta)?Programming Stunts for Ruby and Groovy (and a Little Perl)

By Robert Fischer | Published: June 24, 2008

After I learned OCaml, my coding mindset was totally distorted. I started writing Java code that looked like this: public Collection<foo> getCertainFoos() { return CollectionUtils.select(getFoos(), new Predicate() { public boolean evaluate(Object o) { return SOME_CONSTANT.equals(((Foo)o).getProperty()); } }); } </foo> This is kinda ugly in Java, but it’s simply what comes out when I was thinking [...]

Posted in Groovy, Perl, Ruby/JRuby | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Water Ice on Mars!

By Robert Fischer | Published: June 20, 2008

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!! — Mars Phoenix Rover (cite) Wired article is here. University of Arizona’s page on the Mars Lander has a press release here which includes some pictures. NY Times just got into the mix here.

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