Arcoarena

Out of Office Reply

Well I’m off round China for two weeks starting from tomorrow. If I don’t respond to emails don’t be offended. If on the off-chance someone needs to contact me for some obscure reason and it’s really important email me making it obvious it’s important in the subject as I may check my email in order to email parents and tell them I’m not dead etc. . Failing that I’ll catch up with you all in two weeks.

Oh and yes I have packed my crew T-Shirt

Tour

Well I’ve just made it back from tour. It was quite good fun, tiring but fun. It’s a pity I only got to do the fit-up but I had to leave to get ready to go on holiday. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll make alteast the weekends next year.

Anyway, stuff to do. More later

Another Photo

I’ve been messing around with my camera and some image editing software. I’m particularly proud of this one. Hopefully I’ll get to add some of Whitehaven soon (a local town).

Pompeii

I’ve just finished reading Pompeii by Robert Harris. Harris appears to like writing historical novels as he’s also written about the code-breaking team during WWII in ‘Enigma’. It is quite an odd concept - writing a book where everyone knows the ending but if Shakespeare can do it….

The book follows the man responsible for the maintenance of the Aqueducts in the Bay of Naples and takes place in the days and hours running up-to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (think 24 a la Ancient Rome). The water stops running and the Aquarius must fix the aqueduct, but preying on his mind is the mysterious disappearance of the previous holder of his position and some strange goings on in the area.

What is most striking about Pompeii is the level of detail, and more so since all of it appears to be startlingly accurate. At the end of the book Harris acknowledges his sources (a good few) and thanks those (distinguished) people that gave advice including Dr Mary Beard (someone I’d actually heard of before reading the name in Pompeii). Writing a book set 100 years ago requires some skill to avoid any anachronisms but writing one set around 2000 years ago is some feat. From my (sparse) knowledge of the Roman empire at that time all the details appear to be spot on, each page containing many references to actions performed or customs that must have been researched quite meticulously.

Along with attention to details in the book Robert Harris also includes some historical figures. Whilst the main character is an unknown some notable people take a large role in the book, most notably Pliny the Elder and (to a lesser extent) his nephew Pliny the Younger. What is astonishing is that every single detail about Pliny’s life appears to be correct even down to the description of Pliny the Elder’s demise (not wanting to spoil the end but you should have guessed). As it happens Pliny the Younger wrote an account of his uncle’s death which ties in exactly with the story-line of the book (for the curious Pliny describes what happened to him and his mother after the eruption, not included in the novel, in Book Six, letter 20 of his Letters, the description of his uncle’s death is earlier in letter 16).

Having babbled on about the little yet accurate details it only remains to say that despite the constraints of ‘getting the history right’ and ‘everyone knowing what happens’ Robert Harris still manages to create an enthralling book that really brings to life that period of history. I just wish I’d read it when I was still studying the Roman Empire. Having harped on for quite so long about the detail is seems as if the only reason to read it is if you have some strange long-running obsession with the Romans (ahem) but that isn’t really the case. It’s a very entertaining book, not absolutely outstanding but good, definitely worth a read.

The next few weeks

I refuse to let a rant about SML be at the top of the front page so here are a few random things

I’m getting some really nice pictures from my camera. I’ll have to work out what size/quality settings to put it on for my holiday - I wouldn’t want either bad pictures (quality wise) or to run out of space on the memory card

Speaking of holiday. I’m about to go to Devon on the MT Soc tour. I’ll only be around for the fit-up but it should be cool. I’m only around for the fit-up as I have to come back home to pack as I’m off to China (Shanghia to Beijing) for two weeks.

On return from China I shall have to go about finding a flat in Portsmouth/Southsea to live in before I start my job.

The only other thing I think I have to do this holiday is wind Gary up with constant emails telling him I’ve been in China whilst he was sat at a desk at work. I’m sure he’ll get his own back somehow.

Anyway, things are good at the moment

‘Til later

SML - The Final Word

Right, I promise (hand on heart) that this will be the last time I say anything about SML. I’m sure it’s all bored you lot (which is why this is a static page rather than a blog entry) so I won’t say anymore about it……after this.

I just have a few things to say to purge my opinions having finished working with SML (for good).

SML isn’t a bad language. It’s (mainly) functional and if you like functional programming or think in a certain way you will probably like it. It’s very elegant and neat, things happen in a few lines and you can do some very clever stuff.

The best things I liked about SML were:
-the map function: you write a function that applies to one element of a list and the map function will give you a function that applies that to the whole list
-curried functions and partial instantiation: also quite handy. Curried functions allow you to partially instantiate things (i.e. you can pass parameters one at a time (which is a great deal more useful than you would think).

I think it’s good points are also it’s bad points. I don’t care about elegant code and hence it infuriated me when my project supervisor went all starry-eyed about how wonderful SML is. The fact you can do stuff in a few lines is very cool; it’s also very confusing. Setting something out in a longer-winded way can often lead to code that a larger number of people can read and understand.

One of my other problem with SML was that I had to learn it before I could use it. This inevitably meant that I didn’t use the fancy stuff that SML can do but something like C++ (or dare I say it Python (think higher-order functions other than map)) can’t.

Now having finished talking (well…mainly complaining) about SML as a language - I have a few other problems.

1) The documentation is crap. It’s fairly non-existent. Most of the stuff on the web is also pre-1997 when there was a big change in the language and hence it’s useless. Nobody tells you this though! If anyone reading this has to learn to program in SML - buy a book

2) You can’t do anything with it - No-one writes APIs (interfaces to programs) for SML. Also there are two systems available to make GUIs - both are appalling, particularly the ones the SML website wants you to use. They both appear to be ‘proof of concept’ rather than anything anyone is expected to use. Anything that is written for SML (including the Gui systems) has the documentation issue too (see 1)

3) It’s only used by academics - perhaps this is the root of all the other problems. In essence, nobody writes about it, nobody uses it and even if somebody did use it they couldn’t do anything with it.

Basically my problem with my project was that I see no point in using the language I was being forced to use. I didn’t use the fancy stuff and that is the only reason to even think of using SML

Sorry for the the long rant. It’s my last on this subject I promise. Happy programming, live long, prosper and don’t use functional languages.

Spam, spam, spam, spam

Well my attempts to propogate my newer email addresses appear to have worked and bar a few mailing lists I think I might be able to ditch my bigfoot.com account which appears to recieve a fair amount of spam. On the same topic, I have now setup my mail client to use spamassassin to do my own mail filtering but at the moment it seems to think everything is spam. D’oh!

I’m also about to try out Fedora Core 2 so I might let you know what I think of it.

Something to Do

Well with Guildford not happening from my point of view (it is happening, I’m just not going - they are over-crewed as it is). I now need something to occupy me before I go away. I am also still debating the tour issue but the lack of Guildford makes it more likely I’ll go.

So as I was saying I need something constructive to do. I think I might try and learn something useful. I think first off I’m changing the comment module so you don’t have to be logged in to add your name. I’ll have to think what else to do.

More Photos

I’ve added a few more pictures some here and a few more here. I might be a little slow uploading the second lot but they will appear

Results

Well 4 years of work got me the same class of degree as Gary. What the class of degree won’t show however is that his will be a high 2:1 and mine will be somewhere below that. It’ll be interesting to see the actual mark