David's Ramblings

XBRL

David — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:49:21 +0000

The XBRL spec will put you to sleep. In any case, I’m making an XBRL parser in ruby. Yeah, we already have xbrlware community edition, but it’s artificially limited and I didn’t want that, so I’m building my own. Also, xbrlware represents the entire taxonomy as a Ruby class. I am going to make mine a little more generic than that.

“Like”

David — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:21:18 +0000

This whole Facebook “like” thing is getting out of hand. Facebook keeps recommending things to me that other people “like”. You know what other people like? Books. Not specific books, just “books”. You know what else people like (or so Facebook tells me)? They like “country music”. Not particular artists, not particular songs, but “country music”. How do you tag an arbitrary thing that you “like”? I don’t even know. When I figure it out, I’m going to “like” air. Then I’m going to like “breathing”. I might go so far as to “like” The can.

Eyes And Feet and more: Turbo-boost your WiFi signal – in 15 minutes

David — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:51:43 +0000

Eyes And Feet and more: Turbo-boost your WiFi signal – in 15 minutes.

Cool! Build your own parabolic antenna adapter using a cut-out pattern, aluminium foil, paper, glue, and a knife.

Thesis Draft – 2.0

David — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:57:03 +0000

Thesis – 2.0

Things you learn while programming.

David — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:41:25 +0000

One of the things I like most about programming is that to implement something correctly you must understand the details of whatever you’re implementing.

I’ve been reading about MACD this evening and I’ve come to a better understanding of the MACD trading strategy than I’ve ever had.

Last week I was reading about the exponential moving average (EMA) and now I understand it better than I ever have before.

It’s fun to learn new things.

David — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:19:42 +0000

That’s how natural selection works in the jungle: sometimes the strong survive, sometimes they get bitten by a snake.

Nelson Rushton (My Thesis Advisor)

The Hilbert Hotel – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com

David — Mon, 10 May 2010 04:55:55 +0000

Link: The Hilbert Hotel – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com

This is a good read.

In a class I took with my thesis advisor, he explained the Hilbert Hotel similarly, and it was as entertaining then as this is now.

How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable

David — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:10:58 +0000

Link: How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable

This is a hoot!

The halting problem is described on Wikipedia as:

Given a description of a program, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever.

The halting problem is algorithmically undecidable because “there is no algorithm which can be applied to any arbitrary program and input to decide whether the program stops when run with that input.”

Partial building collapse as I left campus Friday.

David — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:30:24 +0000

Link: Partial building collapse as I left campus Friday.

David — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 07:03:28 +0000

You might’ve heard about the CAP Theorem. It says that when building a distributed system, you’d like to guarantee 3 properties – Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance – but that you have to pick two, because you can’t have all three at the same time.

Today I’ve invented DRC Theorem™.

Dog
Rain (and therefore mud, at least in Lubbock)
Clean Carpet

Pick two. You can’t have all three at the same time.