Curried Lambda

Paywalls lined with barbed wire

I came across this paper using Google Scholar. I can't find a digital copy anywhere, even using my alma mater's library system. I find myself asking these questions:

• Without knowing the content, should I spend the $30USD for it? That's a risky endeavour just to read it, not knowing if it contains something useful.
• I can "request permissions" to get a copy for personal use (although, oddly enough, "read it" is not one of the options when you do that, although "reuse in a thesis/dissertation" is). It takes up to five business days to see if that is acceptable and how much it will cost.
• If I'm trying to to write a paper and I want references -- say, 10-15 or so -- that will be well upwards of $300 just for the references I actually use, notwithstanding the ones I don't use. That's a huge risk with essentially no chance of a payoff.

Even if you are going to charge me to read something, at least learn a lesson from iTunes and Steam: make it easy and I won't bother with less "respectable" methods.

Blog consolidation

I've decided to merge all my blogs into one place to keep things simpler for me. This means that anyone who reads this will get a mix of research/developer-oriented material as well as, well, stuff that isn't that.

I'll use tags to differentiate things, but sometimes I may forget.

Hopefully I haven't broken too many things.

I'm also playing around with different themes. Forgive me if things are in flux for a little while.

I voted for the London Fringe Party

Fishbowl: Funny and touching, complete with science humour. The characters portrayed used stereotype to get your attention but are not portrayed with such simplicity. The story ties together nicely. Kudos to Mark Shyzer and crew.

"New Talent": A good story with good acting but there is a part in the middle where it gets a bit dull. We found the "agent" character to be intensely interesting. The set and stage management left a little to be desired, though. The TV was distracting and the sound levels for the music were often too high.

Monster: An incredible one man show that was engrossing, although we both found the story to be confusing, mainly the timeline. With the plethora of characters portrayed (with no costumes and a minimal set) it was hard to keep track of everyone, which may have contributed to the confusion.

Dying Hard: This was the only show we had a split opinion on. The show consists of a single actor performing interviews with miners who worked the fluorspor mines in Newfoundland. Unfortunately, if you have trouble understanding the accent (as my wife did), it's hard to get into the content. To be honest, I couldn't understand the first 5-10 minutes of dialogue but I did find the actor convincing. I liked it, my wife didn't.

Emma: Very light fare that had a few laughs and a some awkward deliveries from some of the supporting cast.

Overall, we enjoyed the shows and will definitely be looking at attending some more theatre.

Presumptuous exceptions

Our study results revealed that some developers have shifted their perspective on exception handling from the intended proactive approach (i.e., how to handle possible exceptions) to a reactive approach (i.e., using exception handling as debugging aids). In addition, some developers dislike being forced to implement exception-handling constructs and therefore, neglect to implement them thoughtfully. Both results explain the poor quality of error handling.

I think the authors have an overly optimistic view of what exceptions provide to the system. The vast majority of exceptions are little more than glorified logging aids: they give you a message and might contain a stack trace, but that’s about it. What you can't do (without an awful lot of work) is ascertain enough information to go about a reasonable recovery strategy. In particular, it is rare that the immediate caller of an operation that may throw an exception even has enough information to do anything about it. About the only reasonable thing to do is try the operation again.

Furthermore, is there any reason to believe that developers ever viewed exception handling as proactive? Just because it may have been intended as a way to handle possible problems does not mean that it was accepted (or even presented) as such.

Lastly, I posit that the remark to "implement them thoughtfully" is another instance of "boil the ocean".

(Note: This is what prompted my tweet earlier.)

Diaspora, the (desperately?) wanted Facebook alternative

Have you heard of Diaspora yet? It's "the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network". It's gotten a lot of support from people, pushing $200K as of this writing.

I'm not getting my hopes up too much, though; there is no product yet, only hope of one. And the way its supposed to work is by running a node on your machine to connect with other people -- a decentralized Facebook.

I wish them the best of luck and, in their defense, they had no way of thinking they would be getting this much attention. But let's face it: if using this means managing a node, then if managing the node isn't as simple as going to a web site and updating your status, people like my wife (who make up the vast majority of Facebook's users) are simply not going to use it.

Great talk about building a team

I've always liked it when measurement and comparison is done as a side effect and is not the end goal for the participants. It's the same reason, I believe, karma systems on social websites rarely work.

Reading and writing: the golden ticket

The Globe and Mail's editorial today:

Throw out the demonstrably false assumption that all students in Grade 7 can read and write well enough to succeed in school. Assess students one by one; identify those who are grade levels behind their peers; and give them the support they need to catch up. If it means putting some subjects on hold until they do so, so be it.

Literacy is "the golden ticket" to success in school and modern economy.

If you don't have the ticket by now, we will move Heaven and Earth and timetables to help you get one. [emphasis theirs]

I'm in agreement on this: reading and writing trump other skills, even, dare I say, arithmetic. In my experience, those with good reading comprehension and the ability to write clearly are the brightest people, and can often get up to speed on other subjects without much trouble — including math.

What I would hate to see, however, is rabid devotion to teaching literacy at the expense of everything else.

Exploration and specification

Bear in mind that experimentation is not at odds with studying. In fact, good experimentation often requires careful study. What I am getting at is that in order to understand how one thing works within the context of another, I get more out of playing with it than reading about it.

I've noticed this pattern in many activities; cooking, for example. My wife and I enjoy writings of Michael Smith and Julia Child and have been working from their recipes lately. That said, we don't learn what works in a dish until we try cooking it, regardless of the authority behind the recipe. Learning to cook from just reading about it is remarkably difficult.

What is enjoyable about cooking, even though the specifications (recipes) are not complete, is that the laboratory used to experiment is enjoyable. Most kitchen equipment is simple, though somewhat tedious. During the experiment is it easy to investigate the state of things and sample it to get an idea of the end result. Improvisation is encouraged, both with respect to ingredients and tools, in order to deal with things that don't go according to plan. And even if they don't go according to plan there's still a good chance you'll get something approaching edible out of it.

In short, cooking is fun because experimentation is, for the most part, simple and even if you screw up you'll still eat.

Another example of this is software development. Here I've noticed a culture that emphasizes specification. My experience has been that experimentation within software development environments is not that enjoyable. It gets considerably worse the more strict the system. This is the case even with decent documentation around what the system can do.

Consider something as simple as using a function. If the system is not very strict the setup involved to use the function is usually straightforward — just type it in at a prompt — but determining what is necessary to make it useful can be tricky; if something doesn't work, investigating the result is tedious and rarely informative. In stricter systems, even with a decent specification readily available, the setup needed to use the function can be a pain: surround it with a main function, allocate objects, make sure everything is the right type, and so forth. Both kinds of systems suffer from a lack of meaningful error objects to be poked and prodded (read: tasted).

Yes, it's a gross generalization but in my experience obtaining useful or satisfying results with the elements of a "programming laboratory" means leaving the laboratory and seeking help elsewhere. My kitchen experiences have not suffered from this problem.

In short, making experimentation easy makes me happy. I'll study when I want to know more.

(Ok, so it's a slightly unfair comparison as presented but I want to avoid excessive technical terminology. So there.)

"Dumb-Dumb Bullets"

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a
five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the
need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.
Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in
slides instead of legal briefs.

In my experience, PowerPoint (and other presentation software) can be
used to great effect but it does not replace critical thought on what
it is you are trying to say. In other words, bullet points do not
automatically clarify things. PowerPoint is used extensively where I
work and it seems to have become the de facto way to issue a memo.
From where I sit, it's been a total disaster.

The Vegas experience

For starters, the whole trip came about because when we got our car it came with the option of an inexpensive vacation (for approximately an extra $1 per payment). We opted to go with it since it didn't cost much and we didn't have to commit to anything. The vacation was arranged through Travel America and the Diamond Getaway Package. Word of advice: avoid working through this system. While we didn't lose money, we wasted a lot of time trying to book the trip. The fact that it took nearly two years to arrange the trip with them should tell you something. Dates are limited, the available dates are poor, the window to book is small and the website is essentially useless. Furthermore, the dates got shifted on us after we thought it was finalized and my wife had to jump through hoops to get an extra day off.

With the obnoxious booking experience behind us, we resolved to not let it sour our time away. Turns out it didn't matter.

Let's get the good stuff out first.

Our love of food convinced us of the need to experience haute cuisine so we booked a dinner with Alizé at the top of the Palms Casino Resort. It was an incredible dinner. To (sort of) quote Ferris Bueller, if you have the means, I highly recommend you experience a place like that at least once.

The other enjoyable part was getting to meet Louie Anderson and attending his show. He's a very nice guy (or was to us, at least) and his act was much funnier than I anticipated. I heard a bunch of his routines back in the 80s and 90s, and I was glad to hear he didn't rehash it all. He had a good rapport with the audience, but did look a bit tired at times and seemed a little more bitter than I remember him. Still, we laughed a lot and enjoyed ourselves.

Now, the not-so-good...

We got to meet Louie because we got free VIP tickets to his show for participating in a timeshare presentation. Yes, I know, you're rolling your eyes but bear with me. We were well aware of what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't end up buying anything (no surprise there) but it took up more time than we thought.

It was after the timeshare presentation that things really went downhill (notwithstanding the show). We went for a walk to the In-N-Out burger -- not all dining experiences have to be extravagant -- and realized just how hostile the city is to walking. The sidewalks twist and turn away from the roads and look like they go nowhere; planning a walk requires you do lots of exploring first (much like planning a vacation with Diamond Getaways).

On top of that, the city is ugly. The architecture, such as it is, consists of gaudy imitation buildings and haphazard empty spaces to keep structures away from the four to eight lane streets; fifteen metres of crushed rock from the curb to the parking lot peppered with litter hardly counts as attractive.

Aside from Alizé and (oddly enough) In-N-Out Burger, the food was poor and over-priced. Typical prices were about $30 for a meagre breakfast for two with the functional ambiance of dining in a ditch (here's looking at you, Sherwood Forest Cafe). We went to a seemingly nice place in the Luxor on our last night there and were uninterested. It was less impressive than The Keg with higher prices and more mechanical service.

We did find cheap food but meant going to some sketchy places.

Most importantly, the majority of people who work there come off an insincere. It's like they have the notion of making you feel welcome and comfortable in order get your money backwards: first we'll do all we can to get money from you then we'll see what we can do about getting you to find something enjoyable.

That and the constant solicitation. The street vendors handing out cards for escort services were actually the least annoying of them all: they just stand there, slap cards against their hands and hold the cards out for you to take. The timeshare headhunters, on the other hand, are on you every waking moment. We must have been bothered by them upwards of 50 times in a 7 hour stretch. Furthermore, they will chase you down until you start walking briskly.

Neither one of us came away very happy with the city. We aren't interested in gambling, the shows are pricey and the people are either unpleasant, uninterested or drunk. We have no desire to go back.