Category: Computing

Comments on Dr. Shiva’s Election System Analysis

Posted on by zxq9

UPDATE 2020-11-20: Scroll to the bottom for a follow-up. Commentary Dr. Shiva performed a data analysis on the automated voting system results in the 2020 U.S. election and made a video presentation of it just a few days ago. I was asked to give my thoughts on it yesterday, so I watched it this morning […]

Excerpts from Chat: Discovering Structure and Grokking the True Nature of a Problem

Posted on by zxq9

This is an excerpt from a private chat with someone about code and I think it expresses something universal about programming, mathematics and engineering or any discipline where iterative development is necessary to manage complexity and discover simplicity. …about a bit of code where I haven’t quite grasped what needs to happen, or the core […]

Erlang: Dispatching Closures (aka: why we don’t do OOP)

Posted on by zxq9

Oh my! It’s like “Creating nouns in the kingdom of verbs“!(The link above is to a great post from Steve Yegge — read it and come back if you aren’t already familiar with it.) I wrote a funny little module today to demonstrate to a friend why FP folks sometimes refer to OOP objects as […]

Erlang: [video] The GUI experience on Windows with ZX and Vapor

Posted on by zxq9

I’ve written and spoken a bit about how ZX makes it easy to create, distribute and launch templated GUI projects in Erlang. I also showed how the (still ugly) GUI program launcher Vapor can make it easy for non-technical desktop users to use those programs. So far I’ve been doing my examples on Linux where […]

Erlang: [Video] Creating and running GUI apps with ZX

Posted on by zxq9

I had a little bit of time to make a video on how to use ZX to create GUI applications, but not enough time to do any post processing. Hopefully the video demonstrates the basic use case well enough to make the purpose of the tool itself obvious. (The audio isn’t great — hopefully I’ll […]

Hardware Development VS Software Development Budget Allocation

Posted on by zxq9

It is funny to me that hardware engineers are able to test the bejeezus out of essentially solved problems like how many keypresses a keyboard can take before mean operations to failure and document every minute aspect of their development, but software developers are pretty much prohibited from being given the time to document code. […]

Erlang: Barnsley’s Fern

Posted on by zxq9

A mathematician friend of mine asked me the other day whether we used many techniques from fractal theory in game development. I told her that I didn’t think so, at least not formally. She asked me if I had ever implemented “Barnsley’s Fern” (Wikipedia) and of course I never had. So she asked me to […]