Ted Leung on the air

Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...

Sat, 17 May 2003

One of the things that Tim Bray mentioned in his article on Ustr was his use of an aggressive TDD methodology. Today Keith Ray posted a nice page of TDD refs. I'll be taking a look at these myself.

[18:07] | [computers/programming] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments |

Yooster

Tim Bray has given us a peek at Ustr, which is designed to be more suitable for heavy text processing than java.lang.String. We've played with different representations for Unicode strings in the various versions of Xerces-J, so it's interesting to see Tim Bray taking a crack at the problem. We were more focused on trying to avoid transcoding until the last possible moment, so Ustr has a different design center than what we did. Nevertheless, the more XML there is in the world, the more cycles are being burned up processing strings. We need all the help we can get.

[18:04] | [computers/programming/java] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments |

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age

I've been reading my way through various books on network science. Duncan Watts' Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age was the last one on my list. Six Degrees covered more ideas than any of the other books that I've read. Small worlds , scale free networks, and preferential attachment were already familiar to me. Percolation theory, information cascades, and multiscale networks were not. Watts does a good job of storytelling, although I found the prose in Linked to be more engaging. But Six Degrees made up for that by going well beyond Linked and Nexus in terms of the ideas.

There were some stories that stuck out to me, such as Judith Kleinfeld's investigation of Milgram's small world results and the story of Toyota-Asin's disaster and extraordinary recovery.

There is also a nicely annotated further reading section including difficulty indicators.

[17:47] | [books] | # | TB | F | G | 0 Comments |

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