Older blog entries for fzort (starting at number 190)

redi, long time no see!

My English grammar book simply says that, after a ditransitive verb (which takes a direct and an indirect object), the indirect object can either come in a prepositional phrase after the direct object ("She told something <to me>") or directly after the verb ("She told <me> something"), implying that the relevant bit of the yacc code for English looks like this:

verb-phrase
: ditransitive-verb direct-object preposition indirect-object
| ditransitive-verb indirect-object direct-object
| ...
;

That doesn't seem to be a general rule, though. Maybe I need a better grammar book!

Your etymological explanation makes sense. Thank you!

It's been a while, Advogato.

Wow, ncm and redi are still around!

This proclus person is annoying. Seriously man, how do you find time to blog like five times a day or something?

I'm writing this little game. In a startling departure from my usual modus codandi, I decided to give this newfangled C++ thing a spin. Now I'm happily writing code that looks like this:

sprite_queue<falling_label, gl_vertex_array_texuv_color, MAX_BOMBS, FALLING_LABEL_TTL> falling_labels;

Different language, but I still feel that I'm essentially banging at the keyboard at random until I arrive at something that compiles. Plus ça change...

I'm trying to improve my English. I'd like to understand why "she told me something" is allowed, but "she explained me something" makes native English speakers emit a parse error. Does anyone out there know where I can get a BNF for English?

eckes: you could try the Sphere Online Judge. It's a site with thousands of programming problems (many require a fair bit of knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and discrete mathematics to be solved). Submit your code and it will be compiled and tested for correctness. A lot of programming languages are supported, including Java. I was addicted to that site a while ago (my account).

sye: Prevayler is a joke. It's embarrassing how the interviewer thought it was necessary to ask about it, probably because the leader of that project, like the site you linked, is Brazilian.

ncm: thank you very much for pointing out that paper. I've only read the abstract, but it looks... interesting.

I haven't released any free software in a while, so I decided to stop being a d*ck and release the source code for Protozoa, an arcade action game I wrote a while ago.

Source: http://www.fzort.org/protozoa/protozoa-src-20100617.tar.gz
README for the source: http://www.fzort.org/protozoa/README.source.txt

Placed in the public domain (GPL doesn't make much sense for games). Have fun!

wingo writes about anarchy. He's free to do that, of course, but it should be pointed out that, under that regime, computer programming as a profession, or even computers, would probably not even exist. There are examples, these days, of countries which are effectively without government, and they aren't exactly doing smashingly.

Yes, capitalism sucks, but alternatives were tried and they all failed. In my own country, we lived under an inflation of 2500%/year (not a typo), until decidedly pro-market reforms were implemented. Much more could have been done, if only those reforms weren't so vigorously opposed at the time by the left-wing party which is currently in power. Said left-wing party now doesn't dare touch the fundamentals of those economic reforms, and brags about the positive results as if they were they were exclusively of their own doing, but it doesn't matter. They worked.

A theory

Zaitcev, chalst: hjclub once posted a guide on piercing the Great Firewall of China (Google Translator - click on "Translate"), which is noble and everything. Maybe that's what made atai give him/her the certification. It's possible that hjclub simply doesn't understand English very well, and certified the spammer because (s)he liked the cute pandas. Don't ascribe to malice, et cetera.

Could any of the Chinese-speaking Advogato users out there convince hjclub to lift the certification?

Edit: I was wrong.

ncm: why? Hard to imagine how it could be more idiotic than the shuttle. (Not trolling, just curious.)

Moving out

I'm moving my "diary" to livejournal. Once in a while I feel like writing about stuff that's off topic for Advogato (I've just posted an entry on politics there). I haven't been doing a lot of free software lately, anyway.