Older blog entries for haruspex (starting at number 260)

20 Apr 2007 (updated 20 Apr 2007 at 17:23 UTC) »
Ankh,

f/1.8, which means the shutter of the camera can open very wide, letting in a lot of light but at the same time giving a narrow "depth of field", so that someone's face can be in sharp focus but the background be entirely blurred.

Well, an f/1.8 lens wide open allows you to maximise shutter speed, so presumably you're talking about very low light/slow film situations. (N.B. you have a typo, s/shutter/aperture/).

lmb, you might be interested in this talk: Torture, Secrecy and the Bush Administration given by Prof. Scott Horton.
13 Apr 2007 (updated 13 Apr 2007 at 15:45 UTC) »
Chicago: what happens in IRC between guys isn’t just putting women off joining, it puts guys off as well -- absolutely! It can be totally toxic. No cure in sight, however. A**holes will be a**holes & on irc there's no cost to being one, and no reward for being civil.
13 Apr 2007 (updated 13 Apr 2007 at 12:02 UTC) »
nymia: Be sure to check out TWiki before settling on a wiki, especially one to support software engineering (shout out to spinner who introduced me to it). I prefer it overall to Mediawiki.
robocoder, Re: "Standards for Accessing TorontoMLS". *boggle* @ PC systems criteria which don't appear to have been updated in over a decade - I hope they don't get updated any time soon, either... Or would you rather see: "Minimum requirements to access this site: Windows Vista, 3GHz+ CPU, 1GB RAM, 3Mbit"?
24 Mar 2007 (updated 24 Mar 2007 at 21:21 UTC) »
slamb: actually make doesn't suck; people just never seem to RTFM which is fatal when combined with nugatory folk wisdom that 'make sucks'. Folk wisdom takes up residence in poorly maintained minds, like legionnaire's bacteria in neglected air conditioning ducts. Folk wisdom sucks.

In this particular case, GNU anticipated your problem. If you use bison, you are not restricted to a 'generic' intermediate.

(update) Calling this a make problem is a long bow indeed.

16 Mar 2007 (updated 16 Mar 2007 at 02:16 UTC) »
Chicago, I recognise a psychological resistance to using Svn for 'throwaway' projects. However, the hardest part is really naming the project. Once it's named, it's easy: just throw up a Svn URL on a blog (or here). The advantages are great. No need to worry about keeping crappy tarballs up to date; just commit at will. Whoever checks out will get the latest. Plus all the obvious niceties such as tagging, rev history in case the 'toy' project gets serious. That's what I do. So to circle back to the beginning, imho the hardest part is making up a name for the project. :-)
4 Mar 2007 (updated 4 Mar 2007 at 15:30 UTC) »
fejj, Numerous too are the fallacies that programmers use TO justify hand-writing some of their low-level routines. Rewriting libraries is so rarely a good idea that one could write an epigram - oh wait, someone did, so I won't rewrite it: PrematureOptimization. (Quite a few other pages on that wiki are relevant also, several of which are cited in the 3rd para.)
apenwarr, isn't that usually called prefetching?
tonyyarusso, You might also add this tragic absurdity to your list.

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