Coding Music

Music, , ,

I’ve been doing a lot of programming this week, and that means I’ve been listening to a lot of music. Between the Current’s always excellent new music podcast and a few free iTunes songs from a Facebook promotion, I’ve got a few new favorites:
Beirut – Nantes
Beirut took me a few listens to warm up to, but he does have an amazing voice. Nantes is their best track (that I’ve heard). Unfortunately there’s no music video, so here is a live version. See also Elephant Gun, which is another great song, but a very strange music video.

White Stripes – You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You’re Told)
I’m not always a fan of “traditional” rock groups, but the White Stripes are really good. My favorite track is “A Martyr For My Love For You,” but again there’s no music video, so here’s another track from the same album:


José González – Down the Line
This is a phenomenally strange video, but the song is excellent.

Book Sale

Books, ,

Ithaca Book Sale

Last weekend was the beginning of the biannual Ithaca book sale. It’s run by volunteers, and usually has upwards of 250,000 books. The prices decrease for each of three consecutive weekends, but they start at $4.50 for a hardback, so I though it would be worth it to go early. Apparently everybody else had the same idea, because it was packed on Saturday morning. I was about ready to leave during my two hour wait in line, but I am glad I didn’t as the selection was pretty amazing. I looked exclusively for computer science books and found a number of gems:

  • Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (first edition) by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman — The classic “red dragon book” on compilers. This was actually very well timed as I am in the midst of writing the front end of a simple compiler for my research.
  • Introduction to Algorithms (first edition) by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest — Along with the compilers text, this is the book I’m likely to get the most use out of. It’s one of the classic works on algorithms, and it is pretty encyclopedic for results up through the eighties. It’s probably not the best for an introductory algorithms course, but it’s great as a reference.
  • Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (first edition) by Hopcroft and Ullman — The “Cinderella book.” This is another classic, and I’ve been told that the first edition is better than subsequent editions.
  • Operating System Concepts (sixth edition) by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne — The “Dinosaur book.”  I think this is the textbook for the Cornell OS class, so I will need it at some point.
  • The C Programming Language (second edition) by Kernighan and Ritchie — I need to brush up on my C/C++, and who better to read than the creators of C themselves. I’ve read part of the first edition but it’s been a while
  • Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson — Rails is a popular web application framework for the Ruby language. I’m probably unlikely to use it in the near future, but I’m a sucker for web development.
  • GNU Emacs Pocket Reference – I’m also a sucker for Emacs. I know most of the stuff in here, but it never hurts to have a reference.
  • C Pocket Reference – Likewise for C.

Not too bad for $35. I hope to go back at some point and take a look at their fiction.

Quotes

Asides, Books

And the IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It’s a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don’t get out much, and when you do it’s usually at night.

–Ken MacLeod, from the introduction to The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Real hackers — computer programmers in the sense that the word was coined at MIT in the 1960s — are meticulous, intelligent, mathematically and linguistically inclined obsessives. Far from diving in and out of your bank account details, they’re more likely to spend months working on a mathematical model of an abstraction that only another hacker would understand, or realise was an elaborate intellectual joke.  

–Charles Stross, from the afterward to The Atrocity Archives

Excuse the Dust

Meta

I tried to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress today, but things didn’t go quite as planned. I didn’t lose any content, but I had trouble getting the theme to work. I will try to fix it soon, but things may be in disarray for a while. 

Update: I seem to have gotten things back to normal. There are still a few quirks — the flickr photos only work at the bottom of the sidebar, but everything else seems to work normally. Maybe I’ll actually post something new soon…Â