Malletrivia

Pros and cons of a budding stuntman

Xander has always been a strong, physical little fellow [which has led to some embarrassment when he simply runs through other kids when they get in his way]. His new "thing" is climbing on top of anything even faintly climbable, which now leads him to positions like the one demonstrated below [shades of Xander Cage ...].

I'm somewhat conflicted about this. On the one hand, I like the fact that he's a little daredevil, and have grand visions of sitting in the stands at sporting events, beaming with paternal pride as he performs athletic miracles. On the other hand, I suspect this also means we're going to be dealing with more than the usual allotment of cuts, bruises, sprains etc along the way, and that's no fun for anybody. On balance, though, I'll take that over a sissy 'fraidy-cat. 

$tories from $ilicon Valley

The NYT seems a bit obsessed with the fortunes currently being made in Silicon Valley and/or the social phenomena that come with the confluence of large accumulations of wealth, at an early age, by lots of people, in the same place. See, for example, this, that and the other story. The main [albeit not stated explicitly] point of these stories seems to be either "See, rich people have problems too" or "Wow, look at how insane all the rich people in the Valley are" [or maybe both]. Or maybe they're just a chronicle of the times, "What life was like" dispatches from the Internet-fueled Gilded Age, with no overarching philosophical agenda.

A zoo of superlatives

In an attempt to get out of the house and keep Xander entertained, we went to the Cougar Mountain Zoo today, whose current main attraction consists of two tiger cubs. And the cubs are indeed quite fetching; they've grown into the tiger equivalent of strapping young toddlers, currently weighing in at around 100 lbs apiece, but still small enough to be cute [to the extent that you can consider a 100lb cat cute ...]

What I found almost equally noteworthy, though, was that the choice of animals with which to populate the [quite small] zoo seems to have been based largely on the criterion "Is animal X the most-something in some category ?". Take a look at their list of animals and you'll see what I mean; they also have a species of macaw considered the "best talkers" among macaws, a couple of mountain lions, which apparently have "the largest range of all cats, covering the Americas" and "the most endurance of all cats", and are considered by the zoo to be the "Cats of Cats" etc. It was sort of educational at first, but got rather annoying by the end. Pretty much the only animals that weren't "super" in some way were the lemurs, and I suspect they really had to restrain themselves from putting up a sign along the lines of "The ring-tailed lemur is the most lemur-like animal in the animal kingdom".

Anyway, it's worth visiting if you have some time to kill, want to hand-feed [and get snorted on by] some alpacas, and are in the mood for some eXtreme, RedBull-chugging animals. 

Ashesi University: kicking @$$ and taking names

I had a chance today to hear Patrick Awuah talk about the current status of Ashesi, the private university that he founded in Ghana after leaving Microsoft in 1997. What he's been able to accomplish is extremely impressive: merely 6 years after opening its doors in 2001, the university is rated as high as, or higher than, the 3 oldest universities in Ghana [KNUST, the University of Ghana, and the University of Cape Coast], by prospective students and employers. Almost all of their students have had multiple job offers upon graduation, which is a true rarity in a country and economy where most university graduates have a hard time getting even a single job offer. When Christina and I were in Ghana in early 2004, we went to check out their campus and talk with Patrick a bit, and it was clear even then, before they'd turned out any graduates, that they were doing something pretty amazing and their students were going to beat the pants off the graduates from any of the other universities in Ghana. And their student body isn't just made up of rich kids whose parents can pay the fees necessary to run a top-notch university -- a large percentage [more than 50%, I think] of enrolled students are on financial aid of some sort.

All in all, it was very inspiring stuff which, of course, awakened the old question that I think a lot of Ghanaians [and other Africans] currently living abroad face: what we can do to improve the situation back in our country of origin. I still don't have a good answer to that for myself, but it's something I intend to keep thinking about.

[Random fact: Patrick was the first person to ever interview me at Microsoft, for my first internship in 1994. I believe he asked me to reverse a linked list, and since my answer was in Lisp, I spent that first internship *not* writing MS product code :-)]

Random book review of the month: "Beautiful Code"

I just finished reading "Beautiful Code", touted as a book in which "leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects". Sounds great, right ? [If you're into that sort of thing]

Unfortunately, I don't think the book quite lives up to its billing. The 33 chapters, each contributed by a different set of authors, vary quite widely in quality, ranging from truly beautiful/elegant/intricate analyses to very pedestrian "... and so, children, that's how I was able to make my C code talk to the old mainframe"-type descriptions. Along the way, there's also some plain bad advice ["XML is just text, so you should construct XML documents by using printf statements", basically] and one chapter spirals off into the deep end of Lisp expression evaluation la-la land.

That said, there are a few bits that are definitely worth reading:

- Jon Bentley's chapter is a nice little meditation on statistical analysis versus explicit computational modeling of an algorithm [using everybody's favorite algorithm, Quicksort]
- Bryan Cantrill has a great description of some of the intricacies of implementing concurrency primitives in an OS
- The chapter contributed by Brian Kernighan serves as a useful example of how to actually implement a small regular-expression matcher

... and I'm pretty sure the chapter on how to use Software Transactional Memory to deal with concurrency issues would be mind-expanding if I ever managed to read it without getting lost about 3 pages into it. Maybe I'll just keep chipping away at it.

[Update: here's an entertaining thread on using Erlang to perform the task described in the "Finding Things" chapter of the book. I've been toying with reading up on Erlang myself, so this is a timely find.]

Possible explanation for an inability to find trashcans

Maybe the caption to this picture explains the thought process of the people who keep throwing their litter all over the sidewalk in front of and beside our house. Personally, I lean more towards an explanation centered around the terms "lazy" and "ignorant".