Amazing

Lately I have been more and more amazed by two things:

1. Gravity
2. Magnetism

Sure, we have a bunch of equations for their effects (i.e. the force they impart), but do we really truly understand how they could actually come about?

Think about it, our Earth is completely locked into orbit around an object 93 million miles away. 93 million. Heck, Pluto is 3.6 billion (3.6 thousand million for the Brits out there) miles away and it ain’t even going to break away. That is pretty damn amazing and we totally take it for granted.

One of the more entertaining things to do for us simple-minded folks is to take two magnets and try to push their like-poles together. Those puppies will really fight you! You can use the effect and move another magnet around a table. Japan uses this for friction-less high speed trains. Kids play with magnets from the youngest age, and it’s always fascinating, but it is completely taken in stride.

It is very interesting that another instance of moving things without touching them, telekinesis, is complete hogwash (presumably…) despite there being electric currents running all through us.

Maybe this is why every guy has, at some point in his life, been convinced the he could use the Force.

Don’t even get me started with quantum entanglement (aka “spooky action at a distance”). The world around us is truly stunning, even when we can “explain” it.

Update:Had 36 thousand million instead of 3.6

Schools and that jazz

There has been a lot of furor (at least from all the links popping up on proggit) around the “worth” of CS degrees and how bad the programs are.

My personal take is that people are expecting the wrong thing out of it. There is certainly a mechanical/trade aspect to programming. That’s the part that they can teach quite well: syntax, basic algorithms, etc. Strangely, this is the part they only teach in Software “Engineering” courses versus pure “Computer Science.” Most people go into these programs expecting to be able to walk into a typical business programming job and get to work. They really do no want to learn about Big O, Finite State Machines, or Data Structure Implementation. Who wants to know about all that damn math!?

The bit that they do not teach well is the part that actually makes you good at “programming”: critical thinking problem solving skills. Much of your time is spent figuring out how to go from problem to solution and, after doing that, why the apparent solution does not actually solve the problem correctly. You will spend a lot of time debugging software and fixing bugs. That’s just the way it is. Yes, each language makes some aspect of expression easier, but at the end of the day the actual algorithm is exactly the same. There are really only two ways a bit of program can be wrong:

1. The algorithm is incorrect
2. The expression of the algorithm is incorrect

I would argue that the analysis of either of these problems requires slightly different skills. One of them is the heart of “computer science” and it is the creation of algorithms that solve problems in faster and more innovative ways that are researched. The majority of us will never come up with a truly new algorithm; rather we will solve a problem that is just being defined in terms of different nouns. So a key skill of any programmer (during the design phase of construction, however short that may be) is recognizing how the problem can be re-phrased in another light and use a known algorithm. The site TopCoder is an excellent way to practice this.

Assuming that the proper algorithm has been chosen, the next step is to actually implement it. Theoretically this is the “easy” part, but it is also where the majority of effort is placed in the real world. An absolutely necessary skill of a software engineer is to be able to follow the logic of code (usually people speak of reading code but I really think you follow the logic of code instead. While I have seen some poetic code before, it really isn’t literary in nature) and trace what it is doing with a particular input. It is this skill (or the lack of) which is why, i believe, people complain about bad Computer Science education. You can whine and moan about Java or C++ being used (instead of “pure” languages like Haskell) but frankly that is a bunch of hogwash. If a person is getting the right education, or has the right innate talent, then they will be able to solve problems in any language given to them.

I have always said to people that one of the most useful classes I ever had in college was my Physics class. The professor was smart and did not allow calculators on the exams. You see, it is not the answer that matters, but how you get there. Your algorithm. The most important lessons in Computer Science (and medicine, and law, and….) is those that teach critical thinking and being methodical about solving a problem.

Ruby will not make you magically a better programmer. Java does not turn you into some brainless idiot. Perl will not turn you into a person incapable of writing clear code. Using RAD tools will not prevent you from learning how your code actually works. It is the person behind the code that matters.

Update: I found this response to the debate by Brian Hurt at Enfranchised Mind to be very good (and much better written than mine) in the sense of mentioning that, effectively, you want a “Developer that knows Java” rather than a “Java Developer”.  The reality, though, even if we don’t want to admit it, is that companies want Java developers. What do they care if the person will be useless 10 or 20 years from now, they’ll just get a developers that are trained up on New Fangled Language X.

Holidays and a New Year

It’s been a while…

I’m ending a nice long 3-or-so week extended Christmas (just me, the wife, and pictures of gifts from family), New Year’s (very cool dinner on a ship permanently docked on the Thames. Those who know me won’t be surprised to know that I spilled red wine all over the table within about 2 minutes of sitting down. The 9 others at the table were quite nice about it) and 5-day Moroccan holiday in Marrakesh (مراكش). The last was quite cool (finally something different from Europe, you can only handle so many castles) but hectic and wearing at times (I can only handle so much haggling.. even though it’s satisfying to only pay 50% of the original price, I know I’m still paying way more than the price a local would pay). Again those who know me will not be surprised to know that I dropped (and shattered) the large tagine that we had purchased… was about 10 feet from our boarding gate at the airport.

And to really but an end to the holiday, my wife is now on a plane back to the States to get us going for our repatriation there. I will be following 3 weeks later, as my year-long stint here in the UK is ending. I have have had an awesome time here, both at work in out and about. Met some great people who I will definitely miss.

And now for something completely different..

To bring things back around to geeky stuff (I tend to skim over other people’s personal stuff, so I understand if you, Reader, have done the same) I have finally started working on my Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator. It is still using the same basic core as the C64 and NES emulators. Main difference is that the SNES using a 65816, a successor to the 6502 which can address 16MB of memory (24 bits) and implements all of the 256 op codes and adds some more addressing modes. When it initially starts up, it is actually in 6502 emulation mode (with bugs that the original 6502 had fixed, which I’m sure provided frustration to many developers who depended on undocumented instructions and bugs). I have gotten some basic graphics to work in the ‘test.smc’ demo included in Y0shi’s documentation, but it is nowhere near even able to get screenshots, but hopefully only a week or so (I’ve spent a feverish 3 or 4 days dedicated to SNES stuff, but probably spent another couple of weeks previously working toward getting an Apple IIGS emulator working, which uses the same processor) to get there.

I have started adding some JUnit tests of the actual instruction implementations, as even minor bugs can truly spiral out of control in the running of the system.

As usual, Zophar’s domain has proved invaluable for obtaining documentation, but I have also used Wikipedia for system overview (memory sizes and the like) and another site I stumbled on just called “Emu-Docs”

I will make the code available via CVS or Subversion once it is in a usable state. Apparently my wife never really played the SNES, so we shall see if I can find anything to drive me like getting SMB3 working on the NES did.  I would love to get Super Mario Kart working.

I have been using ZSNES as my “reference” for what a working system should look like (I don’t know if it’s open source or not, but I am only using the executable in any case).

Shoutout goes to the many people who dedicated hours and hours dissecting and analyzing the SNES and writing emulators in C and Assembly which ran on old Pentiums. My Java emulator may one day run at a full speed on a 2 Gig machine 🙂