Roundup

PAIP

We got some new books in at work, among them Peter Norvig's classic Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (PAIP). It sounds strange, ordering a decade-old book about AI programming in Lisp for a company that works with media from Python and C, but the book has a staying power that outlasts the passage of time.

PAIP is not interesting from an AI perspective. Most all of methods and strategies are outdated at this point. Its strength is in teaching how to optimize programming in a high-level language. See the PAIP retrospective page for how -- skip past the Lisp melancholy at the top, just go directly to "What lessons are in PAIP?" at the bottom.

Lesson 26 on that page is a delightful Alan Perlis quote: "A programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming is not worth knowing", which was originally published as part of Epigrams of Programming.

Paris

I spent the weekend in Paris.

(I'm now basking in the glow of that sentence. Excuse me.)

Went to see the city, and to visit a girl. The former was pretty interesting, the latter left a bit to be desired. Así va la cosa.

Patch

My patch made it into 2.6.14-rc5. Neat.

In the shipment that brought us PAIP also came Corbet et al's Linux Device Drivers, third edition. From a brief skim, I find it's a nice complement to Love's Linux Kernel Development -- LDD has more specifics on writing drivers, but LKD is good for an overview of the kernel as a whole.

Pollo

Unexpected bbq last night. Up drinking and saying stupid things until 4 in the morning. The weather's still nice enough to sit out on the terrace in the evening -- in terms of temperature barcelona wins handily over the french cold wet capital.

Pure

With regards to Robert Love's recent informative post about GCC attributes, it bears noting that pure and const should be used only when the function does not write to memory. Cf. bug 64994.

Performance

Quite pleased to see that Billy Biggs is writing. Yay.

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