My daughter reads very well for her age. I worry that a lot of her books are really too easy for her. She loves to read though, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what to read with her. I came up with the idea of going to the library and picking up a bunch of kid books about a single topic. When I first mentioned this to her, she said “Maybe then you and I can be as smart as dad!” (Oh great!)
This is the first week we’re trying this out. The topic she chose was African animals. We’ve been having fun reading the books we chose. She was reading them by herself the other day and kept saying, “Mom, you have to know this RIGHT NOW!” I think this will be fun and we will both learn something. Hopefully some of the books will be a bit more challenging for her and she’ll have fun in the process.
(We’re reading them with Sam too, of course. It seems he’s learning to love books as much as the rest of us.)
It’s been almost a year and a half since my mom passed away. They say you’re supposed to say the persons name to help you heal. Does saying mom count? Probably not, just thinking of her name makes the tears come. A good friend of mine had her father pass away right before Christmas. He got sick just after my mom did. He had a longer fight. I don’t know if this is better or worse for him and his family. I wanted more time with my mom, I guess I always will, but seeing her in pain, seeing her go from being the strongest woman I knew to literally just skin and bones was awful. People sometimes say that they don’t want to remember people like that and it’s better to not see them in that condition. For me, I don’t remember my mom in that way. I’m glad that I was a part of the whole process. When I think of how my mom looked the last time, she actually looked at peace. She didn’t look like she was in pain anymore. I think that was important for me to see.
I didn’t talk to my dad or my siblings on Christmas. I talked to them around Christmas, but just not the day. My sister called on Christmas Eve and started talking about my mom and I just said I had to go. Matt put the ornaments that are reminders of my mom on the tree. I don’t know if he realized the significance of them. I sort of just ignored them. I didn’t want anyone to make me think of my mom. I hope at some point I can pull out all the feelings I have and figure them out. For now, it still hurts too much.
The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.
Kurt Cagle wrote an article for O’Reilly regarding the effects of the Paulson Bail Out Plan and IT. It is an interesting article and I agree with most of what he says, especially that this is a global problem. I think we need to do something, but this is not the answer. There are a lot of smart people in this world and we need to come up with a better plan!
I love this image:
Awesome Image
Dean Wampler twittered about this presentation on Scala at Twitter. He also has some excellent, detailed posts in his Seductions of Scala series at Object Mentor. (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
The more I’ve been reading about Scala, the more excited I get. I think a functional language could do wonders for our code at work. I think I’ll take one of our simpler models and write a Scala version to do a comparison with the java version. I’m hoping this might go a long way towards convincing the powers that be that a functional language would improve the quality of our code.
This quote has been running through my mind a lot recently.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupér
It’s been almost a year since my mom passed away. I think the phrase “time heals all wounds” is baloney. Not that I thought I’d be over this by now, but I think I’m going to have to actively do something to be able to move on. I don’t think I have done anything to really try to feel better. I think I was just numb and in shock. Last week, I about had a complete meltdown. I basically sat and stared at my computer for nearly a full day. Since then, things really haven’t been too much better. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, which is good, but I feel awful. I have been spending a lot of time questioning just about every aspect of my life from my relationships, my job, my career, my health, my living situation, everything. I hope I can begin to heal soon and I hope that some positive changes come out of the time I’ve spent debating everything recently. I’ve begun making plans for some of the things I want to change. I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that soon.
At work we write software models. Our models are generally comprised of a bunch of utility classes that read in data or calculate pieces of the models. These classes are usually easy to test and it’s easy to write these using TDD. But then what happens is we have a single big class that is the Model. This class gets initiated and then its Run method is called. Inside the run method is where the whole model runs essentially. I don’t know how to test this. We could certainly be better about partitioning our code better to make it more testable, but in the end, we still have this big method that does the majority of the work. I keep looking at this problem trying to dissect it another way that would make it more testable, but so far I don’t have a good solution. I guess this is similar to the question about whether you should test an entire class or only the public interface.
Another issue I have with testing our models is that much of the time they are nondeterministic. I believe this is comparable to the problem above in that you test all the pieces of the model that are deterministic and then are left with only the parts that change that aren’t tested. In this case, I guess it’s appropriate to write a test harness that runs the model many times and does some sort of statistical analysis on the results. This doesn’t feel like TDD for some reason though. We fail at work by not having the developer write these tests and so they usually aren’t done until the model is “done” and the details are somewhat removed. Perhaps a good project for me at work would be to write a generic test harness that could be applied to this problem and make it so that an R script could be plugged in to make the statistics easy. I guess we’d need to define the statistical limits of “correct” and report when the model falls outside this range.
Not that these are the only two reasons I think he’s awesome, but I wanted to share.
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Exciting News
Found this link through a twitter (tweet? what’s the right word?) of Tim O’Reilly. Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis. This is absolutely disgusting. I don’t even have words to describe how I feel about this.
