In my previous post I talked about rounding errors with floating point numbers. If you work with real numbers and computers, sooner or later, just like others before you, you will conclude that computers suck at math. Continue reading ‘Floating Point Trickyness (2) — select Is’t Broken, Is It?’
Interesting: say I have a 100 x 100 matrix of doubles. Then I put values in each row from -1 to 1, equally spaced, such that all 100 rows for each column i contain the value -1 + i*((1 - -1)/(100 - 1) == -1 + i*2/99, where the columns are numbered from 0 to 99. By definition, the sum of all elements in this matrix should be 0. For integer numbers, this is true. For floating point numbers, this is tricky. Continue reading ‘Floating Point Trickyness’
Now for something completely different… Continue reading ‘Background Pictures’
Reading Jeff Atwoods latest blog entry, inspired me to kick of again1 with a rant. I usually agree with Jeff’s statements, and this time I too do agree that scripting languages are a positive development in language evolution. They opened up many opportunities and make life a whole lot simpler with respect to mundane aspects of “real programming” like memory management, edit and compile cycles, and so on. But I cannot disagree more with the rest of what he is saying. Continue reading ‘Coders Unite’
- After changing houses; I’m (practically) done moving from Utrecht to ’s-Hertogenbosch. Yes, I will need to update the background title picture, since that one was taken in Utrecht. [↩]
I promised to write about the analogy between running a restaurant and running a software project, which is my conclusion in my contribution to Derrick G. Kourie’s festschrift. So here goes. Continue reading ‘Software Nightmares’