I have been reading old pragpub magazines on my Nook. After reading through the "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" articles I thought I would give it a little whirl. I don't think I am going to invest too much time into it to be honest as I would prefer to invest my time in improving my FSharpishness; but a little peek never hurt anyone eh?
The articles start in August 2012 http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-08 and carry on for a couple of months.
I have found a good tutorial from the main Haskell site too http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
I haven't really had a proper look yet but will do as soon as I get a little time :-)
Thursday, 23 May 2013
Work based learning for engineering qualifications
Engineering Council - Education & Skills - Engineering Gateways
I think this is a good idea for helping people get up to scratch and giving them guidance in achieving IEng and CEng. The closest uni to me is Derby Uni. My only concern with the qualification is that it will cost you a pretty penny to do it through the University.
In some ways I hope people use the UK Spec themselves to guide what type of work they should be involved with and what professional development they do. Considering you will carry out most of the studying yourself, I am not sure the unis will offer value for money over doing it yourself and applying through the technical report route.
I suppose once I get a reply about my current IEng application, I will begin to make enquiries about working towards CEng. When the time comes I will try and get some prices about the course.
I think this is a good idea for helping people get up to scratch and giving them guidance in achieving IEng and CEng. The closest uni to me is Derby Uni. My only concern with the qualification is that it will cost you a pretty penny to do it through the University.
In some ways I hope people use the UK Spec themselves to guide what type of work they should be involved with and what professional development they do. Considering you will carry out most of the studying yourself, I am not sure the unis will offer value for money over doing it yourself and applying through the technical report route.
I suppose once I get a reply about my current IEng application, I will begin to make enquiries about working towards CEng. When the time comes I will try and get some prices about the course.
When did 3d printers get so good?
Just spotted the MakerBot Replicator™ 2 Desktop 3D Printer
The resolution is nuts! The last 3d printer I saw was one that one of the guys from Nottingham Hackspace had made a couple of years ago. Whilst I am not taking anything away from that, these new breeds are awesome.
Looking at the price now and seeing the complexity of what can be made with them makes me thing the future is coming much sooner then I thought. This Makerbot is only about £1500.
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Ableton Push
Make music with Ableton Push | Ableton
This looks pretty cool. Its the sort of thing I just avoid at all costs!
Sony Discman Data
Data Discman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amazing! I would love to get my greasy hands on some of these. Saw it in the Engadget Distro magazine.
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Messing about with Javascript Jasmine Tests
I first started messing about with Jasmine tests over a year ago at a Progressive.Net conference (A friend had mentioned them before that too I think), but I never got round to implementing them properly. I am having a bit of an evening of tinkering with our core software platform at work and thought it would be cool if these were integrated into the admin site perhaps.
Anyway, I need to get back up to speed so I have begun giving them a whirl. I can't remember the exact syntax before but this time looking at ig I am really impressed. The test runner prints the tests out in a real cucmberish way that allows you to essentially keep a nice living specification of the javascript on your site.
Take a look at the site and some more examples here http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/
Take a look at the site and some more examples here http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/
Saturday, 18 May 2013
Fibonacci algorithm performance testing in .NET languages.
I was doing a little tidy up of the some of the books under my desk and I started to flick through Foundations of F# by Robert Pickering. It's a great book and I started to flick through it. I spotted the Fibonacci sequence and it got me thinking. How could I waste some of my afternoon?
I did the algorithm in F# and then begun to wonder if something in C# would be faster. That got me thinking about how to accurately measure performance. In the end I went down a bit of a rabbit hole but I found some interesting results.
The results above correspond to the names of the tests below. It's very difficult to create a true scientific test on your own computer but the tests were run an i5 Sandy Bridge with 8gb of ram. No other programs except Visual Studio and Windows 7 were running. I ran the test 5 times, each time it ran the tests 100,000 times and then it grouped on the test name and took the average and saved it to sheet 2 above. I then used a pivot table and aggregated / averaged again.
I was surprised and pleased that the F# methods seemed to run the fastest. Even more surprising was that some of the VB entries were next.
I wasn't surprised that the shorthand VB method was slower; even though really it should be just as fast as the C# shorthand equivalent if ? :. Obviously they don't boil down to the same thing in IL (I might just check that next).
It's worth noting that many of the results are really close together. They are in the correct order but are rounded to 4 decimal places. I think in most situations that's accurate enough.
The original algorithm was the fastest but as they were all so close; it's worth considering other things such as the most expressive syntax. As it turns out, I think the original F# algorithm is actually expressed the nicest way to by a long way.
I did the algorithm in F# and then begun to wonder if something in C# would be faster. That got me thinking about how to accurately measure performance. In the end I went down a bit of a rabbit hole but I found some interesting results.
The results above correspond to the names of the tests below. It's very difficult to create a true scientific test on your own computer but the tests were run an i5 Sandy Bridge with 8gb of ram. No other programs except Visual Studio and Windows 7 were running. I ran the test 5 times, each time it ran the tests 100,000 times and then it grouped on the test name and took the average and saved it to sheet 2 above. I then used a pivot table and aggregated / averaged again.
I was surprised and pleased that the F# methods seemed to run the fastest. Even more surprising was that some of the VB entries were next.
I wasn't surprised that the shorthand VB method was slower; even though really it should be just as fast as the C# shorthand equivalent if ? :. Obviously they don't boil down to the same thing in IL (I might just check that next).
It's worth noting that many of the results are really close together. They are in the correct order but are rounded to 4 decimal places. I think in most situations that's accurate enough.
The original algorithm was the fastest but as they were all so close; it's worth considering other things such as the most expressive syntax. As it turns out, I think the original F# algorithm is actually expressed the nicest way to by a long way.
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