Mert Nuhoglu's List: Software

• Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

• \captionsetup{singlelinecheck=off,justification=raggedright}

• >>> import codecs >>> fh = codecs.open("/tmp/utf-8.txt", "w", "utf-8") >>> fh.write(u"\u2013") >>> fh.close()
• • Decode First, Encode Last
   
  • When in doubt, encode as utf-8
   
  • Use codecs with unicode objects to simplify things
• Decode First means whenever taking byte stream input, decode that input to Unicode as early as possible. This will help prevent issues where len() and slice malfunctions with utf-8 byte streams.
• Encode last means only encode to byte streams when you're ready to output the text to something.
• The codecs module lets you read the bytes in and decode the bytes on the fly getting your text into unicode objects much simplier and with less overhead.

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• >> Does anyone have an explanation why foo.__repr__() and repr(foo) makes such
  >> a difference here? Hints welcome.
  

  > Shouldn't repr return plain string, not unicode one? When calling .__repr__()
  > directly you just call a method directly. When called by repr() some ipython
  > magic happens, which expects __repr__ to return a string.
  
  

  Thanks - you saved my day. I'm now using .encode('utf-8') before I return
  the string and now everything works.

• Consider the regular expression (x+x+)+y.
• just assume that each "x" represents something more complex, with certain strings being matched by both "x".
• If you try this regex on a 10x string in RegexBuddy's debugger, it'll take 2558 steps to figure out the final y is missing. For an 11x string, it needs 5118 steps. For 12, it takes 10238 steps. Clearly we have an exponential complexity of O(2^n) here. At 21x the debugger bows out at 2.8 million steps, diagnosing a bad case of catastrophic backtracking.
• In the above example, the sane thing to do is obviously to rewrite it as xx+y which eliminates the nested quantifiers entirely. Nested quantifiers are repeated or alternated tokens inside a group that is itself repeated or alternated.
• The reason is that all the tokens are mutually exclusive. None of them can match any characters matched by any of the others.

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• "What will happen if users can program their own computer?"
• We compare mass ability to read and write software with mass literac
• We believe that the next step, having millions (or billions) of programmers, will cause a change of a different quality--the abundant availability of personalized software.
• In the future, we envision that computer programming will be taught in elementary school, just like reading, writing and arithmetic
• Even if most users do not program regularly, a familiarity with programming and the structure of software will make them more effective users of computers. For example, when something goes wrong, they will be able to make a better mental model of the likely failure
• Why Teach a "General" Programming Language?
• Turing-completeness is the key concept
• A typical property of domain-specific languages is that they provide excellent control in the application domain for which they were intended, and (almost) no freedom in unanticipated areas.
• General languages are therefore ideal when used in combination with domain-specific languages.

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