Pearls Before Piglets

tips 27 May 2009 | 0 Comments

While Googling my way through the interwebs, I came across the 2008 Western Australian Certificate of Education sample examination for Stage 2 Biological Sciences. It contains this diagram: If you’re wondering, the entire hierarchy is drawn from Umberto Eco‘s novel Baudolino.

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Making Maya’s Python palatable

code 3 March 2009 | 2 Comments

Maya’s python interface leaves something to be desired, as it seems like a straight port of their existing MEL interface with no additional thought put into designing a nice OO interface. For example, here is how to set or get the ‘radius’ attribute of a sphere: s = cmds.sphere() r = cmds.sphere(s, query=True, radius=True) cmds.sphere(s, [...]

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Refactoring in Haskell: Adding an Argument

code,tips 10 December 2008 | 0 Comments

Just a small tip on this: When you add an argument to a function that already exists you should check the existing usage of the function. Say you have this: f x y z = … … and you want: f x y z w = … First of all you should check the contexts [...]

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Vacuuming Firefox’s sqlite3 databases

code,tips 17 November 2008 | 0 Comments

Firefox 3 was running very slow for me, so I desperately tried this, thinking that it wouldn’t make much difference. I was wrong; there was a noticeable speed improvement. From a bash shell: find ~/.mozilla -iname ‘*.sqlite’ -execdir sqlite3 {} ‘vacuum;’ \;

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