Top Down vs. Bottom Up programming

Programming Styles

Top Down:
A program is created in terms of classes or methods, which are in turn identified by even lower level methods until the program is complete.

Bottom Up:
Build the language up towards the program. Create new functions and operators that make it seem like the language was custom built for the program.

Mine:
Pretend magical parts of the program do certain wonderful and conveneint things, and program off of that. Then go fill out the magic parts when you feel like it.

Google explosion

Google's been busy lately:

Googlepages
Google Video site bar
Google music search
Google CL2 (calendar)
Google links

Midterm Complete!

Now that the Computer Vision midterm is over, I'm allowed to talk about it.

It was pretty easy, but at the last minute, I changed one of my answers to something I'm less sure of. I hope that doesn't hurt me too much.

During the midterm, I got pretty familiar with about 19 lines of Python. I have to admit that Python's biggest gotcha - that whitespace matters - is also part of what make the language so attractive. Just glancing at the indentation gives you an idea of code structure. In 19 lines of code, I created a program that answered one of the trickier problems - complete with graphics output.

A Microsoft product that's better on Mac and Linux

I was trying out remote desktop on Linux (command: rdesktop) and it does something that the Windows XP version can't: Widescreen. It take full advantage of my 24" Dell FP2405. It also has options for bitmap caching, sound forewarding, and local printing, among others.
(I'm pretty sure macs use this version of remote desktop too... could be wrong)

Linux is also catching up to the next generation of windowing systems: http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi
I wonder if Apple's interested in using some of this cool X server technology.