SemanticMetadata.net

Best of compiler construction

In general one should not post errors of other … but well I just give the best answers, no questions, no names … and of course: it’s a good laugh

Notation for describing graphs is not quite clear to some people. I also miss the mother nodes: [...] nodes in the dependency graph are depending on father nodes, sister nodes and brother nodes [...]

Asking for advantages and disadvantages of a certain approach I got within the same answer: [...] advantage: program is faster, disadvantage: program would be slower [...]

Please note that I assume that these answer come out of the stress of the people writing the test and not the missing knowledge.

Compiler Construction & Lord of the Rings

Recently I had an idea on compilers and code generation. Generating assembler code (I’m talking about MIPS code) and with it labels I thought: Why not using cool names for labels? Instead of

LB_WH002_001G:
beq $a1, $v1,  LB_WH002_002G
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  LB_WH002_001G
LB_WH002_002G:
...

One could be more creative and use for instance Names from Lord of the Rings like:

THE_SHIRE:
beq $a1, $v1,  MORDOR
add $a1, $a1, $v1
j  THE_SHIRE
MORDOR:
...

While this definitely does not increase readability of assembler code I still think it doesn’t lessen it much. Instead it introduces “geekiness” to assembler

For those who are not creative themselves and need a lot of labels I recommend the numerous fanrtasy fantasy name generators available on the internet like this, this or this one.

XKCD: purity of research fields

XKCD has been in my blogroll for quite a while, but this is - in my humble opinion - the most cool cartoon of XKCD ever :-D. I especially like because of the fact that I studied maths Behold the “purity of fields“.

Slogan Generator …

Sometimes we just need to be pushed into creativity for marketing. A nice tool is the slogan generator. For the semanticmetadata.net blog it generated

“If You Can’t Beat Semanticmetadata.net, Join Semanticmetadata.net.”

and

“You Too Can Have a Semanticmetadata.net Like Mine.”

However I think I won’t use those slogans

Meeting Minutes

Remote Control

6 Word SciFi

Paused for some time, next try:

Label :WORK_END reached; Goto :HOME; Restart;

Find all six word stories here.

Small Games for Kids - New Release

Besides the two already existing games (GuessWhat and Soundmachine, more information here) I added a new one called SoundVis. The main idea is to animate a kid to make sounds by for instance clapping or yelling. The louder the sound the bigger the blue circle in the center gets. While this sounds trivial it is great fun Note that the microphone has to be functional. A simple test is included in the start screen of SoundVis.

Installation:

Find the new package (including source, licensed under GPL) here. Use 7-zip to unzip them. Launchers (.exe files) for windows are included. Linux users might peek at the included batch files to get a clue how to start the games.

Final Standard for KB Confusion

Is a Kilobyte 1024 Byte? Or maybe 1000 Byte? Xkcd posted the final solution for the KB confusion.

Learning how to program with Scratch

At the CSKGOI workshop Ian Eslick presented ScratchTalk, a system which creates programs from natural language input. It is based on Scratch, which is an animation framework with a visual program language. Scratch has been developed at the MIT and is used to teach kids how to program. It is rather easy to create a small side scroller game with easy graphics so I think I might give it a try in my teachings (e.g. in “Introduction to computer science” for students from social science).