Sunday, October 23, 2011

More reasons why C++ gives me headaches

This gem is from the wikibook More C++ Idioms, to get the address without needing a valid operator&. Enjoy the cast once, cast twice, wait, I didn't mean char at all goodness.


template
T * addressof(T & v)
{
return reinterpret_cast(& const_cast(reinterpret_cast(v)));
}

Friday, October 21, 2011

Don Quixote

Just bought a ticket to see Don Quixote this Sunday. Anyone? $40 for the Joffrey Ballet? I'll just go alone.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Contemplating Spring

Well, I'm thinking these are the things I'd like to take (from what's available).
I need Abstract Algebra and Writing (required), and I think I'll add to that Algorithms, Theory of Computation, Graph Theory, and Financial Mathematics. Then I believe I'm done. There are a hundred things I think I'd have liked to take, given the time, and perhaps a nice graduate school will consider my case, but if not, it's off to find work.

Saturday, October 08, 2011

Intermediate Values

We were talking about the intermediate value theorem (can't get from here to there without sometime being in between them) in my real analysis class and the thought occurred to me that the interval is a very restrictive notion. How does this generalise to more dimensions?

Is there a natural way to extend the IVT beyond real valued functions? I could see that the length/radius of a set of points in R^2 or C would have this property (since we have length in R, and the curve is continuous implies the changes in its distance are continuous), but I don't see what it means for say the helix f:R-->R^3 where f(t)=(cos(t), sin(t), t) except when considered as three separate continuous functions. (i.e., let a = 0, b = 2*pi, and see that nothing more can be said than that there exist z values between 0 and pi for which the z component of f(t) obeys the intermediate value property).

Is the problem in the notion of an interval, or of betweenness? Is there a better way to describe this phenomenon when talking about parameterised curves?

Saturday, October 01, 2011

Seriously, Emacs is a winner

Anyone using rfcview? This is about as useful as an umbrella in a rain shower! The fact that I just give it a number, and it fetches a well formatted text file for me is a feeling of power. When was the last time your editor gave you a feeling of power.

The gdb integration is superb, and I'm on my way to making it my primary email editor (largely due to finger inertia, after a few hours of write compile debug, it's easy to forget how to use more 'friendly' software.) How do you kill a line in Evolution, anyway?

I recently forced w3m to start working, which is pretty slick as far as non-javascript powered browsers go. It's a lot prettier than lynx.

As if slime weren't reason enough.