Genii Weblog
What do these have in common?
Wed 24 Mar 2004, 10:14 PM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
First, Andrew's post:
As I'm sitting here getting NCT Search 3.0 beta 1 ready to send over to Jim at Brightline, I realized that the cache is a little too good --- if you make a change to a configuration form, you have to redeploy the servlet to get it to pick up (or drop the diiop task on the domino server and restart it).
Then Colin's post:
It's aliiiive! A wee C++ app connecting to MySQL using the MySQL C API. MySQL's C++ API (called MySQL++) and RedHat 7.3 don't seem to get along, so I decided to see how hard the plain ole C API would be to work with. It seems quite doable, and others have written their own C++ wrappers for the basic C API. After all, why not? A hidden upside was that by digging deeper into the C API, I also came across a few mentions that MySQL++ is highly inefficient.
And finally, my son's AIME question:
A convex polyhedron P has 26 vertices, 60 edges, and 36 faces, 24 of which are triangular, and 12 of which are quadrilaterals. A space diagonal is a line segment connecting two non-adjacent vertices that do not belong to the same face. How many space diagonals does P have?
What do these have in common?
I'll tell you... they are all completely insane sounding ramblings that make sense if I stare at them just long enough, but not too long. Where does the human brain learn to decipher this stuff?
Copyright © 2004 Genii Software Ltd.
What has been said:
134.1. Colin Pretorius (03/25/2004 01:04 AM)
Good point. I frighten myself sometimes. Then again, I think back to the horrendous wording of some of my old tax and accounting exams, and I realise that things aren't so bad after all :)
134.2. jonvon (03/25/2004 06:26 PM)
it strikes me that on some level or another, these are all virtual worlds. its like when you are running around inside one of those idsoftware engines (doom or quake or whatever) after a while you learn the "rules" that govern that reality.
like, if i run backwards down the stairs and toss a grenade under up toward the top of the stairs and then jump off midway i can run underneath the staircase and whoever is at the top gets blown up, but i am safe because "the stairs" are shielding me from the "blast". in "real life" i probably wouldn't try that, because the rules are a little different for the metaspace version of me...
my brain has somehow figured out the rules that govern that virtual world, and eventually i use that ruleset just as quickly as the one i use when i drive in traffic, or navigate a web page, or cook dinner.
each of these realities is quite real to our brains, whether it is geometry we are wrestling with or a linux server. we learn to survive in them just as our ancestors did when looking for food and shelter in the jungle. i have a set of problems that occurs over and over again, i learn the rules of that system and eventually use them to my advantage.
well i didn't expect to type all that. but there you go. one theory anyway.
:-)
134.3. Ben Langhinrichs (03/25/2004 08:18 PM)
Cool. Makes sense to me.