I’ve been tied up with all sorts of work- and life-related things, hence the lack of posts over the last few days.
By way of apology, allow me to offer the so-bad-it’s-good nerd TV show from the 1980s, Automan! Loosely based on the movie Tron and driven by the then-new interest in personal computers (this was the age of the original IBM PC and the Apple ][). It had all the earmarks of a cheesy Glen A. Larson production, plus all the technobabble of that era and made the old Buck Rogers series look like hard sci-fi by comparison.
I’m working on an article (working title: Walled Garden…or BEER Garden?), so here’s something to keep you amused in the meantime…
My Obsessions, Circa 1980
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The “Star Wars Trumpet” Video
Well, I can’t make a reference to Battlestar Galactica (the 80’s version) without making one to Star Wars, can I? How ’bout the video that’s making the rounds right now — this so-bad-it’s-good performance of the Star Wars theme on trumpet for the “talent” portion of an old beauty pageant?
I work in TV Sports, this tape has circulated amongst our tape rooms for years, I figured it was only natural to be on YouTube. I’m of the understanding it was a statewide beauty pagaent, and Stacy is Miss Douglas County. I have no idea who she is, or if she even knew there was a talent portion of the contest.
It’s believed that the tape has origins in the Kansas City area, and I thought it was a Nebraska beauty pageant.
As you can see, this is the Japanese version of the game. Note that while all the mushrooms’ dialogue bubbles are in Japanese, the Princess’ “Help!” dialogue bubble (as well as her yelling) is in English.
Here’s a gem from over a quarter-century ago: Sorting Out Sorting(running time 31:15), a film produced by the University of Toronto that uses then-impressive graphics to visually explain sorting algorithms:
The film is divided into three sections, each devoted to a category of sorting algorithm. These sections are:
Insertion sorts: Linear insertion, Binary insertion, Shellsort
Selection sorts: Straight selection, Tree selection, Heapsort
In case you’re not interested in sitting through 30-odd minutes of film and ice-cold ’70’s sci-fi synth music (which I found sort of mesmerizing), here’s the spoiler: Quicksort wins!*. I think this calls for a LOL-computer-scientist image of Quicksort’s creator, Tony Hoare:
Footnotes
* In most cases. If you want to sort data in an in-memory array or array-like structure that allows for constant speed random access, Quicksort is generally your best option, and it’s probably the algorithm used by your programming language’s built-in sort function.
Their latest video takes on the Python-based framework Django. This is a tricky comparison, as both:
Are built on dynamic programming languages that currently have considerable developer mindshare (Ruby from Rails, and Python from Guido’s working at Google)
After taking a good look at Django and weighing all the pros/cons, I didn’t really think we should make fun of it. Django is a great framework for building web applications, one that employs many of the same techniques that Ruby on Rails does. If it wasn’t for Rails I’d probably be programming Django right now. Amongst a sea of mediocre web frameworks it’s definitely close to the top.
