Suggested Readings: Programming Pearls

Jon Bentley — Programming Pearls — 2nd Ed, Addison-Wesley, 2000, 240 pp. ISBN 0-201-65788-0

(Buy at Amazon.com)

The central theme of this book is efficiency and economy of solutions of programming problems. However, if the book is globally interesting, it would greatly benefit from an update; the proposed programming style—independently of the gist of the solutions— is old school in many respects. The style should probably updated to take modern programming style into account, say, à la Alexandrescu and Sutter for C++.

Wallpaper: Procession

(Procession, 1920×1200)

Wallpaper: Slanted

(Slanted, 1920×1200)

Wallpaper: Outliers

(Outliers, 1920×1200)

Wallpaper: Tulipe gauchistes

(Tulipes gauchistes, 1920×1200)

Wallpaper: Outlier

(Outlier, 1920×1200)

Wallpaper: Tout l’égout sont dans la nature

Wallpaper: Time

(Time, 1920×1200)

Jump!

After five or six years working at the ÉTS, I was offered a position at the LISA (the Laboratoire d’Informatique des Systèmes Adaptatifs) at Université de Montréal… an offer I could not decline.

The LISA is run by Yoshua Bengio, my former Ph. D. adviser, a world-class researcher in Machine Learning, with other researchers, with many students.

Over the last few months, I gradually shifted my time from ÉTS to Université of Montréal, but I will be working full time at the LISA from now on.

Noah’s Backups

A couple of weeks ago, my basement got flooded by meltwater. Fortunately, long story short, I’ve got insurances for that, and except for the basement underfloor that will need to be redone, relatively little damage was done. No computers floating, nor furniture. It could have been a lot worse. Wet, but not floating, was a box containing backups and old CDs and DVDs with data sets.

Luckily, this box was air/watertight and its contents remained dry. What kind of box was it?