Author: grant

Evaluating the ADC Select Membership

Apple offers 3 levels of memberships: online, select, and premier (0USD, 500USD, and 3500USD respectively). They differ of course on features. For the time being, the select looks the most reasonably priced so I wanted to learn more about how it might make sense.
From what I read, the biggest perks are the 2 support tickets and the hardware discount (10% on normal hardware and 20% on pro hardware). Access to outdated WWDC material is not very compelling. While the online “coding headstarts” might make sense, neither seem justified by the price.
The hardware discount is interesting, as the discount essentially cuts 500USD off of any pro hardware, and then you end up purchasing the select membership with what you have “saved”; so this alone can make the membership worth it. One might wonder why you wouldn’t simply purchase this membership when you want a discount and let it lapse when you don’t; but apparently if you do so, you will no longer be offered the discount. In other words, once you purchase it you have to keep it up.
For me it looks like the best approach would simply be to start with a Macbook and take some time to ramp up and get familiar with things. If it makes sense to take advantage of the support tickets and faster hardware (every year or so) then the Macbook could get passed down to someone else and I could find out how helpful the tickets really are to me.

Standford Programming Paradigms Course Videos

Programming Paradigms (CS107) introduces several programming languages, including C, Assembly, C++, Concurrent Programming, Scheme, and Python. The class aims to teach students how to write code for each of these individual languages and to understand the programming paradigms behind these languages.

The videos are available here.
(via reddit)

Standard Haskell

This is the the Haskell Platform, version 2009.2.0.1: a single, standard Haskell distribution for every system.
The Haskell Platform is a blessed library and tool suite for Haskell distilled from Hackage, along with installers for a wide variety of systems. The contents of the platform are specified here: Haskell: Batteries Included.
The platform saves you the task of picking and choosing the best Haskell libraries and tools to use for a task. Distro maintainers that support the Haskell Platform can be confident they’re fully supporting Haskell as the developers intend it. Developers targetting the platform can be confident they have a trusted base of code to work with.

It looks interesting; a blessed package collection and a compiler ready to run on OS X, Windows, and Linux.
(via Control.Monad.Writer via reddit)

Fractal Imaging

What is fractal imaging? Well, it’s more than just the algorithmic generation of ferns (like the generated image above) from non-linear equation systems. It’s a way of looking at ordinary (bitmap) images of all kinds. The hypothesis is that any given image (of any kind) is the end-result of iterating on some particular (unknown) system of non-linear equations, and that if one only knew what those equations are, one could regenerate the image algorithmically (from a set of equations) on demand. The implications are far-reaching. This means:
1. Instead of storing a bitmap of the image, you can just store the equations from which it can be generated. (This is often a 100-to-1 storage reduction.)
2. The image is now scale-free. That is, you can generate it at any scale — enlarge it as much as you wish — without losing fidelity. (Imagine being able to blow up an image onscreen without it becoming all blocky and pixelated.)

— Kas Thomas
Here is the book, Fractal Imaging, referenced by the article.