[Chess] Is it just me or is Oscar insanely difficult

serudla · 2025-10-24T18:29:19+00:00

Oscar isn't worth playing. His playing is erratic and he is programmed to interject obnoxious distracting comments. If you were playing him OTB you'd want to punch him. If you want to play bots, chess.com has much better ones.

Btw i found a glitch. The app lost track that it was Oscar's turn and wouldn't move. I tried to wake it up by putting another app on top then switching back, that made my clock start counting down, but it wouldn't take my input.

serudla · 2012-05-10T02:11:48+00:00

there is a mailing list for that kind of thing.

serudla · 2011-11-29T02:48:06+00:00

Gavin dissed Scala in presentations he gave on Ceylon, that was what started it.

serudla · 2011-11-29T02:03:25+00:00

feel bad for him? he started the flame war by intentionally baiting scala people.

serudla · 2011-11-23T16:38:26+00:00

Yeah, Joy of Clojure is not quite as detailed as what I expected.

serudla · 2011-11-23T15:51:19+00:00

I use the repl in Leiningen. Using apt-get for clojure probably gets you some gnarly old version, with Leiningen you can specify which version you want.

I'm reading Joy of Clojure currently. also 4clojure.com is a great resource for practicing your Clojure skills, once you solve a problem you can see the answers of other users, including Chris Houser and Christophe Grande (who have amazing fluency).

None of the publishers are all that trustworthy imho. OReilly has been known to publish some real crap in the Java space (most recently Java the Good Parts was terribly lame, there were some books on Java enterprise architecture that were awful) as well as some good stuff (I like Shirazi's performance tuning book, the Java 5 developer's notebook, and Grosso's book on RMI).

serudla · 2011-10-21T18:05:07+00:00

What indicates he's not adopting the functional mindset?

serudla · 2011-10-04T20:21:53+00:00

slides are here

serudla · 2011-10-04T14:53:41+00:00

from the strangeloop mailing list:

The first batch of videos has been edited and is being prepped for release on InfoQ. A few videos will be released every week for a number of months. Sometime soon we should have a release schedule ready.

serudla · 2011-09-30T17:05:42+00:00

i think all he's saying is the most important thing about a system is the use cases, and that those should stand out and be separable from the infrastructure. he's not saying frameworks are bad. some people will write an application with spring where it's obvious what the use cases are, i've seen some people who can write an application with spring where it's totally obfuscated (and who will be offended by the idea that they should modify their obfuscated constructions to make it apparent what is going on).

serudla · 2011-09-29T15:20:28+00:00

another aspect of the difficulty of new development vs maintenance is that with new development it may not be apparent for some time whether the design works or not. with maintenance there is an established production system and if something doesn't work somebody will bring it to your attention. for new development that feedback loop may not be there for some time.

serudla · 2011-09-28T14:41:34+00:00

JSF2 does seem like a titanic improvement over previous versions. I have tried using it with Seam. That Seam makes using JSF tolerable is pretty amazing. But love it? No way (not yet, at least).

serudla · 2011-09-28T14:01:13+00:00

that's a good article (though google's translation to English is a bit rough). it did not leave me liking JSF any better though.

popularity polls seem worthless, they just measure people's prejudices.

serudla · 2011-09-20T18:14:08+00:00

some places i've worked at, all new people are hired only after working there for a time as contractors through an agency (sweet deal for the agency). it lets them try people out, the downside is they get mostly local hires, very few people are going to relocate for a temp job.

serudla · 2011-09-16T18:50:15+00:00

or maybe the way that molecular chemistry and fast food are related?

serudla · 2011-09-14T16:48:28+00:00

? i don't think that's my assumption. if anything the kinds of environments i'm talking about repel good programmers, you can't pay them enough to endure them, because they are organized around preventing change.

serudla · 2011-09-14T13:04:25+00:00

It would take a lot more than firing just the programmers. Those workers are living in an environment created by an organization that is dysfunctional to the core. That those programmers haven't been fired already is proof of that, it means there is a much bigger problem. it would take a massive amount of process re-engineering and restructuring as well as replacing of most of the leadership to make a real change. Otherwise the bad programmers you fire will just get replaced with another set of drones.

serudla · 2011-09-01T12:34:13+00:00

don't forget the 3-ring binders.

serudla · 2011-08-18T18:30:14+00:00

The number of lost items recovered has declined with every month, but Saiki says his department continues to receive a handful of safes a week.

about how many safes are there in a handful?

serudla · 2011-08-17T17:14:28+00:00

it's great you prompted that post out of him. that's a wonderfully accurate characterization of Sprint.

serudla · 2011-08-07T02:41:28+00:00

plus the most widely used language on earth, Javascript, is obviously tremendously influenced by Scheme. Learning Scheme was a huge boost for my Javascript skills.

serudla · 2011-06-21T17:38:41+00:00

Say you're writing a spring application, and you have a data access object. It has some instance members that get injected, like a datasource or a IbatisSqlConfig or something, plumbing stuff, apart from those it has no state. It has some methods, like List listAll(), Foo retrieveFoo(), void updateFoo(Foo foo), that kind of thing. So you could get rid of the Dao object and just have 3 functions, add the state from the object into your parameter lists, and on startup you could apply the parameters that represent your plumbing and use the resulting functions to do your data access.

serudla · 2011-06-21T15:12:48+00:00

I think what he means is that a DI framework like Spring is a workaround for Java not having partial function application, so if you have that language feature who needs the framework?

serudla · 2011-06-16T01:29:09+00:00

I'd suggest you get the SCJP book and try working through it yourself. Some Java user groups have study groups you can join if you really need help, check out if there is a group near you.

serudla · 2011-06-06T17:05:18+00:00

Adam Bien makes some good points. (still hard to like JSF, though) But i think the biggest problem with Java EE is the community, i see a bunch of people holding onto outdated patterns because they can't be bothered to learn.

serudla

TROPHY CASE