If you blog it they will come?

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Company Profiles

Ever since working for software companies which were spinoffs of other software companies which were spinoffs of other software companies, I've wondered what a tech company family tree would look like.

Although it runs slowly in the browsers I've tried, this map reveals an amazingly thorough time and space relationship graph for Puget Sound tech companies.

On top of this, LinkedIn has beefed up their company profile pages with illuminating statistics such as incoming and outgoing career paths. Plus, statistics on  median age of employees and breakdown of which titles constitute which percentage of company employees sheds light on facts which previously would have required some form of insider knowledge.

Now, for example, I know that prior to joining Microsoft, employees often worked for HP or Oracle, and after leaving tend to arrive at Amazon or Yahoo. I also learned that median age of a Microsoft employee is 34 years old and 13% of its nearly 90,000 employees are software engineers.

Its juicy information like this which I covet for visualization purposes--perhaps simultaneously depicting the flow of workers in and out of a company as well as size and age. I'll have to see if I can snag myself an API partnership.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

"Artifacts" of taking Graphics/Computer Vision courses

from http://flickr.com/photos/csb13/99025844/

  • When I am in a restaurant I sometimes notice the reflection and refraction of lights and objects through my water glass and try to trace the beams or other objects back to their origin. This is especially true in restaurants with colored lighting.


  • When I am walking around areas with lots of solid geometry like between passageways of buildings on campus, I sometimes imagine that the world is translating or transforming instead of me, the viewer (since they produce equivalent images often the approach in graphics is to shift the entire world). I might sometimes figure out where the vanishing points are relative to all the edges and corners.


  • I am aware of my internal edge sharpening and occasionally notice the effects of mach banding, both phenomenons which occur as the result of signal processing built into the wiring of the rods and cones of the eye itself.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Diving into "Dive Into Python"

Well I'm now five chapters deep in Dive Into Python, which is available completely for free as a PDF.

It's an older book, but still relevant for its unusual and fantastic approach of teaching a new language to experienced programmers. The approach seems so obvious, and yet it's difficult to come up with examples of other titles which follow the same approach.

Guido

Each chapter begins with a short code example which highlights the power of Python while performing non-trivial tasks such as outputting the language's own documentation or displaying directory listings with file metadata.

These examples highlight the succinctness of the language while including a new language concept per chapter, effectively booting the reader into a frigid pond of fresh semi-obtuse language constructs ('Get thrown into freezing cold pond of python' doesn't have quite the same ring though).

The remainder of the chapter is always devoted simply to exposing the constructs and syntax of the example; both what and how it all works, line-by-line if necessary. Code samples are available from the website, and the chapter encourages a hands-on approach of running and modifying sample code.

At each chapter's conclusion, a checklist of concepts is presented and the semi-obtuse sample seen at its start reads as clearly as a language you've known all along.

It makes perfect sense that the best way to learn a language is by dissecting code beyond one's current reading level and then changing and authoring examples to reinforce it all. It's a bit strange that fewer books go as far as this one, but it's possible the "by Example" series follows a similar tack.

Dive Into Python's chief drawback is it's age--the book was written way back in 2003, the time of Python 2.3 (it's now the age of 2.6 and the dawn of 3.0). Still, this is a much more fun way to learn than reading, for example, Python in a Nutshell, as I was doing (it's more of a reference manual anyway, though more up to date).