Comments for Thias の blog

Comment on Cat Haiku by Samuel A. Falvo II

Samuel A. Falvo II — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:47:07 +0000

I also don’t think you can make a Haiku poem by taking two perfectly formed English sentences that happens to be 24 syllables long combined, and fragmenting them to form the 5/7/5 meter. If my memory serves, each line is intended to communicate a single concept, no?

Comment on Cat Haiku by Samuel A. Falvo II

Samuel A. Falvo II — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:44:01 +0000

My cat stretches tall.
Paw extended, come to me!
Happy you are home!

Comment on Text encodings, the original sin by Thias

Thias — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:24:54 +0000

Fair enough, but for tabs to work, the values for tab-stops need to be defined properly outside of the text flow, or a system that properly supports HTS (0×88).

Comment on Text encodings, the original sin by Rainer Brockerhoff

Rainer Brockerhoff — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:21:03 +0000

I prefer tabs over “random spaces” for indenting when writing source code, but I suppose this is a matter of opinion – there are good arguments both ways.

But using spaces instead of tabs (and proper tab stops in the paragraph format) when aligning normal text in a table is a serious error. Just change the font or font size and the table will become misaligned. (Sorry, pet peeve…)

Comment on Text encodings, the original sin by Thias

Thias — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 09:50:43 +0000

Corrected for the end of the ASCII range, as for tab and line feed, they are slowly dying out, tab because its meaning is basically a random number of spaces, as for line-feed, it has become synonymous with carriage-return.

Comment on Text encodings, the original sin by Rainer Brockerhoff

Rainer Brockerhoff — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:05:47 +0000

Small correction: ASCII goes up to 0x7F, not just 0×79 — lowercase ‘z’, for instance, is 0x7A. Also, a few other characters in the 0×00-0x1F range are still used, like TAB (0×09) and LF (0x0A).

Comment on Falsehoods programmers believe about geography by Tim

Tim — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:20:30 +0000

I grew upon a small island of the west coast of Ireland (pop. ~600) where my mother was post mistress. We regularly got mail addressed to some one on the Island with no other information. Because there are very common traditional names in use on the Island there may have been ten or more individuals sharing a name. A guessing game would ensue to try and identify the correct recipient (clues would be origin of letter, handwriting, asking P.O. customers etc).

Comment on Falsehoods programmers believe about geography by Hesky

Hesky — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:08:38 +0000

- Countries are permanent.
South Sudan was recently born. Netherland Antilles recently ceased to exist.
- Your definition of a country will be the same as others.
Is Taiwan a country? Kosovo? Puerto Rico?
- Countries have well defined borders.
Countries frequently dispute the location of their borders and the borders of other countries.
- Taking into account disputes, countries have well defined borders.
Treaties often define their borders in a way that makes it very difficult to figure out where it actually is. Borders are often defined by natural features that move (e.g. rivers).
- It’s possible to render a single map of country borders that can be used anywhere in the world.
Countries like China and India have laws that require maps in their country to render borders a certain way and those requirements are contradictory.
- There exists some line you can use (disputed or otherwise) to mark the border between one country and another.
Chile and Argentina have purposefully left a section of their border not surveyed and insist that that section not be drawn.
- You can at least assume that areas within a country (states, provinces, etc.) have well defined borders.
Borders defined by natural features (lake, river) often don’t specify where in the lake or river the border stands and what happens if the natural feature moves.
- Countries are fully covered by administrative areas.
- Administrative areas of the same level do not overlap.
- Geographic divisions are contiguous or don’t have holes.
- Names for administrative divisions have the same meaning in different countries.
Nepal’s highest level of division is county while the US has counties as one of the smallest levels.
- The administrative divisions within a country are consistent (i.e. all the top level divisions in the US are called States and those are divided by counties).
The US has the District of Columbia and different states are divided differently. Many countries have “interesting” exceptions to their divisions, often around the capital (or largest) cities.
- The administrative divisions of a country stay the same.
- OK, the borders can change but the system/hierarchy stays the same.
- Major changes in country divisions only happen every decade or so.
- All the land in the world can be defined to be in some country.
Antarctica
- Antarctica can just be treated as a separate country.
Several countries have claimed overlapping portions of Antarctica.
- Postal codes are geographic features.
Businesses love to assume that the world can be mapped by postal codes. They base many decisions around this and by the time they find out it doesn’t work they don’t care and insist that it work anyway. In fact, postal codes are almost never defined geographically but rather just consist of a set of addresses that fall within the given code. So it is technically meaningless to say that a point falls within a given postal code.
- A postal code can be used to refer to a city.
It is often the case that a postal code covers a city and a giant portion of neighboring rural land. This means that searching for a mechanic in your zip code can easily get you a result many many miles away.
- There is an official definition for the international date line.
- The date line doesn’t change.

Comment on Falsehoods programmers believe about geography by Aaron Seigo

Aaron Seigo — Fri, 31 May 2013 15:54:44 +0000

“Places have only one official address”

This is even true within the same country. While the example given is a place with an address in two countries, in Switzerland (more Switzerland! :) there are bilingual cities/towns such as Biel/Bienne where every street has two different names (one French, one German) and therefore each location has two addresses. The street number and PLZ may be the same, but the street depends on which language you feel like using …

Comment on Falsehoods programmers believe about geography by Fredrik Roubert

Fredrik Roubert — Fri, 31 May 2013 12:47:04 +0000

In Sweden, not only buildings but entire towns are moved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna#Moving_the_town