h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ripley! Here! Now!

*curls up in a corner of one of the sofas, watching the stairs with horror*

I speak JAVA, but not snake.

Courtesy

I haven't done any programming since 1998. I haven't learned a new language since 96. I think I qualify to be officially obsolete.

A 78-year-old friend was over here for a visit this afternoon and I showed her the first two episodes of the West Wing from DVD. She insisted on seeing one more before she left and has already made a date to come back a little earlier next week and see four more.

That's the way an addiction always starts...just one episode, then why not stay for another, and then...you're foregoing human contact in favor of the box.

(So speaks the newly hooked Queer Eye for the Straight Guy addict.)

Told ya.

Hope I got this right. I went to a carol service at the medical school tonight, and accepted a lift home off a good friend, but she ran out of petrol (on a dual cariageway). She got into a flap and was on the verge of calling the RAC.

I persuaded her to walk to the local petrol station (about 10 minutes away) - just as we were setting off a very nice policeman drove past and offered us a lift there, and then drove us back to the car.

It sort of restored my faith in the police actually. We brought him a chocolate bar from the garage to say thanks - not much but he seemed pleased.

I looked at Python for the first time about 2 weeks ago and worked through a couple of lessons at "Dive into Python". Does that make me proficient?

I don't understand the Queer Eye thing. It's just another makeover show. And it seems every TV station has at least one of those now. I'm tired of them.

Hey if you can do Hello World then you are proficient

Courtesy

[Hyp] totally tired

d'E, you're certainly more profficient than I am. I don't suppose you know how to, say, whip up a program that can examine textual input in pairs of letters, keep track of how often the letters occur, and then write a random letter generator based on that input, do you?

I mean,....well, let's say that this thing (in its most primitive state) would just count the occurances of a single letter. From the input, "a" occurs 12 times, "z" occurs 3 times, "q" occurs once, "e" occurs fifteen times, etc.

Second level up, it would look at pairs of letters. It would know that "qu" occurs much more frequently than "qa", "re" occurs more than "ry", etc.

The final level up, the one that I'm quite frankly not concerned with just yet, would look at triads of letters. "que" occurs more frequently than "qut", "qat" occurs more than "qab", etc.

And then the random letter generator would use these letter frequencies to determine which letter to create next.

It starts with the letter "q", checks its records, and notes that "qu" is much more frequently encountered than "qa", so it probably prints "qu" next. Then it sees that "up" occurs more than "ue", so it most likely prints "qup" instead of "que."

Does this make sense, or am I rambling?

Anyway, d'E, do you know if what I'm suggesting is easy or hard? Because I really, really need to know just what I'm up against.

Makes perfect sense to me. Alas, I have no knowledge of either of those languages.

*waiting for a tile to finish rendering so she can go to bed*

That's the trouble that I've been having. No one that I've asked has ever even *heard* of Icon (and that's the language of preference), while next to no one has ever heard of Python.

Affy - while having heard of Python its on my todo list along with PERL.

From what you have described it would be a difficult, but not impossible, task to perform in JAVA. I know that PERL is much better at text manipulation so it might be easier there. No idea about Python or Icon.

Hope this helps.

Courtesy

Courtesy, thanks for the advice. But here's my dillemma: I could program this in two hours in JAVA. I could program this in three to five hours in C++ or QBASIC. But this professor....who seems oddly reluctant to teach or to answer direct questions when I press him for info....wants this to be done in ICON, though he said that "....it wouldn't kill me if you do it in Python."

He then said that ICON was not a popular language, gave me a text book and said good luck. I now know precisely why ICON is not such a popular language. So I'm going to subversively switch to PYTHON which, while it's still a bit alien to me, at least looks familiar (the less-than-or-equal-to symbol actually MEANS less-than-or-equal-to in PYTHON. ICON doesn't play that way), so I can at least figure out what code does when I look at it.

As I was the kid left holding the proverbial bag when EVERY OTHER PROJECT MEMBER DROPPED OUT, I'm coming very close to going insane. So I'm looking around....frantically....for people who are connected with these two languages in any way, shape, or form, to see if they can give me some pointers.

Oh, and just so you get the full humor of how weird this ICON language is: I contacted the guy in charge of the main ICON website. He says he can't remember ICON at all, he hasn't used it in six years. He does it all via PYTHON now. At that time, roughly a week ago, I decided to switch to PYTHON and hope that I could get this project running decently before December 12th.

And now you know why my soul will probably be crushed before I even have a chance to get to the final exams this year.

[BC not posting because he is irritable and bad-tempered}

I have never watched West Wing, but the clips I've seen look good.

Queer Eye has only recently arrived here, Living had the best part of Saturday devoted to it. We thought it was hilarious and the blond bloke is wonderfully camp, but I agree, after two or three shows it begins to like the rest of them.

Trinny and Suz on What Not To Wear are still brill, but would completely devastate me if I were to be on that one. They remind me of girls I went to school with who were utter b*tches and made my life pretty miserable.

I'm in odd mood today, we had a lovely meal out with the sons last night, only at Pizza Express, but they were so amusing and it brings it home to me that there won't too many of those once No2 sonmoves out next week.

I also had a dream about loss last night and the feeling is still with me. I know it is just a state of mind and I will probably shake it off in an hour or so.

Affy, I know what Python *is* and I have a Python program on my computer, but I know nothing about programming in it.

Anyone else slightly appalled at the announcement that Paris Hilton is going to be in a "Reality" show on a farm?

Well, I loose my car tomorrow to the bank. I just cannot afford it anymore. This is the latest in things that make me have serious misgivings about nearly every major decision I have made in the last two years. I really hoped that things would be looking up for me, but they are not. I am simply overwhlemed by life at the moment.

Note that the above whine was not a cry for help or an indicator that I am going to do something stupid or drastic. It was just a whine.

My brother lost a lot of weight a year or so ago, Z. And seems to be keeping it off. He started running regularly, though not particularly obsessively, and it just seemed to disappear.

The low fat foods are a bit bizarre, according to my Mother. My Dad had been put under reasonably strict low fat/ low sugar instructions and she says that everything proclaimed to be low fat is loaded with sugar instead, according to the ingerdiemts list. Drives her nuts.

Repression and art. Worked well for poetry/lit-tri-ture/etc in the USSR as far as I can see ("We take poets seriously in this country. We kill them for it" Total misquote which destroys the beauty of the phrasing, but you get the idea. Um. Mandalstam, I think). Worked very badly for the visual arts. Especially painting. At least in terms of innovations and stuff. I mean there was a brief flowering (think Eisenstein, or even the black square guy), but Soviet Realism? *Shudders* Oddly easier to ban paintings than writing too: I think you can easily clobber them on the grounds that you don't like it or it's in bad taste or it's just not art. Plus, writing can be coppied and circulated samizdat, and you can't really do that with painting, or easily in the past anyway with film, though you couldn't make huge films without somebody noticing either anyway today (assuming that the USSR was still in place).

Anyway. Im sure there were other things to comment on, but I've forgotton them now.

I'm in Britain and it's been mainic. Am now facing difficult choice. Have been offered a job. Upside: it's what I want to do, nice place, good set up, good people. Downside: starts in Jan, money terrible and they want to lock me down for at least two years, maybe three. And I have to decide by tomorrow.

So I took advice from freinds in the bis over here. They say don't do it. They say come back in Spring and shop around over the summer (when there is lots of work). They say: that's bad money and to be tied up for two years? Ouch. They also say: we'll introduce you around at our places next week. There will be work there in the summer. It'll be great, they'll love you. They say: don't be in a hurry about the teacher training thing (the job I'm offered is to train me as a teacher trainer and have me do that), concentrate on getting a foothold. Plus it would allow me to finish off my term with my present school.

Now, ideally I think they are right. But. What if I do come back in Spring, and it doesn't work out? I mean, I know that after this two year period I'd be even more employable with solid experience. And I know that I prefer security. But I know that money would make it extremely borderline indeed financially for me and B. I'm not sure I'd end up financially worse off, but then they are going to train me up and you can't do that without your employer deciding to. I mean, there aren't courses you can pay for or whatever. So I could end up on the same money but without the career boost if you see what I mean. Although, then I'd have wriggle room to insert myself into a better job quickly. But then I'm not terribly good at networking as a rule.

I knew this would happen. I knew I'd jump at the first job offer I got. I know I'll worry if I turn them down. I hate being forced to make decisions. I always make the wrong one when I do it conciously and don't just drift into things.

Yes, the money is appalling. It often is in my line of work. Have I got the balls to manage to avoid that trap, or do I let myself get taken?

What do you guys think?

Xmas is meant to be a wonderful time of the year, Marv, but in reality it is the toughest especially if you are looking for jobs, as No1 son will tell you. Anything and everything seems far more major as it is held up against the season of goodwill and other people's appearance of prosperity and wellbeing.

I am sorry you have had to give up your car, it is horrid losing that independence that having a car gives you. But I really hope that once things pick up after the holiday season both you and No1 son find gainful employment and lifts you out of the doldrums. The job market here is flat at the moment as no one seems to want to take on staff this time of the year and I expect it is the same there.