ITIL Foundation

I passed the ITIL Foundation test. That means I am a stone in the Foundation, so that any ITIL boss can put me in an ITIL box hole. The topic is very interesting indeed, although the typical ITIL (potentially destructive) box-thinking is at most 25% of the truth about group collaboration and organization – the missing truths are about psychology, sociology and the mystical part.

As a bad side of this test passing, two of my nearest classmates didn't pass. They were sad and irritated. I tried to encourage them to allocate one day in a week for ITIL reading, so that they pass the test at the next opportunity.

Lithium deficit primordial star

(Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2)
SDSS J102915+172927
α(J2000): 10ʰ29ᵐ15.15ˢ
δ(J2000): +17°29'28"
Const: Leo
m: 16.92

SDSS J102915+172927 is one of the extremely metal poor stars in this universe, meaning it was formed "shortly" after Big Bang, but it contains only one fiftieth of the amount of lithium expected to be formed in the Big Bang. Stars have a tendency to destroy the fragile lithium nuclei, so the problem is not serious, but if the lack of lithium cannot be explained in that way, the Big Bang and current models of physics are in trouble.

The astronomers have a strong suspicion that there are many more of these extremely metal poor stars, and are planning to study them with the VLT.

ESO news release here.

Nature article here.

Preliminary devenv choice

The infinite blessings of C# and Java aside, I've for a while considered using mainly (mostly) C++/wxWidgets. The reasons are that

1. the combination presumably taxes the computer running the programs much less, and
2. that I, as a developer, have a freer choice of perusing whatever API I need for the application,
3. and at I at the same time am in full control of the memory allocation (garbage collection is not a good idea).

Garbage collection has been praised for years as a way to improve the program, make it easier to develop it, and to make a better, more glorious and generally überphantastique program that gleams like gold in the distance (the irrational emotional aspect of programming religions). In immediate contact with these überphantastique programs, the "gold" is revealed to be a cracked surface of shallow paint: Android the überphantastique operating system for übertelephones deLuxe professional, very much unprofessionally freezes (!) for minutes, while the somewhat not so boasted JavaScript engine in Mozilla by function eats up memory till it is full: it is some kind of least effort, most sloppiness garbage collection scheme. A worse case is google-viral-chrome that goddamn boasts about having an ultraüberführer fast stop-the-world garbage collector. This is criminally insane, like boasting about cleaning the city streets by blasting away all parked cars, and sweeping away the scrap in minutes!

Java is pretty good for producing executives that are portable. C# is not good for that, since it is quasi-strictly Windows-only. (Allegedly it's better than Java, but that matters naught if it's not portable). The problem with Java is it's virtual machine bloat: you don't need all of it, usually, and it eats your resources. Garbage collection is a bad thing, but one can choose garbage collector by using some runtime call; one might also write code to avoid it. Still it's overkill and not quite as portable as generally believed.

One disadvantage with my choice of C++/wxWidgets is that C++ have access only to the Boehm Conservative Collector, and I don't know its behavior. The second point is that wxWidgets provides 16 bits Unicode when I use 32 bits Unicode. Maybe it's rehackable, but I'm not sure.

Undesirable "feature" in string literals conversion

My own string literals conversion program contains an undesirable "feature", namely it converts also strings in comments. It would be better to keep the comments as they are, when a file is converted from .uc to .c, so that the .c keeps being more readable.

R123–R125 – Still not dead in Reinfeldt Hell

Yet a few other microscopic releases – the socioeconomic conditions as an unemployed in Reinfeldt the Cheater's Swedish Hell are complicated and requires more than 130% of full working time to fulfill, while the bureaucracy and income delays worsens. Since nobody's going to employ me, for irrational reasons, I have to beat up this quasi-dead donkey: preparing a book give me experience and some hope of getting away from these horrible Reinfeldtian conditions by my own writing and programming.

The still not dead donkey:

• R123 (Sep 2, 2011): Prep for dynamic class creation by func call – i.e. I'm working in minimalist steps towards a call in my mkmap language that dynamically creates an object type, f.ex.:

     class star { Bayer, HIP, HD, α, δ, π, RV, Mᵥ, SP };
  

  which defines a star to have a Bayer designation, a HIP Hipparcos number, a HD Henry draper number, an α/δ position (right ascension and declination), a parallax π, a radial velocity RV, a visual magnitude Mᵥ and a spectrum SP. The given attributes of the class are hardcoded, Bayer is presumed to be a string, HIP, HD integers, α and δ reals (floats) and so on.
• R124 (Sep 2, 2011): Fix bad object linking of allstrings.o – in fact the new object allstrings.o was introduced.
• R125 (Sep 3, 2011): Further object setup – making some default settings in object setup: first a type, then a pointer to previously loaded object.