M635 J520

Marché de La Rochelle HDR  Probably about two years ago - when taking Andrew Ng's excellent "Machine Learning" MOOC, Johannes sent me a piece of JavaScript that populated the video lists with overall time per lesson just by pasting it into the URL-thingy in Chrome. Magic. Today when I sat down to start the course on "General Game Playing" that I have signed up for, but, alas, not (yet) found much time for, I thought of that piece of code and wondered if I, with my new knowledge of JavaScript, could whip up something like that. (Also I couldn't find Johannes' original one.) I quickly hacked together something this afternoon over a flat white in a hipster cafe here in Lyon. And lo and behold it worked. Then I extended the functionality to also show minutes and seconds of unwatched video - as well as total overall counters for the entire course. Now each lesson heading reads "Lesson N - Name [time remaining/total time]" instead of just ...

I must say that I quite like what I encounter of the Scala language in Martin Odersky's online " Functional Programming in Scala " course at EPFL (as well as the course itself!). It is almost as expressive as my favourite language these days, Ruby . (Of course it will never really be able to match it on expressiveness, I'd say (the latter being duck typed, and the former being strictly typed (even with a most excellent type inference)).) One detail that I like about both languages is that parenthesis are (most of the times) optional. (By "(most of the time)" I mean that you (obviously) can't really skip them if it leads to problems with operator precedence.) This (can) really lead(s) to more readable code. Scala, however, (seemingly) has some inconsistencies when it comes to when  they are needed. Most notably the println  (and similar?) function(s). ((Quite possibly inspired by scripting languages) you have a quick way to display text at the user w...

Fattigfolket I'll be following the   Functional Programming Principles in Scala  course offered by Coursera this Autumn.   To get you started the good folks behind the course have provided lots of info on how to install necessary software etc. However, I ran into a problem, and it's subsequent solution, that I would like to document here. I'll be following the course a bit from here and a bit from there. Sometimes on my mac, sometimes on a linux laptop, sometimes on a windows machine. Anyway, I have my course files in my Dropbox and pick them up from there as needed on the various OSes. Problem was when opening the my scala projects in eclipse in OSX after compiling them under Windows, I got a cryptic " error in scala compiler null " and was unable to clean and (re)compile my scala programs. I realised that I was running JDK 6 on my mac and JDK 7 on anything else, so I figured that might have something to do with it. After following Mary Hamlin 's ans...