This book caught me off guard. For one I know the Disney movie made from the book so that set certain expectations. Also, this is written by the same dude who wrote Les Misérables. Which made me think he was probably just another rom-com author (joking). But in all seriousness this book started out a little slow for me. Victor Hugo was exiled from France, and it was apparent that he loved France as much as he hated Napoleon (fun fact in looking up how to spell Napoleon to make sure I was doing it right, it turns out napoleon dynamite is more popular on google than Napoleon Bonaparte). He spends about two hours describing the city of Paris as it was back in the 1500s. Frankly, I found this dry as it was hard to visualize because I am an idiot who doesn’t know very much about architecture. But as the book went on the tension kept growing. There is this scene in the book where a priest is in a room that overlooks Notre Dame, and he points at a book, and he says “This will destroy that” pointing at Notre Dame. This launches Victor Hugo into an hour-long discussion of how the invention of the printing press signaled the end of architecture. This was fascinating. As I said the book started off a little slow but like a good Tarantino movie by the end all these unrelated(ish) characters find themselves tangled in destiny like a fly in a spider web(imagery from the book). I don’t think I have read a book that had as much tragic irony as this one had. For the last 20% of the book, you really did feel like you really were watching a fly in a spider web. ...

This is a book a little out of my wheelhouse, but I am glad I read it. The author is an Afghan American who does a brilliant job of describing the life of a privileged Afghan in pre-war Afghanistan. By far the best part about this book was the perspective it gave on life, or at least one life in the middle east. It was also interesting to hear Islam talked about from a neutral point of view instead of either fearmongering or blind acceptance. The book richly describes the culture through food, family and the center of the book kite flying. The book reads as a biography but is in fact a fiction. As for the criticisms of the book there were several literary devices the author overused and some plot choices that seemed a little predictable, but believable. Overall, a very entertaining book.

Dostoyevsky’s underground man, Copernican shame, Darwin, the stone wall, and why consciousness without illusion slides toward spite and inertia.

History as moral narrative versus natural fractal systems—humanity as pattern, not protagonist.

Enumerations for the Reduction of Complexity March 13, 2020 by thepigeonfighter Introduction One of the ever present problems faced by developers is the concept of complexity. Complexity is everywhere; it makes things difficult to analyze and even more difficult to control. When writing programs, complexity is introduced exponentially every time a conditional path is added. With every ‘IF’ statement, you are introducing two possible paths your program could take. This article will start first with principles of conditions. I will then examine possible use cases for enumerations. ...

How Code Becomes Binary November 10, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Humans have been inventing programming languages since the 1940s. But what exactly is a “programming language” and how do computers understand different programming languages? Well read on to find out. The Basics Before we dive into things we have to break down what code is. Code is a series of instructions given to some sort of CPU. It doesn’t matter if you are using Java, C-based language or something silly like PHP. At the end of the day it all becomes just an instruction (or more likely a series of instructions) that is passed to the CPU to be executed. Let’s take a look at a line of code that is written in JACK which is a high level Java-like language. ...

Stack vs Heap September 17, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Synopsis Stack and Heap refer to different memory segments. In general, the size of the stack will be much smaller than the heap, but the time required to access data on the stack will be much shorter than trying to access data that is stored in the heap. More Info This is an inherently confusing question. Why? Because in computer science there is a data structure called a “Stack” and a data structure called a “Heap.” When people are talking about the stack and the heap and computer memory, they are NOT referring to the data structures, but to memory segments inside the computer. To make it more confusing, the “stack” they are talking about actually employs the “Stack” data structure. For that reason, we will really quickly describe what a “Stack” data structure is before we investigate what people mean when they refer to the stack vs the heap. ...

How Bit Shifting & Bit Masking Work June 1, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Last post we talked about binary on a basic level. If you are not comfortable with reading binary or counting in binary I recommend you check out that post before reading this one. Using bit shifting and bit masking judiciously opens the door for massive performance optimizations in low level hardware and high level systems alike. Read on to find out how. ...

What is Binary? April 17, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Learning how to understand Binary will change how you see all numbers. What is Binary? I am sure you have had that question at least once or twice before. Usually for me what happened in the past was, I would ask that question and then end up in some article written for a college Computer Science course that would over-explain what is a pretty simple idea. Adding in poor un-intuitive examples to further muddy up the waters. So I want to remove the mystery about it once and for all. Taking your skills from zero to one when it comes to binary. ...

How does your Processor Process? March 30, 2019 by thepigeonfighter An exploration into how your Processor works. In previous posts I have described how computers store information and how the special ALU chip can run elementary operations on that information. In this post I will endeavor to bring it all together into a cohesive overview of how your processor works. Before I dive into the details, I want to step back and talk about the overall architecture. ...