- my projects:
- parseerror.com:
- googlebomb:
- useful:
- interesting:
- people i know:
- people i don't know:
- wastes of time:
- software:
- music:
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- 2008-09-04 I am in Taiwan visiting family and taking pictures
- 2008-08-28 The U.S. government has decided that building a wall along the southern border with Mexico is a good way to prevent additional illegal immigrants from entering the country. In order to decide if I agree I will be reading up on the history of large walls, their builders, purpose, technology, longevity and most importantly, effectiveness.
- The city of Mumbai will fight the smells of rotting garbage with deodorant
- T Boone Pickens' energy plan is a ruse to gain eminent domain rights to build a water pipeline to Dallas; that's where the real money is
- Death or Glory: The Truth About K2
- Ultralight Backpacking: The Why and How
- Terror watchlist upgrade 'imploding' — $500 million to manage a database with 500k records? And the implementation doesn't even really work? And the underlying design itself is horribly flawed? Welcome to a government-funded knee-jerk 'make it look like we're doing something' project.
 Salt: A World History — an enlightening account of salt's importance through the history of Euro/asian civilization. 'll admit straight away that I like history, food, language and learning the origins of things we mostly take for granted. Fortunately Salt does not fall into the pandering, pop-culture trap that many books do; however, it is written in an accessible fashion, does not get bogged down in any one subject for terribly long and contained enough interesting tidbits to keep me reading.
- Free, full documentation to the Large Hardon Collider has been made accessible online
- 2008-08-25 Road bike tires are great; they're light and thin and hard, enabling quicker starts and faster rides. They're tougher against punctures because of their higher internal pressure. So high, in fact (mine are rated at 120 psi) that I could not suitably inflate my road bike tires using my portable mini-pump. And my current 'big' pump doesn't support Presta valves and does not have a pressure gauge. I know I can get adapters to support Presta (and I probably will) but I want a pressure gauge because it makes such a big difference to ride at optimum pressure (without over-inflating one's tubes). So I ordered a new pump and a variety of other stuff... spare tubes, a more complete mini-tool, etc. I looked for a very thin, light adjustable wrench but couldn't find one. My current one seems a bit heavy, and is too thick to help adjust my read caliper brakes.
On the bright side it didn't rain again this morning, I've been very lucky lately; that's bound to change. Oh, and in visiting with my great-aunt this weekend she told me she's been getting by just fine without a car, thank you very much, in the last 60+ years since she left the Navy after WWII. She recommended I take a better look at the local bus routes. Puts things in perspective.
- Interesting that Olympic medal counts from China and the UK order by gold medals first putting China in the #1 spot and the US in the #2 spot...
ORDER BY gold DESC,
silver DESC,
bronze DESC,
country_name ASC;
and the American medal counts sort by total medals first, putting the US in #1 and China in #2...
ORDER BY gold + silver + bronze DESC,
gold DESC,
silver DESC,
bronze DESC,
country_name ASC;
- 2008-08-21 Had my first flat on the roadbike; was passing a stopped 18-wheeler and couldn't avoid a sewer grate. It was a pretty big bang, but I made it about a mile before I realized the tire was flat for sure (which means it's a small hole, that's good as I have no spare inner tube). I figured it would be a "snake bite" flat, and it was. Tried to patch it 3 times and failed. Didn't have a spare tube or tire jacks on me, big mistake.
- penury
- Living without a car
- 2008-08-14 I've been really lucky with weather, no rain this week (yet). Looked like it was going to rain this morning, I was sure of it, but it cleared itself up. Used a chain-cleaning tool on my GT bike last night, first time I've ever cleaned a bike, ever. It was amazing how much grease, dirt and grime came off. Underneath all that dark crap was shiny metal, it was nice to see.
Last Wednesday/Thursday my back tires kept going flat and it must have been the rim. Since the bike shop isn't open on Monday I didn't want to go that long without a bike, and wanted a backup bike in general, so I got my Binanchi while my GT stayed locked up at the train station. Over the weekend the mirror, pump and back light were stolen. At least they didn't take my rack and fenders :/ So the lesson is, never leave anything at the train station.
Also got my rain jacket and rain pants in from Nashbar, they are very light and fit OK, we'll see how well they perform. I'm having trouble finding rain covers for sneakers, and I have big feet so I wonder how easily I'll find them, when I do, in a size 14. Bike commuters must have a shoe solution for the rain... now it's not a problem since I can just wear sandals and get wet because it's warm, but in December when it's 35°F and raining I need a better solution than that.
- Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts are broken
- int mid = low + ((high - low) / 2);
- The Future of Crossing the Street
- 2008-08-12 Weather held this morning, though I have a chance of getting wet this evening. Had a nice conversation with a man on the train about my new Bianchi, he recognized the traditional celeste color, had some questions about the frame, headset and casette. He also recommended clipless pedals, and said that once you get them you never go back. Everyone keeps saying that, so it must be true.
- Windows BSOD at Olympics opening ceremony
- 2008-08-11 Weather held up this morning; forecast was for intermittent thunderstorms; which was good because I got a new road bike and it doesn't yet have any fenders. On Thursday my commuter mountain bike blew 3 tires... must be a bad back rim, which I did note was not straight. So now it barely even rolls... I walked to and from work on Friday and discovered an easier route for grocery shopping and some of Milford's bus routes. Unfortunately bike shops seem to be closed on Mondays, so I can't even bring my bike in until Tuesday and then who knows how long it will take to replace the rims. So I got a second bike, a Bianchi Brava, which is beautiful and so light... one can feel the ease at which it accelerates. It came with clipless pedals, meant for riding shoes, but I'm sticking with toe-clips for the moment so I can wear my sneakers. The bike is missing a lot of stuff I need for a regular commute: rear fender or rack, lights, mirror... but it looks so pure and clean I hate to add them (but will). So I'm hoping for clear skies for the next week or so til I get the thing properly outfitted.
Oh yeah, one reason I couldn't get any fenders was because the bike shop said that anything commuter-related: lights, panniers, mirrors, etc. had been flying off the shelves. It's good to hear that people are embracing bicycle commuting, but I wonder how many will still be doing it in January?
- Commute takes minutes in car but hours on Houston Metro buses
- fatuous
- 2008-08-06 Pouring rain today on the way in, got wet, but not as wet as last time. Ordering proper rain gear from Nashbar. Ride home in the dark was great, and fast.
Been looking at a Bianchi Pista as a possible second, alternative bike. I'm a bit hesitant though, since I want to learn to take care of bikes properly before I get a nice one.
It's all about maintenance... especially on a fixie.
- Dutch town tests 'air-purifying' concrete — I've seen titanium dioxide paint mentioned somewhere on the Discovery Channel for the same reasons.
- In Paris Hilton's response to McCain's 'celebrity' ad she makes fun of McCain for being old and then proposes her energy policy.
"OK so here's my energy policy: Barack wants to focus on new technologgies to cut foreign oil dependency and McCain wants offshore drilling. Well, why don't we do a hybrid of both candidates ideas? We can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in which will create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved."
Paris's "solution" suffers from the logical fallacy of Argument to moderation whereby the correct solution is thought to be the middle ground between two propositions. Let's try applying Paris's "please everyone" methodology to other current and past problems and see what solutions we come up with...
- Creationism vs. Science: Simply declare that God created half the Universe and the other half was created in the Big Bang!
- Bush v. Gore in 2000: Simply declare them both co-President!
- Indiana's attempt at assigning π = 3 vs. π = 3.14159... Simply declare π = 3.14!
- Gray text on a black background vs. gray text on a white background... Gray on gray!
You can't please everyone all the time, so stop trying. Instead, why don't you sit down and do some research, pick a side and defend yourself. But that would be like, hard.
- Tilapia with Garlic Butter
- Google Maps Business Categories
- 2008-08-05 Goddamn train was an hour late this morning, was 15 minutes late to work.
- Know Your Rights: Bustcard
- One quarter of all U.S. airline flights were late in first half of 2008
- People seek cheaper alternatives to expensive home heating oil
- On Language: Me, Myself and I — Why do we capitalize the word 'I'?
- I tried some Coors Light the other day, since I remember Budweiser got sold to the European corporation InBev. It tasted more like piss than Bud Light did.
- sanguine
- 2008-08-04 My bike is a bit heavier and a lot more functional with the new fenders and rear rack. Front fender was rubbing against the wheel a bit, had to adjust. I love the simplicity and accessibility of bike parts... if one of the few dozen total parts needs adjusting, you just do it. I've been told that pumping the tires up to their maximum rated pressure will help reduce flats, I did so, and the ride in today was so smooth.
Went to NYC yesterday, spent some gift certificates at EMS and Paragon Sports. Got some polyester shirts, they're very light and are supposed to wick away sweat well. I've been wearing cotton t-shirts until now; they are hot, soak up sweat like a sponge (and get heavier as they do so) and take forever to dry out.
Rode to Stew Leonard's in Norwalk today; not too bad. In my bike-commuting/city-biking research I'd read something to this effect: "Stop thinking like a car driver... the best bike route will likely be the worst car route and vice versa." So I did. I got off at a different train station than normal because it is a bit closer and then I took residential backroads the whole way there (calculated via google maps). The ride was smooth, there were very few cars and most of the route had shade that the main route wouldn't have provided.
Also, I've been riding on the road, in traffic like one is supposed to on a bike. Previously I was nervous about riding in higher-traffic areas, but I've been more assertive and am trying to be as polite, predictable and speedy when it comes to interacting with cars as possible.
- The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear
- The dumbing down of science
- San Francisco mayor proposed fines for unsorted trash
- Chinese restaurant uses online translation service to name restaurant. Result: 'Translate server error'
- 2008-08-02 Put together our bathouse today; have to find a place to put it. Also, got some fenders and a rack on my bike, yay! The fenders paid for themselves instantly as it was pouring rain on the ride home.
- Large Hadron Collider image gallery
- 2008-08-01 Julia found a bird on the ground in our yard yesterday evening. We placed it in a shoebox with some padding and a little water dish and put the bird on an outside table — at least it was protected from our cat. Using the (excellent) North American Wildlife we figured out it was a sparrow, but not what kind (probably a female because of the dull colors). I figured the bird had no chance, but we went out later that night and it was gone... we don't think the cat got it because there was no sign of a struggle or any feathers, so possibly it was just stunned or dazed and eventually came to its senses.
- piquant
- Park nomad, laptop in tow, calls bushes home
- Practical Pedal — a quarterly bike commuting publication
- Zimbabwe's hyperinflation provides a good reason to move financial transactions away from 32-bit
- Zero cycles
- commuterbicycle.com
- Best and worst U.S. cities for biking
- bikecommutetips
- 2008-07-25 The morning conductor remembers me; he punched the paper receipt/tracker this morning for the correct destination without even asking to see my pass. It was sunny and a bit cool this morning, perfect weather.
- Bicycle glossary
- 2008-07-24 It was pouring rain today. My current rain solution is gym clothes + flip-flops + cheap poncho. Poncho covers my everything except my lower legs and forearms, and most importantly: my backpack. I arrived at work today no drier than if I had jumped into a pool with my clothes on. I rode through a knee-deep flood underneath the overpass on Old Gate Ln got properly splashed by two cars, and got wet from underneath via my un-fendered back tire, which not only managed to get my shorts soaked, but also my backpack and the clothes and papers in them. I arrived a bit drier (my shirt) than if I had just walked in my regular clothes, but no much. Things I need to do, in order of importance:
- Buy and install a rear fender. This should keep my shorts and my bag drier.
- Get a rear rack; I'll get some panniers too, but in the meantime I can at least strap my backpack there; it'll keep my back cooler (it's amazing how the backpack blocks air and traps sweat).
- Start bringing a week's worth of clothes on Monday morning instead of bringing my clothes every day (I already leave my shoes at work). Wrap them in a garbage bag, even if it's bright and sunny out. This will keep them dry from a daily soak and will mean I'll be hauling less on an average day.
- Figure out a better rain outfit, probably a proper rainjacket and pants. I want stuff I can layer, because even though the weather is warm now, it's going to be terribly unpleasant (and unhealthy) to get wet in November or December.
- 2008-07-23 The weather forecast looked OK at the beginning of the week now says intermittent rain for the rest of the week, including today. It was raining when I woke up, it was raining after the snooze woke me up again, but miraculously it stopped just minutes before we left. What a relief, I hate riding in the rain. I need to get a back fender, at least. Got a flat tire about 2/3 of the way to work, I have a patch kit but no spare innertubes and no portable pump, so I'll be walking to the bike shop to get some.
Got the stuff at the bike shop; patched the flat on the train platform and on the train, that was interesting. I'm getting better at this stuff, but I need to be better prepared. Speaking of prepared I have been riding in junky clothes: an old cotton t-shirt and gym shorts; sneakers if it's dry and sandals if it may rain. Not the best attire in terms of functionality or appearance.
- 64-Bit Programming Models: Why LP64?
- 2008-07-22 Train was ~8 minutes late today; conductor said they were held up in Stamford. Had a dentist appointment for which I was 10 minutes late for instead of 2; slightly later to work than I wanted to be.
- 2008-07-20 It's been weeks since I last drove my car. I do not miss it. I do not miss the stress of driving; I do not miss highway traffic jams; I do not miss staring into the sun on the way home. I don't miss filling up the gas tank. My legs are getting stronger, though I'm not losing any weight since I eat more now (I'm hungrier!). Got some new, more street-friendly tires on my mountain bike frame ($20 each); the ride is definitely smoother. Coupled with my stronger legs I am now able to do most of my morning ride in the highest gear... wish I had a higher gear for some of the downhill stuff.
Not everything is perfect, my wife's commute is a few minutes longer since we have to both walk to the train station instead of drive; she complains and says there are things she'd like to do if we owned a car (things like camping, visiting friends on Long Island, etc.)
Transporting heavy things has gotten more interesting... I biked home a ~25 lb bag of potting soil last weekend, which wasn't bad. However, we now need a more robust ~200 lbs of additional gardening supplies (soil, cow manure, peat moss, etc), and we also want to be able to shop at Stew Leonard's, an excellent dairy/grocery shop on the other side of town. A solution to the gardening supplies problem is to rent a pickup truck from Home Depot for ~$20 and do my own delivery.
We can probably get to Stew Leonard's via the bus, but unfortunately there is no single bus route from our neighborhood to Stew's — it may be possible to combine train and bus though, I'll have to see if that'll work. A solution to both would be some sort of short-term car rental/borrowing.
As far as renting a car, in my home state of Connecticut it is illegal to drive without some sort of insurance; I am currently still insured from my previous car; but I'm interested in finding a per-day or per-trip insurance company so I'm not out $1600/year for full-time insurnace, but am still legal and covered when I do drive. Assuming I can sort this out I think that the occasional short-term auto rental could solve my current outstanding issues.
I've already checked out zipcar and I may try getting there by train and driving ~40 miles back to my home; its's till the cheapest option for a few hours of car access.
Some other bike-related links:
- National/international:
- Connecticut-centric
- Lessons learned from the Debian/OpenSSL fiasco or Why You Shouldn't Modify Code Strictly To Appease valgrind
- Jellyfish sting triathletes in Hudson river
- Budweiser sold to European conglomorate InBev for $50 Billion. This is what happens when the US's "allow uncontrolled booms" and "just print more money " economic policy fails.
- Reporter critical of TSA Finds Self on Watchlist
- wikihistory: or Why You Can't Go Back in Time and Kill Hitler
- Did some gardening this weekend. I walked to our local nursery and bought 10 sweet bell pepper, 5 tomato (3 Mountain Fresh and 2 Big Boy), 2 Thai hot pepper and 1 basil plant, all 15-30 cm tall, for $7 and carried them home. Bought a bag of potting soil and re-potted the basil, Thai hot peppers and 2 of the tomato plants and planted the rest in recently-vacated space we had in our garden. The Chinese brocolli-type plants we had in there didn't do so well, so they got harvested and cooked over noodles; our existing tomato plants (a cherry and a Jetstar) are growing like crazy though.
- I am using the excellent yslow Firefox plugin, developed by engineers at Yahoo!, to analyze and improve the performance of my website. Try it!
- The Creature from Jekyll Island is an examination of The Federal Reserve system; its creators and their motivations, its role and relationship to government and the financial sector and its performance over the past ~95 years. The problem with this book is that its author has decided not to present the facts and allow the reader to form his own opinion; but instead to pander to the conspiracy theorist crowd and litter its contents with loaded language that effectively kills any credibility whatsoever. The author feels The Fed is an oligopolistic system designed by the wealthy to protect their assets and status, which as far as I can tell from other research is basically true; but his presentation is so twisted that it makes separating fact from speculation a tedious task.
- The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander
- Just got back from 3 days in Indianapolis. Not quite as nice as as New Mexico, but the strip steak (medium rare) at St. Elmo's is fantastic.
- 2008-07-06 Just got back from 10 days in New Mexico; a beautiful place. Will have pictures up sometime soon.
- erlang =:= future
- Slate briefly recounts the history of the semi-colon, and asks if it is dying
- Feel free to send/forward email to Sweden's FRA, since they'll be monitoring all information going in and out of Sweden anyways.
- We have been having miscellaneous stability errors on one of our tests servers; turns out it was Juniper's SSL/VPN's Secure Application Manager, a third-party VPN application; it apparently interacts poorly with RDP (which we use to interface with the test server)
- Bike commute going pretty well so far. Got new innertube for my mountain bike. Strangley, yesterday my rear brake got out of alignment and was rubbing on the rear rim even in "off" position. Had to detach rear cable for the ride to work, then fixed it with some help from John and a wrench at work.
- Local bike shop wasn't open today, trying to fix front tire on my good mountain bike. Currently using wife's bike (donated by parents), which she has used exactly once and which weights approximately 50 lbs and which is approximately 6 inches too short for me. It's amazing the difference the bike makes. Apparently my good bike has "Slime innertubes", meaning that they have some liquid in them that is supposed to "heal" any punctures; looks like they're at the end of the line. I need to familiarize myself with the gorey bike part details and get some tools and spare parts (especially since the only bike shop within riding distance has inconvenient hours and rediculously long turnaround times). One of the things I always regretted about owning a car was my near-complete uselessness when it came to diangosing problems or fixing them; I've read about how combustion-engine automobiles run, but there is a world of difference between understanding the book and being able to *do* something (workshop, parts, vendors, networking, etc.)
- My Jetta broke down and would cost more than it's worth to fix it. I am in no rush to get another car, as I have always hated them, and this is a good excuse to try living without one. I take the Metro North train line from my house in South Norwalk, CT to Milford, CT and then walk or bike to work.
I bought a decent but old roadbike in Manhattan (via Craigslist) biked at first, but there is much broken glass on the roadside and unsurprisingly my bike got a flat tire. Then I tried to take the tire off to patch it and stripped the bolt (this is a pre-easy)
- Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors
- The Solution to C++ Threading is Erlang
- Erlang BIFs
- Types and Programming Languages
- My bike route to work
- Cassini nears four-year mark
- Fuel Economy Leaders: 2008 Model Year
- What examples of security theatre have you encountered?
- fucking windows.
- Confessor had a question about UNION ALL'd subqueries
- Kernel Korner - Using RCU in the Linux 2.5 Kernel
- F/OSS Flat File Databases
- Why do we cry? — Hard as it is to believe, hardly anyone studies crying. As a scientist buddy told me the other day, "It's just TOO BIG A QUESTION."
- Programming Language Theory Texts Online
- JVM Spec
- Smoothsort
- timsort
- Lockhart's Lament
- A Parallel Approach to XML Parsing
- The Connection Has Been Reset
- The 25 Year-Old BSD Bug. People just do not understand how hard it is to write perfect code. Any function lacking an exhaustive test suite should be assumed to have bugs in it.
- "The press does not exist to provide information but to provoke emotion."
- Sexy prime
- stochastic
- Well, I've bought nice, expensive headphones (Sennheiser) and cheap, crappy headphones (Radioshack). They've both crapped out on me, though it took the Sennheisers longer to do so (~1 year vs. a few months for the Radioshack ones). How hard is it to make a pair of fucking headphones.
- "The Internet has been operating now for 10 years," Gates said. "The second 10 years will be very different." The Internet has been in operation since the 1970s. What an idiot.
- Frustrated drivers try to sell their gas-guzzlers
- CCTV boom has failed to slash crime, say police
- I think that the programming model for massively parallel systems will be more functional than imperative. Common imperative languages don't include the right kind of information to facilitate auto-parallelism. I'm working on designing a programming language and interpreter will automatically partition and execute general-purpose programs in parallel. The language currently looks something like a combination of the best parts of Scheme, Haskell and Python; but it's far from finished. It's a big project; I'll post something up here as soon as it's worth sharing.
- mod_spox
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Internet porn hurting Toronto strip clubs
- The Slab Allocator: An Object-Caching Kernel Memory Allocator
- jed explains digital audio
- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem
- There's Plenty of Room At the Bottom — a 1960 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman about the importance of nanotechnology.
- Ariane 5 Flight 501 was a rocket that was detroyed by an overflow error in the guidance software.
- Trie
- CUDA Showcase
- Hypercomputation
- APL
- The AutoClass Project
- Perlisisms - Epigrams in Programming
- Wrote a program for calculating all 203280221 prime numbers between 2 and 2^32-1. It implements Miller-Rabin primality test and completes in about 49 minutes on a single 2GHz CPU. I wrote it to take advantage of multiple CPUs, so that should give us linear speedup; but of course the best way to make it faster is to use a smarter algorithm.
- The first 1000 primes
- Physical Address Extension
- Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
- Actor model
- hierarchize
- "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
— Alan Kay
- Scala
- Knuth was wrong about premature optimization. The root of all evil is a premature return path. A very well-reasoned and insightful post.
- The Funniest Joke in the World
- "Infinite patience produces immediate results."
- What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
- "I know the future because I have seen the past."
- A New Way To Look At Networking
- Processing reminds me of LOGO.
- L-system
- Space-filling curve
- Ray Tracing For the Movie 'Cars'
- The Long Now
- I caught the show "Man-Made" over the weekend on The National Geographic channel. I found it profoundly satisfying because of its engineer-like treatmeant of the subject. The topic of the show was the bra. It begins with an introduction of the bra and lays out its practical importance and cultural history. Then we are given an overview of the design process via the design of a single new bra. Through the design the whole is broken down into its constituent pieces. We then learn how those pieces are made from their constituent parts and so on back to the original dependency raw materials: silk from silk worms, spandex from oil refineries, dye from its chemical components, plastic and steel. The methods and tools involved in each step of the process are covered. The show wraps up by taking us through the entire now-understood process and covering some other miscellaneous but interesting facts. I found it thoroughly enjoyable, interesting and educational. There is hope that someone watching these shows learns not only the specific details of how one type of everyday object is made, but the overall pattern of how to learn about a subject. Maybe there is hope for TV after all.
- Richard Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission report on the space shuttle Challenger accident
- Residential Styles
- How the Fed Works
- I have been working on my periodic table table recently.
- kowtow
- superdelegate
- golden spiral
- senescent
 Elements of Murder: A History of Poison is written by John Emsley, the author of many other pop-culture explorations of the chemical elements. It is an interesting (and certainly morbid) journey through the Euro- and Brit-centric history of elemental poisonings, both accidental and intentional. Even though I'm going through an "elements phase" at the moment this book was still a mixed-bag; some aspects of poison were intriguing while other accounts dragged on. Many of the poisoning accounts read straight out of a murder mystery, carrying on for some time and involving many characters. Inevitably all the accounts were of upper-class folk, as the lives of the poor are undoubtedly less well-documented and involve fewer international trysts. While I took away some practical information from the reading I think I won't be hanging onto this one.
- Man commutes via bicycle on Texas freeway
- A tree grows amid rotting paper in the Detroit Public Schools book depository
- Astronomy books for the blind
- bisque
- China bans free plastic bags — I think this is a great first step towards reducing pollution and moving away from the "use once and throw it away" mentality.
- Tata motors rolls out $2500 car in India
- a french amateur radio operator rolls his own vacuum tubes. beautiful.
- Building beer brewing Bender — someone built a full-size model of Bender from Futurama and then brewed beer inside him (a la episode "The Route of All Evil"). Beautiful.
- Witness the side-effects of a fatter society: Super-Sized Autopsy Tables Needed For Big Corpses
- Neuromancer invented the genre of cyberpunk. This sounds impressive until you try and make a list of good cyberpunk. I read it to take a break from non-fiction, but I find myself wishing I didn't. The book was not unenjoyable, it was just too cool, too forced-grittiness tough-guy macho-nerd and too much of an unintelligible mess even before we are subjected to futuristic Jamaica-mon techno-slang.
- Introducing the Solar Tree
- "Bender's Big Score" was nonsensical, convoluted, disjointed and weak. I couldn't even make it through the whole thing, it was just too crappy. It was, dare I say, too nerdy. It contained so many cheesey *wink wink* in-jokes that anyone who hadn't seen the show simply wouldn't care. Nor, it seems, those who tire of the same crap recycled endlessly. Futurama just gets worse. I'm done.
- I noticed that the icons on my site, as beautiful as they are, take an inordinate amount of time to download. I noticed recently that yahoo.com uses a CSS-based image consolidation technique for its icons.
- Fed loans banks $20 billion
- Finally, an in-depth investigation of the eternal question: Could a morbidly obese goalie shut out an NHL team?
- The Story of Stuff
- Idiocracy has a great premise but is a bit too juvenile to be really good.
- arc melting
- Time hackers play with atomic clocks at home
- Interesting that within a few weeks of Fewer Roadside Bombs in Iraq the U.S. Finds Iran Halted Its Nuclear Arms Effort in 2003. Seems like a fair trade, right?
- Bruce Schneier Q&A @ Freakonomics
- Rural Britain wants to put itself off the GPS map
 DNA: The Secret of Life by James D. Watson is equal parts memoir, history book, textbook, gallery of scientist personality profiles and soapbox for his (unsurprisingly) pro-GM stance. Highlights include Watson's account of the Human Genome Project and the account of human evolution as it is currently understood via genetics. While I personally found high school biology to be completely dry and inaccessible I feel that Watson and co-author Andrew Berry do a good job of describing the the function and importance of DNA and various DNA-related technologies. A book trying to cover so many topics necessarily can't be terribly thorough on any of them, but it did pique my interest on a few topics which I plan on delving into in more depth elsewhere. As for grievances: while I don't necessarily agree with all of Watson's opinions my major complaint would be that the book, at over 400 pages, was a bit longer than it needed to be. I'd borrow this one from the library.
- Adblock Plus is a firefox plugin that blocks in-line ad images and frames. It is superior over regular Adblock because it allows one to subscribe to externally-managed "block lists" of ad-serving domains, so one mustn't manually build one. A perfect example of the power of a flexible plugin architecture.
- Saving Electricity
- San Francisco considers late-night pizza ban(!)
- U.S. Copyright Basics
- 2007-11-27 In any environment those best-suited thrive; and the music business is changing. NPR had a story on T-Pain's domination of the pop charts, mentioning he made more money from ringtones than from singles. Most interestingly they also mentioned his extensive use of a vocoder (2:27 into the audio) and tones which translate very well when played on a cellphone's (crappy) speaker; the ringtone sounds very similar to the actual song. We often forget to take into consideration the context of the delivery medium.
- deceptively — see the "Usage Note"
- Dell's Ideastorm is a good... idea.
- What's old is new again: sail-boats
- Apparently in order to do remote debugging via Windows for .Net stuff (someone else's project, not mine) both debugger and debugee machines need to be part of the same workgroup or same domain. Things just seem to get more and more complicated. This is a shot of Process Explorer running via Remote Desktop running via Windows in VMWare in Windows.
- Reactor
 is a software design pattern for handling multiple simultaneous connections in a single thread of execution; while I normally don't build my software explicitly around design patterns my current project does fit this pattern.
- Helvetica is a documentary about the most influential typeface of our time. Part history, part analysis, part existential design philosphy; I learned some and enjoyed most. Helvetica is a modern Swiss san serif typeface based off of a German one named Akziedenz Grotesk, though marketing knew the name wouldn't sell in the US and named it Helvetica based on Helvetia (the Latin name for Switzerland).
- Newsweek article on Amazon's e-book venture. I hope it's a long time before paper books are obsolete, but this thing has enough features to be interesting.
- Memory Leaks in C# — how is garbage-collection advantageous over manually-managed memory? i have never understood this; one has the same potential problems and less control over how memory is managed (i.e. the timing of GC).
 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea discusses the history of math and science with regards to one of my favorite numbers: learning to divide by zero, sum infinite series of zero, cover all rational numbers with zero, destroy space/time with zero, provide infinite energy with zero and that zero and infinity are really just two poles of the same sphere.
- Trigonometry
- Sine
- Fundamental theorem of calculus
- A history of Zero
-
pizza@debian:~$ echo "explain char *(*x)[5];" | cdecl
declare x as pointer to array 5 of pointer to char
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
- I'm currently reading
 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (a.k.a SICP) — a beautiful book that explores the structure of information, algorithms and computer programs. It isn't a book about learning how to program, or about Lisp or Scheme; it's not a book about math. It's a book about thinking, about learning, about exploring information and algorithms.
- Introduction to Parallel Computing
- Counting bits set, Brian Kernighan's way
- Trie
- Folding@Home
- Terror watch list swells to more than 755,000 names
- NESL: A Parallel Programming Language
- BitC Programming Language
- Writing Bug-Free C Code
- Rules of Go
- Hashlife
- Watched Into the Wild tonight; and having read the book I can say that I think they did a good job. The movie was beautifully made.
- I've been thinking about how to efficiently manage a list of timers after seeing the
same issues/solutions in Linux's tickless feature, libevent and mod_spox; this is some Haskell to treat
a sorted list as a tree and insert an item in O(log n) work.
insert p i [] = [i]
insert p i (x:[]) | p i x = [x,i]
| otherwise = [i,x]
insert p i l =
do
let (lo,hi) = splitAt (div(length l) 2) l
if p i (hi !! 0) then
lo ++ (insert p i hi)
else
(insert p i lo) ++ hi
I really like how functional languages allow one to concentrate on algorithms instead of implementations.
- 2007-10-09 I borrowed and read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows over the weekend and I am emotionally exhausted.
- Purely Functional Data Structures
- Disabling NTFS Last Access Timestamps
- An even "better" way to find the largest entry in a list is:
big (x) = foldl1 max x
- A better way to find the largest entry in a list is:
big (x:xs) = foldr max x xs
Which applies the 'max' function between each pair of entries in a list
- Haskell Prelude
- Funny, recursive lambda functions in lisp seem to not be part of the proper language, and require hackery to be made to work. Let me know if I'm missing something.
- Common Lisp HyperSpec
- Just because you cannot do it does not mean it cannot be done.
- bucket sort and example of how bucket sort is much faster than qsort when sorting Library of Congress call numbers.
- Thousands of Burmese protestors killed
- Why you should rewrite your program several times
- OK, so I've been playing with a Haskell tutorial
and I like it so far. So far the best thing I've done is write a function to find the highest number in a list:
big (x:[]) = x
big (x:y:xs) | x > y = big(x:xs)
| otherwise = big(y:xs)
Not a huge accomplishment, but the whole list and pattern-matching
and recursion everywhere stuff takes some getting used to after
the imperative world.
- the latest interesting thing i've done is: set up a flickr account
- Experimental realization of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm using nuclear magnetic resonance
- A Gentle Introduction to Haskell 98 λ
- Rubber-hose cryptanalysis
- The Last Question
- A little example program to generate a file that is both a valid BMP image and a valid PHP script
- Why You Should Never Rewrite Code From Scratch
- older stuff is in the archive...
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