Chasing Coffee

Bah

After spending an entire day optimizing[0] a section of code and having made significant speed gains, it's somewhat frustrating to gain just as much speed by spending one minute removing your profiling macros[1] from what is now a very tight loop.

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[0] For the record, I optimize by restructuring and streamlining code, not by creating spaghetti. Creating spaghetti doesn't help anyone in the long run.

[1] The PS2 is a bit cache poor. This sometimes leads to unusual performance figures.

A reminder

In California you can still smoke outside

Smoke

It's a bit smoky here. It looks kind of like it usually does when there's a heavy marine layer. Visibility looks to be in the 1-2 mile range.

Fortunately, Los Angeles is one big concrete firebreak, so I'm not overly worried about either my apartment or my office going up in flames.

Targeted Advertisement

Sometimes ads just magically fit with the articles they're next to...

QOTD

"I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard."

-- composer John Cage, 1937

Hmm...
I wonder if that will ever catch on

Of course, the trouble with predictions is that nobody tracks your ratio of correct predictions to incorrect predictions so it's hard to tell who was right and who was lucky...

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Oh, and there seems to be a new converter CD.

Fonts and batteries

At home I've recently switched from Gentoo to Debian[0]. And after getting profoundly annoyed after having searched for "backport" for the 300th time, I moved up to the testing class distribution. Apparently during the upgrade fontconfig wound up in a rather unique and highly nonfunctional state[1]. So, after purging and reinstalling fontconfig I now have a nice debian box that has pretty fonts[2].

I also learned how to change the battery in my car. It was easy once I broke down and bought the long-neck socket set[3]. Of course, 8:00pm on a Friday night was not my preferred time to find out that my battery wasn't functioning correctly[4].

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[0] Gentoo is still a very cool distro, but it seems like it has a very high bit-rot factor and everything always seemed to run slowly. It really comes down to preferring to spend my time doing other things than maintain my system (especially if maintaining my system potentially involves waiting for mozilla to build)

[1] Running fc-list resulted in a core dump. Running gaim resulted in a core dump. Running mozilla-firebird resulted in a core dump. Note the subtle pattern.

[2] At least until I break it.

[3] Yes, I needed a deeper socket in order to get my nuts loose, that's what happens when you have a big shaft coming up through the middle.

[4] I jumped it in the parking garage (thank you, AAA!) and then ran it for half an hour. It didn't charge up enough to restart the car (or honk the horn at full volume) after half an hour and it didn't drain out completely overnight. So either the battery's gotten old, or there's something expensive wrong with the car.

Have you ever...

Have you ever seen 8.75L of Bombay Sapphire Gin next to 17.5L of vodka, and had people have to go buy more because they were afraid of running out?

My company knows how to throw a party...

Which of course leads to the most asked question of the night:
"Why'd you guys do this on a Thursday night?"

Well, I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing the answer is:
"Well, given the drinking habits of the employees here, if we'd thrown it on a Friday then we would have run out"

Lions and tigers and car keys... oh my!

Once I couldn't find my keys because for some reason I'd put them in my refrigerator when I'd gotten home from work, but I think Roy's got that story beat...

The piece of skull, taken from the right side of Horn's head, was then stored in his abdomen, Hammargren said.

irony

So, on Friday I ordered a bag of coffee from a company that specializes in shipping fresh roasted coffee[0] (according to several things I've read having the beans fresh roasted makes a world of difference). Of course, Sunday morning I woke up with a case of food poisioning[1] and of course coffee being one of those things that you're not supposed to drink when your diet consists mostly of bland soup and toast[2], I now have a bag of freshly roasted beans that are sitting on my desk getting old.

Ah well, at least my insomnia turns out to be largely independent of my caffeine habit. Not that this is a good thing for me at the moment, but it's good to know for future reference.

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[0] I'll plug the website if the coffee turns out to be any good.

[1] At least as near as I can figure. I spent most of Sunday trying to keep water down. Needless to say, my laundry didn't get done.

[2] It's not quite this bad anymore, but you get the point.

The Electric Meme

I finished reading The Electric Meme by Robert Aunger. He presents a coherent theory on memes that doesn't involve them spontaneously jumping from brain to brain (or artifact to brain), which is a great relief as meme theory is very interesting and I have no intention of amending my beliefs to include the existence of things like ether[0] in order to justify perusing an interesting theory.

The book isn't so much a definitive statement on what memes are, but rather is a good first step in knowing where to look for them when our technology is sufficient to physically analyze the human brain.

I'd give it a 4/5 and say it's definitely worth reading if you're interested in meme theory.

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[0] Webster's Dictionary: "ether 1 a : the rarefied element formerly believed to fill the upper regions of space". Not that stuff you use to connect your computer to your router, I believe in cat5.

RMS at UCLA

I saw Richard Stallman preach... er... speak at UCLA today. The topic was copyright, and the general feeling amongst the people I went with was that you spend your time alternating between agreeing with him and wanting to hit him.

It is very difficult to pin him down to specific points because he's likely to chew you up on semantics before the meat of your argument comes to the fore[0].

However, I did find his arguments on publishing technical books to be particularly persuasive[1] and I wouldn't mind seeing them go forward. I also agree that copyright law has gotten completely out of hand and that the "perpetual copyright through installments" is morally reprehensible.

If only I didn't want to beat the crap out of him every 15 minutes...

Ah well.

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[0] I don't care if it's correct or not, saying GNU/Linux is damned inconvenient and goes against the natural human tendency to shorten names.

[1] I won't attempt to restate or summarize the arguments as I'd probably be flamed out of existence by zealots.

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Ok, enough of that.

Who actually says "co-ed" anyway?

Happy

Happy Leif Erikson day.

Go... um... drink some mead or discover a new land or... um... something.

...there are some odd entries on my Giger calendar.

Little blue redheaded viagra porn pill

For some bizarre reason Jeremy Zawodny's idea on how to deal with comment spam brings to mind a post I saw on alt.discordian a very, very long time ago where someone had taken the first half of a "MAKE MONEY FAST" post and grafted it on to the back half of an ad for phone sex. Some things should be tried purely for amusement value.

Well, I voted

I walked two and a half blocks to where I go vote. I walked because I'd heard something on the radio about a record turnout and long wait times. Fortunately, I'm time shifted[0] so I had to wait in line for almost an entire minute before being given my ballot. It would've been faster if I had driven, but at least I got a nice walk out of it.

I don't usually talk about politics. There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that I like to be able to give informed and well reasoned opinions, and usually I find that the issues behind the convenient sound bytes are very complex thorny things that have broad reaching impacts. So, I can not really say if the recall is right or wrong. I can say that it seems rather sleazy and I find the tactic to be generally distasteful [1].

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[0] Work starts at 10:00am and runs until enough of my coworkers have left that I don't feel guilty about leaving... usually between 8:00pm and midnight.

[1] This is in no way meant to exonerate anyone's behavior in this campaign. I'm more than a little disgusted with the whole circus.

Reminder

If you live in California go vote. People who don't vote aren't allowed to complain about the state of things.

Bubba Ho-Tep

I saw Bubba Ho-Tep at the NuArt theater. Bruce Campbell was there. He walked up to the people in front of us and asked them what they were standing in line for.

Before the movie Bruce appeared dressed as Elvis and sang in front of the audience. He got a group of people to sing backup for him.

The movie was good. Don't expect to see people's heads chopped off with shovels. Do expect an extremely funny and weird mild horror movie that has good characters. This is an excellent movie to see with a largish group of friends who like bad horror movies.

After the movie Bruce Campbell did a Q&A session. He's got a very pleasantly funny yet self deprecating manner that turns delightfully sarcastic when audience members ask stupid questions.

Girl in audience: "Will you say the boom-stick line?"
BC: "Well, I could... if I was your little monkey."

So, if you can find it, go see Bubba Ho-Tep.

Twins?

Weird

I received a card in the mail advertising "Synchronized Massage by the twins". (The card also specifies that it's the therapeutic kind of massage and specifically mentions pregnancy massage... so it's not that kind of service).

Ragdoll

Ragdoll is the new lens flare.

That's odd

Apparently you can play an audio sample too fast and too slow at the same time. My audio stream is being played at too low a rate and then is being aggressively clipped so that the total rate of play is too fast.

It sounds kind of neat except for the high frequency fuzz.

An observation

Matt's observation:
If you have two third party libraries communicating through some glue code that you've written there will always be at least 4 bugs which force you to debug the system in pieces rather than examining it as a whole:
1. The bug in the first 3rd party library.
2. The bug in the second 3rd party library.
3. The bug in your glue code.

The fourth bug is either a general lack of forethought on the part of the programmer, or a systemic problem where the programmer shouldn't have been let near the keyboard while deeply sleep deprived.

mmm... emacs

I discovered M-x speedbar today.

Now I have no more excuses for not having TAGS generation as part of the build process.

Go-Go-Gadget Makefile!