I read The Demolished Man last night (no, not "finished reading", I read the whole thing last night). It's a very good book. It's SciFi story with a murder mystery feel to it. People who are appalled by weak female characters might want to skip this one (at a few points I found myself becoming annoyed that the female characters seemed unable to do something sensible like hitting the antagonist with a heavy object).
The downside is that now several ST-TNG episodes and large portions of Babylon 5 seem much less original. Although having "Bester" as the name for a PsyCop suddenly makes tremendous sense.
I have too much vacation time stored up (company policy is to only allow you to roll 80 hours over into next year).
I tried taking Friday off but we get it as a paid holiday anyway.
I guess I'll have to take a bunch of time off around Christmas or something...
It doesn't actually count as getting through the mail filter if the spam only contains long sequences of letters that don't actually form words.
Earlier today RIAA spokesperson Amy Charter confirmed rumors that pop artist Britney Spears was in negotiations to become a power noise act because of the poor .mp3 quality on extremely high frequency samples.
"We believe that by causing the .mp3 files to be much larger than they would otherwise be we will cause consumers to think twice before downloading"
When asked about the public acceptance of Ms. Spears adding clanking machinery and polyrhythmic noise loops to her tracks Amy Charter responded "Oh yeah, like the average consumer cares about quality. I mean, if they had half a clue they wouldn't be listening to Britney Spears in the first place. Hey, is that a tape recorder? It's recording? You [deleted] [deleted] mother [deleted] [deleted] [deleted]!"
When asked for comment on her new musical direction Mr. Spears said, "Like, I'm going to get to kiss Madonna in this, like, totally underground club. It'll be so cool!"
...
(yes it's satire)
Thought for the day:
Pointer traversals aren't free. They often cause cache misses and attaching a next and last pointer to a small data type like an int can triple your data in size (which doesn't help with the cache misses). Also, if your application is running very close to a critical point (i.e. nailing that 60hz refresh rate in a console game[0]) having the performance degrade a as memory fragments can kill you. Don't use a linked list just because you might need to add and remove elements from the middle.
If element order isn't important you can get the same advantages of a linked list by using a vector or array and moving the last element into the slot where you're removing an element. If element order is important, investigate how often you're adding and removing elements and consider using quicksort.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't use linked lists. Just consider using simpler data types when you're writing performance critical applications, particularly when you have a dataset that is accessed and changed constantly, but the elements are rarely added and removed.
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[0] Games typically wait for the vertical blank on the display medium in order to swap buffers. On an NTSC television the refresh happens 60 times per second. If you wait for a VBlank then your game will always run at a harmonic of that frequency. The problem is that if you're really close to the 60fps line then it's easy for something to push you across the edge and drop you to 30fps.
No, this isn't a criticism of NPR.
Lately I've been having a hell of a time getting up in the morning, so I've been dozing while listening to the news on NPR. It seems to generate the strangest dreams as one news story drifts into dreamland and then back into another news story.
So this morning I was dreaming that I was taking pictures of a GMO protest at the site of the bomb blast at the British Consulate in Istanbul, and then I found a bacon sandwich...
So yeah, who needs drugs when you've got NPR?
and today we determined that cream puffs are subatomic particles...
I'd just like to take a moment to thank the people who wrote screen. It makes my top 10 list[0] of utility programs[1] I absolutely cannot live without, and in spite of it not making the top 5 list, it's ability to resume sessions does more to keep my blood pressure low than anything else on the top 10 list aside from source control software.
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[0] For the record, my Top 10 list of utilities I can't live without (off the cuff and subject to revision at my whim):
[1] emacs could technically be classed as an "operating system", but let's not go there.
[2] As much as I'd like to live without Outlook and consider it bad mix between a cruel joke and a pox upon the whole of humanity, my company's IT department is very Microsoft centric, so I am forced to use Outlook to communicate with my team. Therefore, despite the persistent feeling of dirtiness I get from using that poorly written, bloated, security hole from hell, I must place it in the list of utilities I cannot live without.
I saw The Day The Earth Stood Still a couple days ago. I always forget just how good black and white film looks. It has this soft quality that makes everything look a touch unreal. It makes me wonder how the changes in the medium of mass media affect our tastes. When someone appears on screen effort has been made to make them look good on screen. This isn't as big a deal in a theater with a big high resolution screen, but for television where you effectively have a blurry 640x480 image with the color consistency that's about as reliable as a ferret who's consumed it's own body weight in sugar[0] I have some real questions about the choices that have been made.
And after seeing the original movie trailer on the DVD I no longer feel so bad about how much is given away in today's movie trailers.
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[0] That is to say: it's reliable only in that it'll never do what you want.
The more I see in life, the more I'm convinced that 99% of the people who are given credit for the success of things are idiots who either got lucky using a shotgun approach or they have a knack for picking very talented people who can make their products not suck. I think this failure to understand is part of why so many sequels are awful, which is sad both because it means that we have to suffer through bad movies that could've been really good, and because listening to interviews with the people who are supposedly responsible for a great movie makes me want to track them down and beat them with a blunt object.
Well, I saw Matrix Revolutions.
All that money on special effects and they couldn't hire one guy to write dialog.
Someone brought in a copy of True Crime: Streets of L.A. and the building I work in is in the game. Really, it's kind of weird watching people drive around L.A. I kept trying to get him to go see if they put Spaceland in the game, but he was too interested in running missions.
Unfortunately, the game is visually bland, the hand-to-hand combat seemed silly ("Why is he trying to kick you when he's holding a gun?"), the voiceovers were tacky, and truck shadows show up on the bottom of the overpasses. I'm just not willing to shell out $50 for something that lacks polish.
Found this search string in my stats this morning:
"cheap xanax"
Looks like it's working
The worst bug is the one that crashes your debugger. And then when you get a new debugger that lets you step into where it's crashing it doesn't make any sense for it to be able to crash there. Eventually, you get tired and you have a deadline so you wall off that section of code with a workaround. But you know the bug is there and you know it's waiting.