More Complaining

More Complaining

Birthday and christmas are coming up, and I’ve been asked to post a wishlist. Nowadays more than ever that’s a problem because I have everything I need, and I don’t want for much that isn’t prohibitively expensive.

So one thing I’ve come across that’s really neat is the DiNovo Edge keyboard (it’s COOL, especially when paired with ControllerMate, which is also a cool program). Vinay and David both have one, and it’s pretty slick. But I already have excellent keyboards, most about as old as I am. However, I don’t have more than one great mouse.

So today’s complaining is targeted towards Logitech. Stop screwing around and release your top products with a Bluetooth option. You’re not doing anything that requires proprietary RF. As an aside, that tiny RF dongle is really neat, and should be shipped with all the stupid mice that you insist will only be RF.

I want an MX Revolution at my desk (and maybe even a VX Revolution for while I’m on the road), but not if I have to plug yet another useless dangly thing in my laptop.

That was fun.

Unbelievably fun.

0 – 100 in “I have no idea, but it was FAST”, 100 – 40 in “hold on you your insides”

Previously banned from racing, both in the UK and the US, this car defies superlatives, and brings glee to the soul of a driver.

But we do have pictures. And for those thirsting for more, a wikipedia reference.

Thanks to Rich of Golden Gate Sevens for the opportunity, and David for getting us out and organized. That was awesome.

You know you’re popular when…

People start getting spam from your address.

My inbox was flooded this morning with backscatter after some spammer used my email address in their from field.

If you get a message from me, and you don’t know me, I’m sorry but it wasn’t really me.

PS: You don’t have to send me hate mail in reply to the spam “I” sent you.. I hate it too.

Quote of the Day

Sam Lowry: Excuse me, Dawson, can you put me through to Mr. Helpmann’s office?
Dawson: I’m afraid I can’t sir. You have to go through the proper channels.
Sam Lowry: And you can’t tell me what the proper channels are, because that’s classified information?
Dawson: I’m glad to see the Ministry’s continuing its tradition of recruiting the brightest and best, sir.
Sam Lowry: Thank you, Dawson.

I have a lot I want to learn

It occurs to me that the point of school is not to teach you things, but allow you time to learn the things you want. While a lot of people spend it learning how to drink, find themselves, find someone else, or any number of other things, I spent it on working off tuition and in the company of friends.

But the ramp-up with learning is very steep. From learning how to program you get into data structures which gets you to resource contention which gets you to operating systems. More and more things come at you faster and faster that are each more complex than anything you’ve ever seen or done before. The fun part is chasing this until your free time runs out, you graduate, and you enter the workforce.

Primes

So, I know I haven’t posted in a while, and it’s not for lack of things to say.

The internship at Apple has ended. The internship at VMware has begun. Both are incredible companies in their own right, and I have been privileged by both in that my code for both companies will wind up running on that computer in front of you, if you have a Mac or a VMware hosted product.

Last weekend I wrote a new IRC bot framework sort of thing based on PircBot. It’s a very good platform to build on, and I’m happy with my creation. Once I have tied up the loose ends, I’ll probably open it up for use by arbitrary folks on freenode and potentially other nets as well.

Tonight I’ve been working on prime number generation library for two goals. The first goal is efficient data structures. The second is fast primality tests and quick generation of very large primes for other research (crypto?).

To accomplish the latter goal, I wrote the library to load or save it’s generated prime table from disk on demand, but then found an interesting metric when testing: Loading from disk was the same speed as generating on the fly. What’s worse, generating primes in real time incrementally created a more useful prime table while loading from disk did not provide a complete prime table until the load was complete, which meant that generating primes in real time was more useful.

So I wanted to share that little bottleneck story. I’ve got this ultra-nice 7200rpm hard drive in my first-gen MacBook Pro and a two-threaded prime number generation algorithm can outrun it. Damn.