Posts from — June 2005

I finally got around to making calzones yesterday (with Mike’s help). It took a while since I left a lot of time in between steps so I could figure out what I was doing, but the calzones came out amazingly well. Although this one was devoid of spectacular mishaps like with the pizza (though it came out well) I set off three fire alarms in the process.

I need to do more cooking with meat, I’m not quite sure what the next goal will be. Pepperoni calzones don’t count, though I’d like to do that at some point.

I finished The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie about a week ago. It’s widely regarded as one of the best if not the best book on C.

Anyway, why would I bother with this? I started learning C++ six years ago, so one might imagine that I’d have mastered the more limited features of C by now. If you think this about yourself, I propose that you’re wrong (except Walter). In the course of reading this book, I got to review stuff I already knew, plus (importantly) I learned a whole lot about pointer arithmetic. It isn’t terribly complicated, but every year I understand it a bit better, and I finally feel like I can look at code like:
while (*a++=*b++);
and know what it does without question (this isn’t the hardest example, but it’s one that I like because of its elegance). I finally understand what two dimensional arrays look like in memory, and why they must be declared certain ways.

I don’t code in C, nor do I really have any plans to. I prefer C++ for reasons I won’t get in to here. With that said, knowing and understanding how C works is important for reasons described in The Law of Leaky Abstractions. That’s one of my favorite articles, and I’ve found it to be very accurate inside and outside of programming.

To summarize the theory (though the article is really good, read it!), high-level abstractions break down at certain points and at those points it’s important to understand what is going on below the abstraction. Thus, knowing a high-level language will eventually cause behavior you won’t be able to explain without understanding how the low-level operations of the machine work.

As much as I didn’t like CSE 201 (computer architecture), I did learn some things that were below my comfortable level of abstraction. Thus, when cache misses were dragging our code down last summer, I could help figure out how to combat this.

So there you go. Read the book if you program, you’ll be smarter.

Why does that picture of the book looks like it has a lot of nicotine staining? My cover is white..

I’ve decided to not post about running as much as I used to, since it’s generally boring to read unless I’m getting hit by cars or racing horses. Today’s run had some interesting bits, so I’ll write a bit.

I started out at around 6:45, not having eaten dinner, so I thought it would be a 3 or maybe 4 mile run, then I’d go back. I felt like making things interesting and running to random places, however, so I eventually found myself running in the back roads of northwest Bethlehem. I kept trying to get lost and find someplace new, but whenever I did it I ended up back at familiar places from one of my intrepid runs from February (this one. Frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t seeing much of anything new (except when I took a woods path and found a train, that was rather cool), I decided to head west. I got on Broad street and kept running for a while.

I’m not sure when I crossed into Allentown, but I definitely got pretty far into it. I stopped at around 1919 Hanover Ave in Allentown. I passed the “Bada-Bing Bada-Boom Goodfellas Exotic Dancers” establishment, so I decided I should turn around soon after that.

Unfortunately, the next bridge on the river is another few miles into Allentown, so I wouldn’t be able to run that far yet (that’s about a 14 mile run).

Today’s run took 1 hour 3 minutes, so I estimate it was 8.3 miles long. On my way back (when I was on center street in North Bethlehem), my mp3 player battery died.

Thus, I’m better than the following:

Yeah, I did 8.3 miles.

I outlasted the batteries.

QED

Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavericks) has some good comments on his blog about how ridiculous DVD encryption is. His point, in a nutshell, is that Macrovision’s encryption doesn’t protect DVDs from piracy (obviously), make it hard/illegal for customers to make legit copies, and charges the industry millions for the “service”. Good encryption doesn’t need legal protection.

More to the point, I want to buy DVDs. I do like them. The biggest thing stopping me is the fact that they can scratch a bit and suddenly I can’t use the DVD, or at least part of it. Normal wear can result in this, and I don’t see much of a way to avoid it. However, it’s illegal for me to make a copy of my DVDs, so if one of them gets a scratch, I’m out of options.

Almost done catching up on this week’s blog posts…

Courtesy of Grammar Cop at banterist.com, some of these grammar mistakes are ridiculous. There are lots on the site, here are a few favorites…

(She’s got a grammar error on each side of the shirt.. I hope she didn’t waste a lot of money making it)

I finally got a lot of cleaning done tonight. Picked up a lot in my room, assembled my new three-shelf bookshelf, and reorganized a the furniture a bit (thinking about moving things more, but I’m not sure). I have a lot more to do since the room still doesn’t look clean, and I have a lot of cleaning I want to do tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll still be in a productive mood in the morning.. I have lots to do around here and not too much at work.

I have a couple more posts queued up (it’s been a relative while!), so hopefully they’ll make it here soon.

Daily Show Election 2004 coverage DVD set… I can’t wait!

44 hours of music left in my crusade to listen to every unlistened-to track on my computer. Most of it has been good… it’s nice to have a change of pace.

I can’t seem to sleep much anymore, I think largely because of the heat, I think. I put on the AC before I go to bed so that I can get to sleep, but then I turn it off. I usually end up waking up between 6 and 7 and then after 8. I’m opposed to leaving the air conditioner on overnight because I think it’s wasteful, so I’ll manage. I’ve been keeping a rather strange schedule lately, where I work in 2.5-3.5 hour increments at odd times, my most productive shift being 10-midnight. I work best when there’s nobody else in the lab to distract me.

And now for something completely different:
Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
I think that settles the question in the most scientific way possible.

I just sat through a whole segment of The Daily Show on subtitles because I was too tired/lazy to get up and turn the speakers on. Ridiculous.

A definition of the HLS colorspace I found online:

(Hue Lightness Saturation) A color space that is closely related to HSB, except that Brightness is called Lightness and is measured from 0 to 1 rather than from 0 to 100%.

What a terrible definition. 0 to 100% is the same thing as 0 to 1. The terms brightness and lightness are different because they refer to different things and have different distributions. Why someone would write a definition of something they clearly knew nothing about is beyond me…