endless automata

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-7-25)

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:29:11 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-7-25):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-7-18)

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:09:06 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-7-18):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

I can’t help but desk dance when listening to P-Funk at...

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:50:44 -0400

I can’t help but desk dance when listening to P-Funk at work.

SSH to the Rescue!

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:40:59 -0400

I’m trying to build WebKit on Windows (don’t ask). The instructions are fairly good, but the environment takes forever to setup, the code base is huge, so SVN takes forever to check it out, and finally the build takes quite a long time as well. What started as a “quick” project quickly turned into 5-6 hours of tweaking things on a platform I don’t especially like to begin with.

This morning, it finally looked like I had it all together - but I had to go to work, and didn’t have time to kick off the build process and watch it (hopefully) work. I did have time, however, to setup RDP. But wait, you say, don’t you have to traverse not only one, but two firewalls?

Never fear, SSH is here. Thanks to local port forwarding, I was able to forward an RDP connection to localhost to my box at home and kick off the build… which worked!

More incomprehensible updates soon.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-30)

Mon, 31 May 2010 07:08:22 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-30):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-23)

Mon, 24 May 2010 13:58:44 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-23):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-16)

Wed, 19 May 2010 09:58:39 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-16):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-9)

Mon, 10 May 2010 18:27:04 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-9):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Spent the day moving into my new cube at work. Notice that the...

Wed, 05 May 2010 21:12:07 -0400

Spent the day moving into my new cube at work. Notice that the main work surface is a standing work area. After reading several articles about “sitting disease”, I decided this might be a good step to take. I’ve decided to leave it this way at least until June. We’ll see how it goes.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-2)

Wed, 05 May 2010 20:28:33 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-5-2):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

After a flurry or work today, my latest bike is done and ready...

Sat, 01 May 2010 18:02:15 -0400

After a flurry or work today, my latest bike is done and ready for a test ride. Wish me luck!

"Pushing is just pulling in reverse!"

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:16:02 -0400

“Pushing is just pulling in reverse!”

- James Kruth (while attempting to explain Git to a friend.)

How to Keep Crappy Programmers

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:18:39 -0400

How to Keep Crappy Programmers:

No comment.

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-25)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:10:53 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-25):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all..."

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:02:20 -0400

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

- H. P. Lovecraft (from The Call of Cthulhu)

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-18)

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:06:16 -0400

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-4-18):

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

Binary Search

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:41:30 -0400

After reading Are you one of the 10% of programmers who can write a binary search?, I decided to find out if I was. Here’s my submission (written in about 30 minutes in python):

# the list to be searched
data = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]

# what we're searching for
search = 7

# we could do this recursively, but without tail
# call optimization we'd just reach a stack overflow
# shortly - lame - so we'll go iterative
found = False
while not found:
    # did we run out of data?
    if len(data) == 0: break

    # partition the list (take advantage of default
    # integer division in 2.6)
    p = len(data) / 2

    # proceed based on data at partition
    if data[p] == search:
        found = True
        break
    elif data[p] > search:
        data = data[:p]
    else:
        data = data[p+1:]

if found:
    print "Found it!"
else:
    print "Not found."

I had a bit of an easier time thanks to python’s arbitrary length integers, and list splicing notation. This algorithm would have been a lot more error prone in C/Java style language.

Best Reason to Get an iPad

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:43:57 -0400

Best Reason to Get an iPad

"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at..."

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:34:24 -0400

“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.”

- John Carmack (via reddit)

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either)

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:44:11 -0400

Why I won't buy an iPad (and think you shouldn't, either):

Thank goodness for Cory Doctorow and his frank discussion of our increasingly restricted technology platforms. I am almost finished reading Makers and I too am frustrated with a world with more iPads and less Apple IIs.