kdc-blog

Tabs versus spaces

2012-01-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

(Source for this image) I'm in the "spaces" camp myself. I used to work in a shop with a bunch of Windows programmers who used tabs (because that's what their IDE did -- they never really put much thought into this subject). In an effort to try to fit in, I configured my .emacs file to use tabs. Still, my preferences are for spaces. Of course, the most cogent article I've read on this

She Moves In Mysterious Ways

2012-01-12T07:03:00.000-08:00

So, there I was, driving to work this morning. It was snowing, and the roads were sketchy. I was drving at a reasonable 45mph. Traffic on the roads was pretty light. In my rear-view mirror I saw a pair of headlights appear. Whoever was driving the car was traveling faster than I was -- it didn't take long for this car to catch up with me. At the point that this car caught up with me, I

Engineering Documentation Rant

2011-12-24T13:11:00.000-08:00

B. sent me a link to Institutional memory and reverse smuggling. When I got to this paragraph: Oh, and as an external consultant, I'm not allowed to know some of the trade secrets in the documents. The internal side of the team needs to handle the sensitive process information, and be careful about how that information crosses boundaries when talking to the external consultants.

I love mjd's "It came from... the HOLD SPACE!"

2011-12-09T11:51:00.001-08:00

I love mjd's It came from... the HOLD SPACE. This article describes some of the culture that I grew up in. Slide 18 in particular....wow, that takes me back... I can remember cutting my teeth on some sed/shell-scripts back when I was younger. I had work that needed to be done, and these seemed like the logical tools to do it with. I made progress on this work too. For example, in one

Kardashian Rake

2011-10-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Hi Sears, Thanks for the new rake. No, really. This new rake is even nicer than the one I bought from you a long time ago (Craftsman...lifetime warranty...etc.). I used the old one quite a bit and eventually the wooden handle wore out. I like the new fiberglass handle. Sears, you probably don't remember me. I used to frequent your store fairly often. But your competitors are so nimble

Bradford Century

2011-10-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

Bike route 1110607 - powered by Bikemap We did this ride in July. Where did C. find these hills? Wow, this was an excellent ride. The sun baked me like a fried egg on that last big climb. You can't go wrong going on a great adventure with a great bunch of people.

Politician Skips Chance To Latch Onto Our Paceline

2011-09-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

Picture taken from: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/30/ron-paul-takes-a-bike-ride-in-n-h-sans-helmet-of-course/ Apparently I passed Ron Paul on my lunchtime bike ride today. Our group was HAMMERING along. We were traveling at such a clip that I didn't even recognize him. Mr. Paul didn't seem to be interested in latching onto the end of our paceline. Ah....Fall in New Hampshire.

Amiga Saves the Day

2011-09-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Our eleven-year-old TV died yesterday. Bummer... This is the only TV that we had in our house, so, naturally, we started thinking about a replacement. It seems likely that we're going to inherit one of our family member's cast-off TVs. In the meanwhile, while we are waiting to arrange for a replacement, I decided to cobble together {something else} for us to watch TV on: What is this?

Super Taster

2011-07-04T19:33:00.000-07:00

So, my wife and I were watching one of our favorite cooking shows on TV the other day: New Scandinavian Cooking hosted by Andreas Viestad. The subject of the show related to apples and sourdough.So, Mr. Viestad related the following story: one day he made some sourdough for a friend of his. His friend liked the bread, but had picked up an interesting taste sensation in the actual bread itself

Excitement on Horse Corner

2011-04-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

So, there we are climbing Horse Corner yesterday, when some dump-truck heading towards the local gravel pit takes a turn in front of us. As the truck takes the turn I think to myself "gosh, that truck is going into that turn pretty fast...".The truck makes the turn...for the most part. Everything on the truck makes it except for the apparatus on top of dump trucks that swings back and forth --

Certificate Authority Model Is Br0ken

2011-04-07T06:13:00.000-07:00

I was mildly surprised when I read in Bruce Schneier's Blog that the Comodo Group Issued Bogus SSL Certificates. Here is yet another example of a CA that doesn't even understand why it exists, and what security precautions it should take because of this.I think that the most prescient observation I have ever seen written about the Internet's current manifestation of CAs was written by Matt Blaze

Synchronization Bugs

2011-02-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

My previous posting reminds me of an amusing story I was reading in the book _Coders at Work_ by Peter Seibel. The story is told by Joshua Bloch, who I consider to be an exceptionally gifted programmer: To test the code, I wrote a monstrous “basher.” It ran lots of transactions, each of which contained nested transactions, recursively up to some maximum nesting depth. Each of the nested

YO DAWG I HEARD YOU LIKE THREADS

2011-02-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'd probably find this to be funnier if...oh....nevermind....

ascii2keyboardscancode

2011-01-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

Here is a short/goofy/useful script that others might find to be useful: ascii2keyboardscancode .This is a quick hack that I threw together for a specific and cool little project I have been working on. In very high level terms, it is possible to use this script to drive VirtualBox's "headless" interface, using this CLI interface: VBoxManage controlvm some-machine keyboardputscancode ...

Banksy + Simpsons == Awesome

2010-10-11T06:05:00.000-07:00

Why I like Perl, Reason #498

2010-10-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

For a ${project} I am working on, I am writing an RPM install. I am quite picky about the code that I write -- I insist that the code must be bombproof and reliable. I also insist that the code play nicely with other things on the target system.So, one of the things that my RPM install has to do is to modify /etc/sudoers . I could have written code that would have simply overwritten the target

Goodbye Bloglines

2010-09-28T14:39:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty unhappy to hear that Bloglines is shutting its doors. I really liked this service, and I used it quite a lot over the past few years.I find the rationale for this site's closing to be...strange. I can't argue with Ask.com's claim that traffic to this site is down significantly. However, I do find the explanation for this trend to be weird: apparently I am supposed to understand

Java IO Faster Than NIO?

2010-08-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

The following article on /. piqued my interest: Java IO Faster Than NIOI read Paul Tyma's slides intently because the subject of "how do you design a massively scalable server?" is one of my favorite topics. There are so many interesting areas to explore in this area.I have designed several scalable servers over the years. In one case this was for some telco-class equipment that I was helping

Around The Big Lake

2010-07-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

Bike route 576671 - powered by Bikemap It was challenging and rewarding ride. Definitely the hottest and hilliest ride I've ever done.I'm telling you right now, and I am deadly serious about this: there is nothing better than going on a challenging adventure with a great bunch of people.Thanks go to JP for putting together such an awesome route. Thanks to R.+S. for the water and the great

How is your software project trending?

2010-06-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

How is your software project trending? Are you going to make your deadline with time to spare? Is your project going to spend all of its time in development, leaving not enough time for testing? Is your project bogged down?Can you understand how things are trending in ten seconds or less? Can other people in your organization understand these trends as well?Do you employ any metrics to track

Dream for a Dollar

2010-06-17T13:20:00.000-07:00

A friend of my wife's sent along the following email:I'm sending this email to ask each of you to pass this website along to as many people as you know. As most of you know my son Travis has Muscular Dystrophy. He is in need of a new van that will get adaptive equipment from the State of Massachusetts. However the cost of the vehicle is the responsibility of the disabled driver and the state

Mt. Delight is delightful.

2010-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

It was a nice ride, but no KOM points for me...I'm just glad that I felt strong the whole way.Bike route 465206 - powered by Bikemap Thanks for the great ride T.!

More fun with network graphs

2010-05-06T15:07:00.000-07:00

The work that I have done with analyzing a particular kind of network traffic has continued to bear fruit. For reference, please see my earlier posting "Updated graph from silly network attack".A couple of weeks ago I was dealing with a different ${organization} than I was describing in my previous posts. They have a totally different network setup at this new site, and, I would soon learn, a

Text Editor Fu

2010-04-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading "Staying the hell out of insert mode". I have to concur with the author of this article: insert mode is not the most powerful mode in vi.I don't claim to be some sort of text editing guru or anything. In my career I've met some people who can do some awesome things with their text editor. I always like learning new tricks and techniques.Getting back to the article that I

Updated graph from silly network attack

2010-04-02T18:31:00.000-07:00

As an update to my earlier post regarding silly network attacks, I present an even better graph:This graph was taken from the same ${organization}'s network.This graph shows the sum total of a particular type of network traffic. The spike in the graph was caused by a single computer.Like I said before, I like this type of graph because it lets me quickly focus on and find the offending computer

Rodale Books == SPAMMERS

2010-03-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

I would publicly like to thank Rodale Books (the company that produces Bicycling Magazine, Men's Health, Prevention, etc.) for spamming the crap out of me. Thanks for all of the unsolicited email, folks! Also, thanks for providing no reasonable way for me to get off of your mailing lists.And actually, let me also thank Active.com for providing Rodale Books with my email address. I am certain

The anatomy of a silly network attack

2010-03-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

It has been a satisfying week at work. I have recently been working with ${organization} on a weird network problem that they've been having. Actually, "working with ${organization}" isn't really right -- they've been complaining and I've been telling the staff that runs ${organization}'s network that I strongly suspected that their network was suffering from a certain type of problem. But the

bash programmable completion

2010-03-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

I am a huge fan of the bash programmable completion project. Just this morning I found myself typing:scp remote-host:some-long...and then I hit tab. At this point, the "bash programmable completion" code took over and within a half-second my terminal window was updated with:scp remote-host:some-long-long-filename...and if you really understand what went on when I hit that simple tab character,

Cut the Carbon Kits

2010-01-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

Cool! I just read in the newspaper yesterday that every public library in New Hampshire is now equipped with a "Cut the Carbon' kit, which consists of a Kill-a-Watt meter as well as some worksheets to calculate energy usage. I try to keep what is plugged into my house down to a bare minimum, but I look at this as a good opportunity to gather more data about a few items that I haven't gotten

I am a fan of xkcd

2010-01-13T20:54:00.000-08:00

I continue to enjoy xkcd. Here are two of my favorites:....and...There is only one word for cartoons like this: brilliant!

Nexus One

2010-01-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is a humble suggestion to the good folks at Google: given the name of your new phone, if and when you ever decide to put together a marketing campaign that involves any sort of audio, can you please hire Rob Zombie as a creative consultant? I'm sure he would have some ideas for a soundtrack.

ipsCA: fail

2010-01-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

After trying to debug a boffo customer problem for around 15 minutes today, I finally figured out the root cause of the problem. The problem itself causes me to laugh a little bit, now that I know all of the details.One of the important certificates issued and used by ipsCA (who I'd never heard of before today) expired on 29-december-2009. It's one thing for a certificate that helps secure a

Lentil Soup

2009-12-20T20:26:00.000-08:00

I learn something new every day.So, the other day I was out and about snowshoeing with some friends. It was a cold and windy day, and we were traveling at a good clip.Eventually, it was time for lunch, and I was cold and hungry and thirsty.I had my usual lunch for such trips: a PB&J sandwich. It was a challenge to wolf down my sandwich in these conditions: my hands were cold, I needed to drink

Dogs Are Great

2009-11-13T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of dogs. I don't own any myself, but I will gladly play with nearly any dog that is handy.I'm also somebody who is very appreciative of the veterans in our society.Given these two facts, I thought that this web-page was the best thing that I've seen all week: Dogs Welcoming Home SoldiersSimply wonderful....

Skill in Debate

2009-11-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

I am somebody who admires people who can debate effectively. I wish my high school had had a debate club -- I think that this could have been a fun activity. I mean, sure, in the Real World compromise is frequently a better alternative to never-ending debate, but sometimes you have to stick to your principles and defend your position.A good debate, done well, can be a very enjoyable thing....

Gear Review: BR Lights C2.1-H

2009-10-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

Yet another gear review...Some of the best bike rides I've ever been on have occurred in total darkness. I can recall one ride in particular in which a woman who was leading the ride declared that we simply hadn't ridden far enough that evening and "would anybody mind if we rode down to the beach?". The vote was unanimous -- so off to the beach we went. The ride had already been a ton of fun up

Stale Beer

2009-08-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

True story: Last Friday at noon I went on my usual bike ride in the hills that surround the office park that I work at. As me and my co-worker were descending a small hill, the driver of a (blue?) car traveling in the opposite direction threw a half-empty can in our direction and managed to hit me with a glancing blow square in the chest. I had less than a half second to react to this.

Big Ohh.

2009-08-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

Did you know that if you replace an some code that (1) is frequently executed, (2) runs over a large data-set, and (3) implements an O(n^2) algorithm with some code that is implemented in terms of an O(n) algorithm that things will go quite a bit faster!? Yessirree, it is true!

Too many of them

2009-08-18T05:32:00.000-07:00

So, the other day I'm standing in the deli in my local grocery store. It is Sunday afternoon. The store is busy. I'm trying to pick up some pastrami that is on sale.The clerks behind the deli counter serve customers according to the numbers on the little tickets that everybody picks up when they arrive at the deli. This is the same system that is used at 10,000 other delis.I'm holding number

Java Memory Usage

2009-08-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Lazyweb,Suppose I am writing a large server, and my implementation language is Java. The memory requirements for the server are larger than what the Sun JVM provides by default. So, I need the configure the JVM to use more memory.This isn't rocket science. Everybody knows about Sun's "-Xmx" flag.Here is Sun's documentation for the -Xmx flag: -Xmxn Specify the maximum size, in bytes,

Bike snobs and genius bears, oh my!

2009-07-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of musings, based on articles I read today.First, when do you think that Stephen Colbert is going to take notice of Yellow-Yellow the "genius bear" and declare her to be a threat to national security?:"She's quite talented," said Jamie Hogan, owner of BearVault, based in San Diego. "I'm an engineer, and if one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears. We're

Electronic Trading Marketplace Is In Need of a Fairness Algorithm

2009-07-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

I found this article to be fascinating:The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone

The Problem with Groups on LinkedIn

2009-07-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of other people, I have signed up with LinkedIn in order to manage my professional contacts. Overall, I think that LinkedIn is a good service (as long as one carefully manages one's privacy, that is...). Overall, I would say that the vast majority of all of the email that I have received that came about as a result of my LinkedIn account has been worthwhile for me to read.However,

Netflix Prize Contest Winner?!

2009-06-26T20:19:00.000-07:00

Wow! A team finally managed to attain a 10% improvement in the Netflix Prize Contest This is a very impressive achievement.

Beauty in Engineering

2009-06-21T21:48:00.000-07:00

In terms of beauty in engineering, do you know what I find to be beautiful?Well, here's one thing: it's coming up with a plan to secure a particular network protocol, documenting the plan, and then implementing the plan in code that executes in several radically different environments. It is (perversely?) pleasurable to see seemingly random bytes be transmitted onto a wire from one peer on the

Penguins Win The Stanley Cup!

2009-06-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

Wow. What a game! The Penguins have just won the Stanley Cup.This was a hugely improbable event. The Penguins beat the Red Wings in Detroit, and the Wings are an incredible team oozing with all-stars. The Penguins had some ups and downs during the series, but, in general, they won the series by keeping their foot on the gas when it mattered. At the end of the series, the Wings looked beat-up

Rant: Microsoft decreases Firefox's security with a forced plugin

2009-06-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

Aaarrggh. I am frustrated.I am somebody who tries to be serious about computer security. Also, I frequently find myself answering questions from friends and family like ``my computer is slow and it seems to be doing a lot of strange things -- can you tell me what is wrong with it?'' This line of questioning nearly always causes my head to throb. The whole state of security on Windoze machines

I am not a fan of C++ iostreams

2009-05-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those people who thinks that C++ can be an acceptable choice for a programming project. Lots of people think that C++ is dead, but I'm not one of them. I'm not a big fan of this language anymore, but it can occasionally be OK. I'm mostly somebody who programs at the level of bits/bytes/protocols/hardware/etc. so a language that lets me program at this level and also give me some OO

What is so Hard About Parallel Programming? Lots!

2009-04-06T21:04:00.000-07:00

Over at JavaLobby, Clay Breshears asks "What is so Hard About Parallel Programming?".Hmmm. Interesting. I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this question too. I happened to write my masters thesis on the subject of parallel computation.I think that Mr. Breshears is obviously a very smart individual, but I disagree with his assertion that:[...] learning parallel programming is no

In Praise of the Old Guys

2009-03-10T20:36:00.000-07:00

Gary Roberts, one of my favorite gritty, character players in the NHL, has retired. I'm sorry to see him go. I have been a fan for a long time of Roberts' leadership qualities and everything he brought to the game. You always knew when Roberts was playing that he was giving one hundred percent of his effort towards making sure his team won.Let's see, with the retirement of Roberts, who is my

Low-Powered But Decent-Performance Linux Boxes

2009-02-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

Today I read some cool news: Marvell is offering a $100 wall-wart computer. This seems to be a pretty neat box, with a reasonable amount of RAM, USB 2.0, GbE, and an ARM-flavored CPU. This would definitely make for a workable home NAS or print server box. Very cool stuff.I am a big fan of low-powered (electrically speaking) computers. A few years ago I began experimenting with a Soekris

Fun With Logging

2009-02-09T20:02:00.000-08:00

What is it with logging subsystems? Writing one always seems to bring up the most interesting problems....One day at $DAYJOB I was called upon to write a logging subsystem. So, I dived in.In my judgment, the logging subsystem I had to design+implement had to satisfy a number of basic constraints:output redirectable to a file or terminal or syslogconfigurable so that engineers working on one

Patch for Unix Network Programming Interface Code

2009-02-02T18:29:00.000-08:00

I am a big fan of the book _UNIX Network Programming_ by Rich Stevens. Maybe if you are reading this blog you are too.Anyways, I have discovered that some of the code in this book is suffering from some bit-rot. Specifically in section 17.6 of the third edition some code is presented that allows the programmer to traverse the list of network interfaces on the local machine. This code uses uses

Mad Marble Madness Skillz

2009-01-21T21:25:00.000-08:00

Holy crap. Watch this person play Marble Madness:Marble Madness was one of the few games I ever played with any regularity when I was a kid. I played the Amiga version a fair bit and I thought I was pretty good at it. I played quite a few "perfect" games at the hardest level and I was pretty quick too.If I thought I was good at Marble Madness, all I need to do is to look at this video to

Gear Review: Toro 1800 Electric Snow Thrower

2009-01-17T20:57:00.000-08:00

Hey, did you read the recent news that Belkin's development rep is hiring people to write fake positive Amazon reviews? I guess this gentleman (and possibly company...) has decided that it would be a better investment to essentially commit fraud rather than actually make a product that works well. Way to go!(I'm not shocked that there are fake reviews on Amazon -- I mean, this is obvious --

(Don't) Throw It Over The Wall

2009-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

I used to work at an interesting shop in which the general culture of the place regarded the SQA staff as being one step above moldy bread or something you find growing between your toes. This situation was succinctly expressed by a single catch-phrase; this phrase was uttered whenever a new software release was given to SQA:THROW IT OVER THE WALLIn the culture of this place, the ultra-smart

2008-12-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

Another dose of truth from XKCD.

Seen after the ice storm

2008-12-20T14:23:00.000-08:00

So, during the aftermath of the storm, as I was sitting in the parking lot of the local giant hardware store, I observed the following: guy parks his minivan in front of me. A few seconds later a woman in another minivan parks next to him. Her van has the kids in it; these two are obviously husband and wife or otherwise involved.So, after the husband gets done talking to the wife, he finds a

Reflections on the Great Ice Storm of 2008

2008-12-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

In our house we just lived for a week without electricity (from the power company, anyways). It was an interesting week.I'd been preparing for this event for a while, in fact, ever since the last big ice storm a decade ago. I bought a generator a long time ago, and I have been faithfully maintaining it ever since. I've changed the oil in this thing every fall, and I keep things like gas, oil,

2008-11-22T20:59:00.000-08:00

“Human beings are very quirky and individualistic, and wonderfully idiosyncratic,” Hastings says. “And while I love that about human beings, it makes it hard to figure out what they like.”More here.

Typing is the most important class a CS student could ever take -- not!

2008-11-19T19:41:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while somebody who I think is very smart makes a pretty boffo comment. Case in point: Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror concurs with the idea:....the most important computer science course a CS student could ever take [...is...] Typing 101. Wow. I really disagree with this.I have worked on any number of projects over the years where it has been obvious to me that one or more of

The Matrix Runs on Windows

2008-11-11T16:26:00.000-08:00

Beware of the Leopard (or, "In praise of #error")

2008-10-28T05:24:00.000-07:00

One day at $DAYJOB, whilst all of the engineers were working on the large C++-based project that many people reading this blog have actually used, somebody discovered a bug. Actually, this was less of a bug and more of a software misconfiguration. The crux of the problem came down to the fact that in our software product, it was possible to build/compile the product with "Feature X", but "

It's All Text!

2008-10-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

My new favorite Firefox extension is It's All Text!Now I can edit text in text-fields with my preferred text editor: XEmacs.Life is good.

I like the IHOP coffee

2008-10-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

(thanks for the link C.!)

Leadville 100 -- Wiens and Armstrong -- Incredible

2008-08-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

Geez, can you imagine this scene? Five time defending champion Dave Wiens just can't shake Lance Armstrong in one of the toughest single day races in the world. Armstrong hasn't ridden a 6+ hour ride in years. He's just riding for fun. Then the two get to the foot of Power Lines, which Wiens, who knows the course like the back of his hand, almost never rides up. Armstrong asks Wiens if he

Report from BlackHat 2008

2008-08-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

I was pretty psyched that my employer sent me out to Black Hat last week. It was nice to hang out with a bunch of people who are enthusiastic about discussing computer security issues.I wish I could have spent the entire week at the conference. Maybe next year. I got a good taste for the issues at hand, but I found myself yearning for more technical content.The marquee talk that was presented

I am a fan of Programming by Contract and gcc's -Wcast-qual

2008-05-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Late one Friday afternoon at $DAYJOB I was nearly finished implementing a new feature for the product that I worked on. This was the culmination of several long days effort, and I was looking forward to finishing my task and going home for the weekend.As I was hooking everything up to enable the new feature, I spotted a bug. This was a strange bug, but I felt confident that I'd find it quickly.

One of the best sports stories I have ever heard

2008-05-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

Despite the awesomeness of playoff hockey, the best story that I've heard all week is this one:Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky's left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to

Tour de Cure -- success

2008-05-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

The ride was a success. Seventy-five miles in semi-tough conditions -- lots of rain and it wasn't warm either. A friend of mine even joined me for the ride.Of course, to get the whole writeup, you'd have to pledge money, which I believe you can still do, here.From what I read in the newspapers, this event was supposed to raise over $200k. Nice!

Topozone transmorgifies into a less-useful thing

2008-04-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite sites on the web was TopoZone dot Com but now I have learned that they have changed their business model completely -- now they want $50 a year for me to use the site. I have no problem paying for something that is useful but I am struggling to see how a subscription would be money well spent.I am mostly interested in NH maps. When I tried out the "new" Trails dot Com (which

Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill

2008-04-26T20:36:00.000-07:00

AutoGuitarHero

Notes on accessing Subversion repositories via a custom SSH tunnel

2008-04-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

I just spent a little while lost in the weeds as I was updating my server to support my custom svn+ssh setup. Here are my notes, just to help others along. I am trying to keep things simple, so I am running svnserve. I am also running sshd on a non-standard port -- this fact perhaps contributed to the way that I set all of this up. I want my setup to be simple to use on a day-to-day basis.1.

Happy Earth Day!

2008-04-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

We get our milk delivered to us, the old fashioned way, in glass jars via a milkman. The milk comes from Sherman Farm and gets delivered by Catamount Farm. Honestly, it is a little more expensive, but we really enjoy the overall experience. There is nothing better than a cold glass of milk from a glass jar!Anyways, our milk arrived today, and along with the delivery itself, we got a sticker

All I need is a programmer

2008-04-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

This excellent blog posting reminds me of the time that one of the executives at $DAYJOB referred to programmers as "monkeys". It was clear to me at the time that he was simultaneously trying to express that we were all interchangeable and somehow he was trying to motivate us too.His comment was actually wonderfully honest; in ten seconds I learned exactly what he thought of us and our work.

The Human Footprint

2008-04-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

We just got done watching The Human Footprint on TV. It was pretty interesting. The sheer magnitude of stuff that each of us consumes in a lifetime is pretty staggering.We thought that some of the numbers cited by the show were probably accurate, but for other numbers and figures we were a little bit confused. For example, the show tells us that the average American consumes around 563 cans of

Get up, boy! I'm not done with you yet...

2008-04-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

Yay! Gary Roberts is back. He scored two goals tonight.On nearly the last occasion we saw Roberts (age 41), he took Ben Eager (age 23) to task because of a cheap elbow Eager had thrown to one of Robert's teammates. So, Roberts decided to teach Eager a lesson:My favorite part of the fight was when Eager was just about to fall down and Roberts pulled him back up, almost as if he was saying "I'm

Startup Life and Death -- April Fools

2008-04-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have an odd story about April Fools jokes...or lack thereof.One April 1st, I got to work at the startup that I was working at, did my usual morning ritual of checking the builds and answering my morning email. Then I decided to troll the Interweb to see what amusing new IETF RFC had come out that day.Right at that moment our CEO called for an all-hands meeting, so I went to the meeting. The

VESA driver works for me with very old Dell Latitude C800 ATI M4 32MB

2008-03-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

I wanted to upgrade my ancient Dell Latitude C800 from Fedora Core 4 to something newer. So, I decided to try Fedora 8. During the install the video was garbled so I did a text install. After everything installed, I tried to get X running. I didn't have a lot of success. Everything was weird and still garbled. The install itself detected the ATI card so I continued to work with the ATI

Tour de Cure -- American Diabetes Association -- 4-may-2008

2008-03-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

In honor of a few people I know who suffer from diabetes, I will be riding my bike 75 miles in this year's Tour de Cure for the American Diabetes Association. I believe that this is the fourteenth straight time that I have participated in this ride.If you would like to support me in this endeavour, please visit my TdC page.I have ridden the century TdC ride (actually ~107 miles) many many times

Multiple Function Return Points Considered Harmful

2008-03-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

I prefer to see functions written in such a manner that there is one consistent return point. I prefer this: int f(int x) { int result; if (x < 3) result = 1; else result = 0; return result; }...over this: int f(int x) { if (x < 3) return 1; return 0; }This is a religious issue (to some extent). Clearly, a good optimizer is going to

War is Hell....and only costs a quarter to play.

2008-03-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

Interesting article on TCP congestion control

2008-03-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

Interesting article on the subject of fixing TCP's congestion control algorithm:http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1078A lot of reasonable things are presented here, at a very high level. The graphs are especially interesting too. From what I have read of SCTP, this very nice protocol also has the potential to suffer from this problem.Interesting thought question: what do you suppose an ISP is going

The VLAN Koan

2008-03-20T08:51:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following parody/koan one day to help a tech-writer friend of mine understand VLANS. He liked it. I hope you do too.Goso said: ``When a packet goes out of its egress to the edge of the abyss, its header and its payload all pass through, but why can't the VLAN tag also pass?''Kevin's comment: If anyone can open one eye at this point and say a word of layer-2 bridging, he or she is

A conversation with Eliza

2008-03-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

M-x doctor RETI am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.I am upset. Joseph Weizenbaum has passed away.Weizenbaum? Hah! I would appreciate it if you would continue.I think that the curse of being middle-aged is that you see all of thegreats that preceded you eventually pass away.Is it because the curse of being middle aged is

Do the test

2008-03-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

Do the test

Ack is my favorite new tool

2008-03-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

Ack is my favorite new tool. I highly recommend it. It is even written in my favorite programming language -- you know, the one with the really supercharged and usable regexp library. Over the years, I have written some handy tools in this area....like for example, my "txtfind" shell alias: # put this in your .bashrc/.kshrc/etc. txtfind () { if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then txtfind .

Development Tip: Multiple Build Areas

2008-03-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

Here is a code development tip that I nearly always employ in any workplace. I have employed this strategy for years, and several of my colleagues have told me "wow! that's a really good idea!" so I thought that share this.I always setup multiple build areas to go along with the source control system that I am using. At the very least, I always have a "-work" directory (where I work on my

A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING “WHY” CAN BE DANGEROUS

2008-03-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?

Recursive Make Considered Harmful

2008-03-04T12:58:00.000-08:00

One of the happiest days of my life was when I typed "make print" and I watched make invoke LaTeX and then my masters thesis started spewing out of my laser printer. Make is a dependable tool that, by definition, knows how to handle dependencies and is flexible enough to handle complex tasks (Towers of Hanoi, anybody?).People who are fans of make like myself will probably like Recursive Make

Debugging War Story 2

2008-03-03T05:32:00.000-08:00

At one of the projects I worked on in the past I got to work on some protocol design and implementation. This was actually one of my favorite projects ever; it was a project where I had a lot of responsibility, I got to work with a lot of interesting people on some hard problems, and I got to work on a project that allowed me to be creative and technical at the same time.Anyways, I was in charge

Tom and Atticus

2008-03-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

I am a fan of Tom and Atticus. Maybe you would like them too.

Gear Review: Rudy Project Horus Cycling Eyeglasses

2008-03-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

My old cycling glasses (a cheapo pair of perscription sunglasses) died after a decade of abuse. I have been doing more and more cycling lately, including some interesting night rides. Because I have had several incidents over the years in which things have pinged off of my eyeglasses as I have been riding, and because ${employer} was chipping in in terms of employee benefits, I decided to buy

Debugging War Story

2008-03-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

One day, one of my colleagues updated me about one of the problems that he was trying to fix in one of the older products that he maintained.My colleague informed me:We can't fix the problem because we can't even produce a build with the current codebase that doesn't crash instantly on the board. Something in the code changed. I've tracked it down; it is a compiler bug. We'll have to call the