springdew

• 14:41 Class this morning dragged. Late, short lunch. Made 100 on written exam. #
• 14:43 Back on the range again. Cornering and tight maneuvering. #
• 18:01 I screwed up figure 8 even though I had it down in practice. I still pass, but am disappointed. #

http://boston.conman.org/2008/09/06.1

Today is my last day of work at the best job I ever had. I was a ramp worker for a major airline in Las Vegas. I am being laid off in the Great Purge of 2008: the massive airline cutbacks triggered by astronomical fuel prices.

Before you cry for me, I assure you that losing the best job I ever had is one of the best things that ever happened to me. One of the perks of working for an airline is that you get to fly free (or nearly free) wherever your airline goes. The only downer is that they also make you “work” on a regular schedule, which severely cuts into ones vacation time. Now, thanks to the negotiations of my union, I get to keep my basic flight benefits during my furlough period—for up to three years or until I am rehired—without the inconvenience of work. My only burden now is not having any money to travel with, but it still feels like I have won the lottery.

Zen and the Art of Baggage Handling

A long but interesting look at baggage handling and the perks of being on, and off, the job.

springdew

• 12:02 Range day at motorcycle school. This time lots of people brought their own, though they can't use them for class. #
• 12:03 I didn't bring mine. Had to drop off kids on the way. #
• 13:42 Unfair advantage on the course. Trying not to flaunt it. Am sure the n00bs will outpace me shortly. #
• 15:25 Each scooter has a name on the plate. Mine has Cecelia. #
• 15:27 One more exercise and we can go home. A midterm awaits me. #
• 16:23 Just got home from the range. AC froze up again, so hot and sweaty on two counts. Cool shower ahoy! #
• 19:24 Ike's projected tracking is favorable. Peeps back home - is okay! #
• 19:26 @sydusa new tattoo is fantastic. WTG! #

http://boston.conman.org/2008/09/05.1

Yet another silly optimization problem. This time, from a silly coding challenge to find the number of integers expressible with unique digits (that is, no single digit repeats) in a base-10 representation up to the value 10,000,000,000 (there are 8,877,690 such numbers, by the way).

The neatest and fastest solution was final program on this page, written in C#. It generates only such numbers; it doesn't try to test each number. Since I don't use C#, I decided to translate the code in C to play around with it. Wasn't all that hard:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int total = 0;
const int pre[(1 << 10) + 1] /* = { ... } */ ;

void generate2(
        int maxlen,
        int currentlen,
        int availabledigits,
        int currentvalue
)
{
  int last = (currentlen == maxlen - 1);
  int x    = availabledigits;
 
  while(x != 0)
  {
    int digit = pre[x ^ (x & (x - 1))];
    x &= (x - 1);
   
    if (digit == 0 && currentvalue == 0)
      continue;
   
    if (last)
      ++total;
    else
      generate2(
        maxlen,
        currentlen + 1,
        availabledigits & ~(1 << digit),
        (currentvalue * 10) + digit
      );
  }
}

int main(int argc,char *argv[])
{
  int len;
 
  for (len = 1 ; len <= 10 ; len++)
    generate2(len,0,0xFFF >> 2,0);

  printf("total: %d\n",total);
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

I pregenerated the pre[] array since I wanted this to run as fast as possible. The code used to generate the array:

for (i = 0 ; i <= 10 ; i++)
  pre[1 << i] = i;

Anyway, once written and compiled (gcc -O4 -fomit-frame-pointer f.c) it ran in about 0.2 seconds (average run) on a 2.6GHz machine. Fast, but I could go faster by running it across the two CPUs in the box. I was expecting about half the runtime, since this is easily parallelizable.

It ran in about 0.16 seconds, a rather disappointing ¾ time. I commented out the code in generate2() just to test the overhead of threading and syncronization and that isn't a factor (program ran in 0.001 seconds).

Undaunted, I decided to try one of the quad-core boxes at The Office. Reworked the code a bit to split the load between four CPUs as evenly as possible, and ran some tests.

0.13 seconds on average. Still not quite half the speed.

Hmmm …

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SpinTheCat/~3/384747782/big-list-of-palin-rumors.html

Cripes, this has gotten ridiculous. Folks, look, let’s just run through a list here. (Updated.)

• No, the Downs baby (Trig) isn’t Bristol’s kid, and no, the kid wasn’t born with Downs because (a) Palin flew on an airplane (b) went home to have the baby after an amniotic leak (c) because he was the result of incest between Todd Palin and Bristol.
• No, Track (the kid who is leaving for Iraq) didn’t join the NG because he was a drug addict. He may have joined the NG because he was tired of people saying his Mom was getting him into the good hockey leagues.
• No, she’s never been in any porn as far as anyone can find (and God knows I get enough google hits on those very topics.)
• No, no one seems to be able to even find swimsuit pictures of her from her beauty queen days; God knows I looked. The bikini pictures that are around are photoshopped, just like the Vogue cover I have up.
• No she wasn’t a member of the (wild-eyed libertarian) Alaska independence Party, although her husband once was
• No, neither the (Canadian) National Post, nor Marc Armbinder at the Atlantic have troubled themselves to issue a correction. Yes, the New York Times did finally correct their story of September 1 — on September 5. This was after Elizabeth Bumiller was quoted by Howard Kurtz as saying she was “completely confident about the story.” Yes, that was after the New York Times’s source retracted the story.

  Yes, this should embarrass the Times, Bumiller, and Howard Kurtz. No, there have been no signs of embarrassment.

springdew

• 15:48 Twitter dot com slash home question mark page equals seven. You some chatty peoples. #
• 15:56 @rhonan Ahhhh the "etchings" of the 21st century! #
• 20:43 @lycangrrl nope it's me. Twitter is fine. My context was wrong. I was coming from the angle of twitter ratting you out. #
• 20:45 @dotamy it hurts a lot when I see beautiful furniture that I can get for free, that has no space to go into my house. #

king_duncan

[	Tags	|	amazing dædalus, auditions, broadway, florida playwrights' theatre, theatre	]
[	Current Location	|	Work - Media Conglomerate	]
[	mood	|	contemplative	]

Nona by James Comtois
Quitters, Inc. by Qui Nguyen
In the Deathroom by Mac Rogers

In addition to these one-acts, the evening will also present vignettes based on King's  Survivor Type, Paranoid: A Chant and The Last Waltz.

http://boston.conman.org/2008/09/04.4

I noticed some odd behavior with mod_blog today. When I make editing changes to entries (mostly spelling corrections) I usually regenerate the static pages (the main page, the various feeds) by hand with the following command:

% ./boston.cgi --config boston.cnf --regen

But today I kept getting the dreaded “Segmentation fault (core dumped)” error. It's always worked before, and the timestamp on the executable was March 13^th, so it's not like I made any recent changes to the program.

But, even odder, if I run:

% ./boston.cgi --config ./boston.cnf --regen

it runs without a hitch. Specify the config file without the leading “./” and the program crashes.

And now, fifteen minutes later, I can't reproduce the issue.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!

http://boston.conman.org/2008/09/04.3

I gave Wlofie a ride over to the local Office Depot as he needed a new office chair. Once there, I wandered off while Wlofie negotiated with one of the sales clerks wandering about the store.

In the laptop section, I spied a unit that claimed to have a wireless connection to the Internet. I fire up the only browser available, Internet Explorer, and I'm impressed at the security feature, which is preventing the Office Depot Web Site from doing nasty things to the laptop.

Nice to know that Office Depot, in conjunction with Internet Explorer, is keeping those dangerous Office Depot Web Sites from damaging the laptop for sale at Office Depot. Although viewing /. is A-OK. Nice to know.

My interests soon turn to seeing what garbage is being foisted off as keyboards this year, and yet again, I'm not disapointed, with over a dozen crappy keyboards that induced carpal tunnel syndrome the second my hands got near. There was one special keyboard though, that looked like a cheap metal tray with a cheap photograph of keys laminated on top that surprisingly enough, was not a cheap metal tray with a cheap photograph of keys laminated on top, but was in fact, a cheap metal tray with cheap plastic keys with about a millimeter of travel.

Having had my fill of pain-inducing keyboards, I then wandered over to the cell phone isle. Such tiny things they are now-a-days, and as I was examining a particularly small example, I noticed that the cell phone (which had no battery and a paper insert inside the screen poorly simulating a working phone) appeared to be attached to the display case via an actual phone cable, much like the type that goes from your phone (or base station if you have a cordless phone) to the wall.

How odd, I thought. I thought they locked these things down. I wonder if I can unplug this—

And yes, you can unplug the cord easily enough.

I wouldn't do it though, unless you enjoy listening to an ear-piercing alarm system blaring throughout the entire store which the employees blindly ignore because this is the umpteenth time this day it's gone off.

Thankfully, Wlofie was pretty much done with negotiations and we were able to leave the store without further incidents.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SpinTheCat/~3/383837351/turnabout.html

Barack Obama himself has held out his community-organizing work on many occasions as one of the touchstones of experience that prepares him now to be President. But more to the point, he’s also the same person who forgot that Palin has been Governor of Alaska for two years in ridiculing her as the Mayor of “Wasilly”: