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First of many

Well, it’s been less than a month since my last post, so there’s some definite progress on the regularity front.

Tonight I updated WordPress to version 2.5, which of course is not particularly notable for any reason, but I did so by checking out the 2.5 tag using svn instead of following one of the more common methods, like grabbing the release archive or using my host’s software installation feature. Colin mentioned the ability to do this to me, and I’m not one to pass up a couple of nerd credits. Some day I’ll find the redemption booth.

Had some fun with the upgrade, though, on account of some issues with the character encodings. The problem was introduced with version 2.2, and I thought I had upgraded to that or a higher version beforehand, but apparently I didn’t. Late to the party, alas. You can read more about the problem and the fix here if you’re interested. I ended up just doing the conversion manually instead of writing a query or using a script or plugin.

While I’m on the subject of the blog, some time hopefully in the next week, I’m going to switch themes. The current theme has several issues, such as the rather ugly wall of green you get when you maximize the browser window. I haven’t decided yet what the new look will be, but knowing myself and my design abilities and sensibilities, it’ll probably end up looking something like this. I also still don’t have a profile page, or really anything anywhere identifying myself aside from the footer and occasional comment.

This will also hopefully be the first of several major site updates I have planned, including a real home page instead of the two and a half year old placeholder.

2008-04-03 reflexive Comments (1) Permalink

Folklore.org shows signs of life

Posting about this will have limited effectiveness, seeing as I’d put an upper limit of two on my readership total, but by that reasoning I’d never post anything. And I really need to get around to writing regularly.

I love Folklore.org.

Folklore.org is a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling. It captures and presents sets of related stories that describe interesting events from multiple perspectives, allowing groups of people to recount their shared history in the form of interlinked anecdotes.

— About Folklore.org

The site currently houses 118 anecdotes related to the development of the Macintosh 128K, mostly written by Andy Hertzfeld. They range from management decisions to hardware and software development to amusing incidents. Wonderful place to waste a few hours, all in the name of history.

Currently, the Folklore site only supports a single project, about the development of the original Macintosh, but that will be changing soon.

— About Folklore.org

This hint of things to come has been on the about page for more than four years, but no sign of a new project ever surfaced. Further, it’s been ages since the last story was added to the site (unfortunately, the stories don’t include time of posting, so I don’t know exactly how long, or even which story is the most recent).

So imagine my surprise when my RSS reader alerted me to the publication of a new story, intriguingly titled “This is a test.” Perhaps it could be a harrowing tale of how a Macintosh prototype was tested for critical functionality but violently failed!

This is a placeholder story to test entering new stories. I hope that it works…

Or perhaps not. But the project that the placeholder story is filed in is interesting, because it’s not “The Original Macintosh,” but rather “The Newton, The First PDA.” So it seems that Folklore.org is being revived with stories about the development of Apple’s unsuccessful device. Exciting times we live in.

2008-03-18 binary
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Functions I one day hope to use in a program, Part I

int fuword(const user_addr_t addr);

man page [fetch(9)]

The fetch functions are designed to copy small amounts of data from user-space.

. . .

fuword() Fetches a word of data from the user-space address addr.

Also acceptable are the related functions fubyte and fulong. I’d probably have to be working at the kernel level to do so, something I don’t really ever see myself doing, sadly, but a man can dream.

2008-02-02 binary Comments (1) Permalink

Initializing a struct with a string array member in C

Last week, I was writing some C code which used a struct that contained, among other members, an array of strings, and I wanted to initialize an array of these structs for use elsewhere in the code. My initial attempts failed with compiler messages that I’d never seen before, so instead of taking the easy way out by creating individual structs, explicitly setting each member’s value, and then stuffing all the structs into an array, I tried to figure out exactly how to make initialization work.

Continue reading ›

2007-11-05 binary
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My Erdős number is now 6

[wiki]

  1. C. Butterfield, R. Mason, and S. Thede. “Sentence Selection for Extractive Summaries in PARE,” Proceedings of the Midstates Conference for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science and Mathematics, Nov. 2007, pp. 53-62.
  2. A. M. Surprenant, S. L. Hura, M. P. Harper, L. H. Jamieson, G. Long, S. M. Thede, A. Rout, T.-H. Hsueh, S. A. Hockema, M. T. Johnson, P. Srinivasan, C. White, and J. Laflen. “Familiarity and Pronounceability of Nouns and Names,” Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol. 31, Nov. 1999, pp. 638-649.
  3. J. N. Patel, A. A. Khokhar, and L. H. Jamieson. “Scalability of 2-D wavelet transform algorithms: analytical and experimental results on MPPs,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 48, Issue 12, Dec. 2000, pp. 3407-3419.
  4. F. Dehne, X. Deng, P. Dymond, A. Fabri, and A. A. Khokhar. “A randomized parallel 3D convex hull algorithm for coarse grained multicomputers,” Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures, 1995, pp. 27-33.
  5. X. Deng, P. Hell, and J. Huang. “Linear-Time Representation Algorithms for Proper Circular-Arc Graphs and Proper Interval Graphs,” SIAM Journal on Computing, Vol. 25, Issue 2, Feb. 1996, pp. 390-403.
  6. P. Erdős, P. Hell, and P. Winkler. “Bandwidth versus Bandsize,” Annals of Discrete Mathematics, Vol. 41, 1989, pp. 117-130.

In this day and age, having a finite Erdős number essentially means that you have co-written a paper with someone on a subject whose field occasionally involves numbers in some fashion.

2007-11-03 binary
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Internet history

The Internet Archive is a web site dedicated to building an “internet library,” an honest to God, actual library (recognized by the state of California and so eligible to receive federal funding) housing “cultural artifacts” from the internet. Perhaps the most notable of the IA’s collections is its archive of web pages. Since 1996, the IA has periodically taken snapshots of a vast number of web sites on the internet, anything its spider can get its crawly little legs on (save for sites whose robots.txt file blocks their archiving or owners request they not be archived). The archive can be easily accessed through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to enter a URL and view all the stored snapshots for that site.

Colin and I were looking at old versions of Google, back when it was but a fledgling search engine created by two guys from Stanford and not in control of the planet as it is today. I decided to look at the histories of the 100 most popular sites on the internet in the United States, as rated by Alexa. Below are some of the more interesting things that I found.

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2007-10-30 network Comments (0) Permalink

Using the C preprocessor in a bash script

Colin and I came up with three lines to stick at the top of a bash script that’ll run the C preprocessor over the script before running it. See all the sordid details at his blog.

Totally going to make my next UNIX Programming assignment use this trick.

2007-09-16 binary Comments (0) Permalink

On Digg and 0F…

< Xerol> holy shit the internet's going to be gone by morning

I wrote this up last night, but I wanted to let it stew for a bit before I posted.

If you have checked Digg any time in the past 24 hours, you have probably seen some part of the HD DVD encryption key firestorm. If not, I’ll just give an overview of what this whole thing is all about.

Continue reading ›

2007-05-02 binary
dynamic
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Oh hey, it’s been two months

Dear readers,

How have you all been doing? Well, I hope. I had an interesting last month of the semester which kept me pretty busy. The Rubik’s Cube project took up a lot of time to code all of the cases. I did manage to finish it on time, though, and it managed to handle everything I threw at it, so that was good. Met the specs, and the presentation and demonstration went well, so I got an A in the class. You can see the finished site for the projects here; the most interesting page would probably be the “Live Demo,” assuming you have a Rubik’s Cube handy.

If I ever decide to go back to the code, there are a few things to handle that I didn’t get around to. The big one is the return code nonsense that’s strewn about the solver code; I could probably cut at least 100 lines of code for the better by throwing exceptions into the mix. The solver is also dependent on color order in a way too boringly complicated to explain here, and I think I know exactly how to fix it so it’s more robust, but I didn’t have enough time to get to it.

The other big event was my hard drive explosion. Some might remember when my hard drive ate itself two years ago about six months after I got my laptop. Since between now and then an Apple-certified repair place opened in Evansville, I decided to take my computer there instead of shipping it like I did last time. This turned out to be a big mistake on my part, since it took them about three to four weeks to return my computer to me with a new hard drive, compared to the lightning-quick less-than-a-day turnaround of AppleCare. But, the laptop works again, so life is good.

And, of course, a late merry Christmas to all of you who want one.

Sincerely,
CHz

2006-12-25 binary
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Software Engineering project, Part II.5: C++ Whee~

[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ cat evaluationtest.cpp
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int incrementAndReturn(int &i) {
   return ++i;
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
   int i = 0;
   cout << incrementAndReturn(i);
   cout << incrementAndReturn(i);
   cout << incrementAndReturn(i) << endl;

   i = 0;
   cout << incrementAndReturn(i)
        << incrementAndReturn(i)
        << incrementAndReturn(i) << endl;

   return 0;
}
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ g++ -o evaluationtest evaluationtest.cpp
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ ./evaluationtest
123
321
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$

Interesting.

[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ cat evaluationtest2.cpp
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
   int i = 0;
   cout << ++i;
   cout << ++i;
   cout << ++i << endl;

   i = 0;
   cout << ++i << ++i << ++i << endl;

   return 0;
}
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ g++ -o evaluationtest2 evaluationtest2.cpp
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$ ./evaluationtest2
123
333
[cb112@cslabpc4 ~]$

Interesting.

2006-10-25 binary Comments (0) Permalink