I’ve had to disable the little sidebar thingies that tell you when Anacrusis and NFD are updated, but hey, that’s what RSS feeds are for. It’s for the best anyway; that was some of the hackiest code I’ve ever written, and I’m glad it’s gone.
Category: Pulverbatch
Ninety minutes later, I still don’t feel well
I gave blood for the first time at GSP, which was, hideously, almost seven years ago. I haven’t gone a year without donating since then. At my current job, I’ve given at all but one (I was sick) of our company-wide blood drives, which happen every two and a half months. I’m fairly experienced at these things. I always prep with lots of water, and I eat a decent lunch, sans french fries.
But dammit, it keeps getting worse. I used to get nervous and shaky, so I started bringing my CD player along, and that helped. Then I started getting light-headed and hot at the snack canteen; last time I had to lie down with my feet on a box and drink nasty Powerade. Today I took twice as long as usual, so they had to reseat the needle–a new and disturbing experience–and I didn’t even make it off the donation table before I almost passed out. Giving blood sucks!
Not gonna stop, though.
The DBC of CS
Social engineering at its finest: SCIgen uses a context-free grammar to generate comp sci papers entirely too much like those from which I’ve been expected to learn for the past two years. It’s a little scary how good the results are. I was able to read the entire abstract of my personal paper while nodding my head, although the first clause of the introduction (“Unified metamorphic methodologies have led to many unfortunate advances”) broke the spell.
Oh, right, the social engineering part is that they got one of their generated papers accepted to a conference. Well-played, humans who probably remember daylight!
It turns out I actually did go to school.
I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!
See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…
I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.
My cousin Bruce is critically ill in a hospital in Indianapolis. He’s had a transplanted kidney for the last seven years, and things have often been a little rough with it, but this time a viral infection in his pancreas seems to have caused it to fail entirely. The last I heard, things were improving slightly for him–they reduced some of the swelling and fluid buildup, but he’s still on oxygen and morphine. I hope things continue to improve.
Bruce lived with my family for a while, when I was in middle school and he was taking classes at EKU. He brought with him a huge and nearly comprehensive collection of first edition AD&D resource books, miniatures and modules, not to mention games like Paranoia and Gamma World. When he moved out, he left them to me. It was a huge and valuable gift, magnified by who I was (and am). I still have every piece of it.
He went to dialysis at the time, of course, and had for years, and would until 1998. I wonder what it was like when he went in for the last time. He showed me the scar tissue that had built up on his arm from the treatments, once, and the image has never left me.
Hard Action Adjuster
There is a new Lady in the Next Cube.
LitNC: “You know what I think? They need to–grow some, and tell that bitch–they let her run that place. You know? She’s an adjuster.“
Strutting around like she owns the place! She’s a loose cannon! She can’t be trusted! Hand over your badge!
I’m dumb
Oh, duh, Apache rewrite rules. Um. (Now I just have to learn how to write them.)