bjornick
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "bjornick" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
06:25 pm
[Link] |
Ash the Wizardly Shyam
Hey there readers. Welcome to a next installment of the Wizardly Shyam. There has been several questions that were submitted during this resurgence, making me feel loved again. Anyway let's begin begin with a holiday related question.
Unlucky the Leprechan asks "Santa's after me lucky charms, and I'm all out of bubblegum. What do I do?"
Well Unlucky, I'm sorry that the mail system did not get me this question in time to help you in time, but fear not. With my suggestions, you will be ready next year for the pillager in red. In order to stop Kris Kringle from getting your lucky charms, you need to take care of the two reasons that he wants your lucky charms. The first reason is because the nice kids are asking for it. The other is that Santa himself is craving marshmallow goodness (you can see it in his waistline).
The kid problem is the easiest. You just need to associate eating lucky charms with being naughty. Perhaps you want to spike it with some known illegal substance, perhaps something like crack, heroin, or HGH. It's advisable that you use something cheaper though. You would go out of business giving those away free. Marijuana is cheap, one of these kids might have a prescription for marijuana, and therefore they would not be naughty if they ask for weedy charms. No, your best bet would be Methamphetamine. Instructions for the creation of meth is all over the internet so you don't even need to be a good chemist to make large quantities of it.
The Santa nut is harder to crack. Santa isn't ruled by the naught and nice laws like kids. Santa is also an artful lock pick and magic user. I mean how else does he make it into those apartments? No man with that much of a love for marshmallows can navigate the chimney system to make it to all the houses. In fact, Santa can pick locks very effectively. But he does have a weakness. Santa can't chew gum while doing anything else. This wouldn't be that big of a weakness, except for his love for durian-flavored gum. Once he starts chewing gum, he is unable to stand and falls down, which depending on his position in the room, may cause lots of noise, dispelling Santa's biggest advantage, stealth. If you had bubblegum, particularly durian-flavored one, you can use it as an alarm that Santa can't defeat. Once you see Santa, knocking him out is fairly easy, since his combat skills are non-existent. But since that isn't an option, you will need to take out Santa's reindeer before he lands. Reindeer won't land anywhere near places that are marked by predatory cats, so you can acquire large quantities tiger piss to mark your terrority preventing Santa from coming near your house. Santa really doesn't have time to walk anywhere, he's got 24 hours to get to all the houses in the world. He'll have to resign himself to a lucky charms-less christmas day if you make the perimeter large enough.
We have another question from our friends up north. Want More S & M asks "Why is it that clothing stores always have a lot of items in large or bigger, yet mediums and smalls go very quickly? Do stores just keep overestimating the number of large people buying their clothes, or do they plan on sending the surplus large items back to be altered into smaller sizes? Neither guess makes any sense."
Well WMSM, what you are seeing is the pressures of evolution. The world (or at least the retail + fashion industry) has decided that the average human needs to get bigger and so they largely produce clothes for larger people. This way the small and medium humans will be fighting over a scarce and important resource, clothes that would fit them. Only the strongest <=medium humans will procure the hip new cloths. Without new hip clothes, the other <=medium kids and adults would be less popular for the opposite sex, making it less likely that they will be able to pass their genes on. This chain of events will in turn make the average size of humans larger, making the larger clothes sell more and since larger clothes take more yarn, it will lead to more money for retail + fashion world. I'm sorry to say that you are dying breed.
|
|
08:43 pm
[Link] |
Ask Shyam
Hey loyal readers, the Wizardly Shyam is back. After many weeks (or months/years) of vacation I am back to answering questions that either where mailed into to my super-secret address or questions that I made up and attributed to one of you. So without further ado, today's question:
In order to judge the validity of your answers, I want to know how much brainpower churns away to answer these questions? - Fighter Jock
Well interesting question. It would be nice to answer with one single number which representations the compute power of peoples brains, called WTPS or Wizardly Thoughts per seconds. If I felt that people would be able to interpret that number, my answer would just be 10-12 MWTPS.
But to completely comprehend that number one needs to understand what a wizardly thought can be defined as
First a wizardly thought can be defined as a thought worthy of the Wizardly Shyam, which in general is most non-inane thoughts. The hard part in the measurement is how to break up the firing of the synapses into thought units. The question really is, how many thoughts are in deciding what to eat for dinner. Does each idea count? Or only the ideas that merited serious consideration? Or maybe it's just the final outcome that counts. The debate that raged in the BIPM about which measurement counts, but I won't go into the details. Suffice it to say that it tends towards the smaller units.
That ends a shortened version of the wizardly shyam. Stay tuned for more exciting answers to mundane questions.
|
|
11:52 pm
[Link] |
Linux VM
You know I have found that the Linux 2.4 memory scheduler needs some work. So for those of you that might not know, but care, all programs are given 4GB of memory, even if your machine doesn't have that much space. Instead of giving the memory to the program at the beginning, the OS will give it to the program as it uses. So what happens when there is no physical memory left? The kernel will take some chunk of memory and write it out to disk and then use that memory for anything else the program uses. When the evicted memory is used again, the kernel will kick out some other page and reload it from disk. The memory blocks that get kicks out depends on the algorithm that the kernel uses, but is generally the block that hasn't been touched in a while. This works just fine in general.
A second thing the OS does in the background is that to improve disk access, is that the kernel won't always go to the disk whenever you access the disk. Instead it tries to be intelligent and keep some blocks of disk in memory so that the OS doesn't have to read/write data to the disk, which is really slow. Also seems to be a reasonable thing to do.
Now let's combine these two concepts. Now supposed you have 2 GB of memory. Program A uses 1 GB of the memory. Program B uses 750MB of data. The kernel has about 250MB of the disk buffered in memory. Program B asks for 200 MB of memory. Now where does this memory come from:
1) Take the memory block that has not been accessed in the longest time
2) Write any modified data in the disk buffer and reclaim that memory for Program B
If you guessed 1, congratulations. You are a Linux kernel developer. This doesn't seem like a bad idea at face value, but really what this results in is that the kernel is constantly trying to load the memory that it told a program that it had. Say you take some memory from Program A. When A tries to access that memory, you have to discard some other memory and read A's memory from disk, which is slow. You just keep ending up doing that. I'm trying to figure out why program is running so slow and the kernel is doing this retarded trick, causing it to spend all of it's time reading data off of disk and write it back to disk. It turned out that some had turned on swap (the ability to write memory to disk) on these machines to debug another problem.
Current Location: Near a Mac
Current Mood:  tired
|
|
11:13 pm
[Link] |
Mac Goodness
In the past week, I have slowly let Apple take my soul. On Sunday, my computer kept on freezing. I'm thinking the power supply is acting a little wonky (the 5V is only 4.75V, within tolerance, but when my chips start actually drawing power, probably too low). I was going to get a Mac Pro when I moved to my new place, just so I don't have one less thing to work about. But after my computer started acting up, I went ahead and ordered, and decided to get a good video card, and now it seems that my Mac will be delivered about the time I move into my new place. I guess it takes a while for Steve to channel his love into the box. I understand. I can wait. On a different note, I finally got my MacBook Pro from work and was able to turn back in my X41, which I found to be nearly impossible to work on. I mean only being able to view 1 file with more than 15 lines and 80 characters wide makes programming very slow. So now I 15.7" wide screen monitor at a high enough resolution (more than 1024 x 768) to actually code. Yay! It's also nice that it actually wakes up from sleep > 20% of the time!
Anyway. I probably should head of to bed, so I can catch up on sleep, and still be able to climbing before a 6pm wedding tommorrow. If my knee would stop being an ass that is.
Current Location: Near a Mac
Current Mood: tired
|
|
11:09 am
[Link] |
Snakes on a Plane
It was everything I hoped for. It was hella fun and not only because the movie was ridiculous, but because the crowd at the 10 PM showing thursday was getting into it. I mean how could it go wrong, with Samuel L. Jackson and snakes on a motherf***king plane! But I have to disagree with Samuel L. on one point, I haven't had it with these motherf***cking snakes on this motherf***king plane.
|
|
07:01 pm
[Link] |
Friday
I wanted to go climbing Friday but I got no love. Everybody had other things to do on Friday night, which wouldn't be all that unexpected, except for the fact that most other Friday nights since I got hurt I knew 2 different groups of people that go climbing. When I can finally go, nobody can go. This is frustrating. I had to go back to my first love, though she can be jealous and vindictive (see bruised knee, sprained ankle), basketball. And now I am pretty sure that was a stupid idea. My knee is still stiff a few days after playing. I hope it will heal by tuesday, because I'm climbing regardless dammit!
I need to find other things to do on weekends that don't cause me bodily harm.
|
|
09:43 pm
[Link] |
Commuting
I always thought that commuting with mass transit would be less stressful than driving to work. I thought that it would less stressful since there would not be traffic to deal with. After my one rush hour in the NYC, I have to rethink this. Navigating the commuter fluid seems quite stressful as well. While traffic on highways is chaotic, compared to rush hour traffic in a subway station, it's quite orderly. Everyone seemed to be going in random directions. Navigating Penn Station was like driving in India, except where people were going like 5 mph faster. I think the best commute is the one that I can walk in 10 minutes.
|
|
06:40 pm
[Link] |
Trip to NYC
Last weekend I went to New York city for a few hours. I showed up at the New York Penn Station (not to be confused with the Newark Penn Station) right around rush hour. Penn Station was huge, or I walked a few stops down thinking I was still in the station, and I felt somewhat like travelling in India. Everyone was going every which way, and the constant dodging of people did not make my knee happy. I swear there were places where I think the commuters were shot out of a fucking canon. So my first interaction with people from New York was unpleasant, you know the whole not giving a rat's ass about others deal, but I expect that this is just because of it being rush hour.
Anyway, I finally find the MTA stop somewhere around Penn Station and I'm trying to figure out how to get to Times Square to meet Kerry, so I look at the subway map to figure out which way to go. The helpful map says to go north and so I look to figure out which track to go, but I don't see directions in the normal sense. I need to guess whether I need to go towards Uptown or Downtown. WTF? This is frankly a usability nightmare. I eventually ask the helpful MTA security folk which way to go and I get a somewhat rude response saying go towards Uptown, yet again the rudeness is probably because of rush hour.
I go through the tunnels which I had to duck to not hit my head, yet again can be explained by rush hour. You see I was actually hovering. The people climbing over my arms were forced to go faster than the speed of commuter going under my arms in order meet on the other side of me, causing lower commuter pressure above me by Bernoulli's Principle. This lift in the commuter fluid forced me up a few feet.
After I got to the Times Square stop I have to call Kerry and figure out how to get to Google. She told me to from numbered street to another numbered street with compass directions. The commuter fluid above ground had lower pressure than the one below ground, but it is still thick. I could figure out east/west/north/south except the huge frigging glass buildings to my right, left, and in front of me obscure the sun. So I get to go one guess which way the numbers go down. I eventually show up and end up in the wrong the building, and this I can't possibly blame on anyone but myself. I was being retarded.
I toured Google NY and inside the building, it was quite nice, and there are some good views from the balcony, despite the fact that there are a large number of large building around. I did see the uber commercialized part of NY that I expected, but thankfully that was only locallized to small parts of the city, just like Kerry promised. We went to Central Park, which was beautiful. I almost forgot I was in the middle of the most populous city in the nation. If I stayed in New york for any extended period time, you can bet I'll be at Central Park a lot. I finished up the trip by going to a really good Ethopian place in a very ethnic part of Manhattan. Too bad I had rush out near the end to make my train to NJ (to appease my 3 fathers/mothers, long story i'll get to that later) forcing my friends to pick up my tab.
I had fun, and I bet I would have been happier with NYC if I left Manhattan, but sadly I couldn't with my time restriction. I will finish this with a back-handed compliment to the city and it's denizen's. I have decided that the degree of hatred for New York City is unfounded. I can't have that kind of hatred for a city that's not especially unique. I've been to London, Chicago, and Singapore, and being in NYC sorta felt very similar to those two places, which actually isn't that bad at all. It feels like a big city. It's the biggest city in the US sure, but I bet if I was in other somewhat international large cities, like Toronto, I would probably be able to do the same things.
Current Mood: tired
|
|
10:49 pm
[Link] |
AT&T DSL
I hate my damn AT&T/SBC dsl line. The modem I have sucks really bad. It's a modem/router and the damn thing has the option to put a machine on the DMZ, but it keeps losing the internet connection when I try that. Of course the line itself is flaky, waiting for the oppurtune time I fucking operate the indexing pipeline so my lack of intarweb can be especially bothersome. The damn thing made me spend saturday night at work. Maybe this shitty service will entice me to move, since the place I live doesn't have cable service.
But I guess I'm running out of things to say. Maybe I should just retire this blog, since I feel obligated to write in it if I keep it up. I'll give it another few weeks.
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: At My Most Beautiful - REM
|
|
11:50 am
[Link] |
Reason I don't watch news
Today on FOX news, a dangerous new terrorist tactic was revealed! It seems that terrorists might actually try to blend in now! OMG!!11!!1oneoneone
Current Mood: disillusioned
|
|
10:41 pm
[Link] |
IE 7.0 Beta
So i tried out IE 7 because I had heard some interesting things about the latest security hole from Microsoft. Now I think I would be annoyed about the things that explorer lets web developer do to my computer, if i could get it to, you know, follow links without crashing. You see I haven't really gotten it to open two windows simultenously, much less two tabs. I think it might have something to do with my exotic plugins, you know Windows Media Player or Flash. Now I realize that I am asking too much from my beta software without all this multi-tasking nonsense. So maybe I can go to a page, then type in another url into the url bar and then have it work. Surely, that's a use-case that's been tested. Wrong again. I can only hope this an issue with my install (a brand new install of XP with only Firefox and DirectX 9.0 installed, mind you), but I hope the actual version of IE 7 can do even the simplest browsing capabilty without crash.
Current Mood:  lethargic
Current Music: Ebay - Weird Al
|
|
10:11 pm
[Link] |
Software Engineering
I think I am finally seeing the light and understand why we need release engineering. I am sick and tired of this firefighting crap that I have been doing the past few weeks. I just hope we will have found most of these issues by the end of next week, so I can go back to actually improve the code that wrote quickly when I first got here. I have had few months while I've been working on other things to thing about how I fix the many flaws in my initial versions, but I couldn't work on because we wanted to have the reduce the variables while trying to test other changes.
Current Mood: hopefully
|
|
11:25 pm
[Link] |
Update
A somewhat quick update.
It appears to only be a bruise on the bone in my knee, and it the pain/stiffness is from fluid in my knee, though in some positions my knee can move side-to-side, which freaks me out. I think it's cause the fluid under my knee cap which lets it move, but still. Need ask the orthopedist on the follow up, but I should be back to normal in another 3-4 weeks.
I keep getting the response that "oh it's only four weeks". I guess that's an "oh it's only four weeks, and not like a couple of months", but four weeks is a hella long time. That's 8 nights of basketball, 2 nights of frisbee and like 10 days of climbing!
I am starting to hate flags, but it starts to makes it hard to use already existing programs. There are like a gazillion flags for any given binary at google and most have reasonable default values under the assumptions that were made when the code was written. But it's damn near impossible to figure out what flags need to be set because the command lines that are lying that runs some of these binaries don't override the default values for a lot of flags, so you don't even know what flags could be set or are need to be set so that you can get it to do what you want. And the people who originally wrote the code don't even remember all the flags they have because after they tuned it once, they forgot about it.
I am going to Santa Cruz thursday on a company off-site. W007!
I need to be more responsible. And if I'm going to keep this journal, I need to write more journal entries in a timely manner, 'cause after a while I have too much to say, which makes me less likely to write one, which sorta makes it pointless.
I think it's wonderful speculation that some people have for the reason there seems to be a Google presence in Oregon. How many machines, what it is being used for, how the big G is going to take over the world with it, etc. Some of the words they use to describe the google computing infrastructure just make me snicker, because of some of the internal code names for some apps.
Finally, might I add that I fucking hate the Great Firewall.
Current Music: Everybody Hurts - R.E.M
|
|
11:50 am
[Link] |
Remote Home directories
It's days like today that I wish that my home directory at the G was on my local machine, and not on a filer that can go down.
*sigh*
Current Location: Work
Current Mood: useless
|
|
12:17 am
[Link] |
A two vicodin night
Looks like today is going to be a two vicodin night. Ouch
Current Mood: stiff, pained
|
|
05:55 pm
[Link] | Vicodin did not impress me much. I was expecting to be trippy or at least effective. It just bit. It was no better than the 600 mg ibuprofin. This 600 mg ibuprofin knocks me out every time I take it. Whenever I fall asleep in the middle of the day, it feels awful, since it usually means that I don't sleep as much at night. I hope the swelling goes down soon and then I can stop taking the ibuprofin, and then I won't be asleep during the day and awake during the night. And perhaps I can bend my knee farther. Today I managed to be able to bend my knee enough to take off my shorts with any pain. A whole 15 degrees, up from the 10 degrees from yesterday I think. Any progress is good progress
Current Mood:  depressed
|
|
06:27 pm
[Link] | 3 hours before vicodin land. Only 3 more hours
Current Mood: pain
|
|
09:14 pm
[Link] |
Unrequited Love
I love basketball, but sadly basketball doesn't love me. I play my first league game today at work and I sprain my knee. Now I am yet again on crutches, with my knee immobilized and trying to figure out how I am going to be able to get into my car to drive with my left leg straight. I could but weight on in it before I went to the ER, but it felt funny at certain bends (around 25 degrees to about 90 degrees) and since I didn't want this to be a repeat of my ankle I decided to go the ER anyway. My car is at google, I'm at home, which isn't too much of a problem because I can just get a taxi to work tommorrow. I just hope that I can drive my car back so I'm mobile on the long weekend. There is only so much you can do sitting in your apartment for 72 hours. I guess I won't be going climbing tommorrow either. I'm going to forget everything they taught me in the belay lessons before I become belay certified. *sigh*
Current Location: home
Current Mood: drugged
|
|
10:22 pm
[Link] |
Surveys
So last thursday I saw the first show for Da Vinci Code at midnight. Was the movie worth staying up until 3? Well since I didn't pay for the movie and I got free popcorn and soda I can't complain. It wasn't like I was actually going to do a lot of work on friday anyway. If you didn't see the movie, my review is that it was a waste of 2 1/2 hours.
Anyway that would not have been worth mentioning except that it lead to a situation where in on Friday it seems that 4 out of 5 people present felt that the Shyam was hitting on a girl. Now to set up the story. I was trying to convince the one co-worker of mine that wasn't going to watch the movie on Friday on Google's tab to go climbing with, but I thought I failed. It turns out that I misread that situation, but that's neither here nor there. Instead I ended drinking margarita's at one guy's office at 5. Most of my friends at work were going to the 7:30 movie and I decided that I would at least go with them to the theatre complex to eat. Anyway by the time the drinking was finished and we got to the theatre complex it was 7. We tried to go a mexican place that looked like fast food/takeout place, but it turned out to be a sit down place. The nice waitress that seated people told us that even takeout might take to long so we come back after the movie. In the process of telling us this, she guessed that we were going to the Da Vinci Code. As we were leaving she said she wanted to know how it was. Well since I knew, I turned around and told her. I told what I thought and she wanted me to elaborate and so on and so forth. After a few minutes, I turned around and noticed that my friends weren't anywhere to be seen. So did I:
1) Ask her if she wanted to discuss this after she got off of work
2) Cut the conversation short and catch up with my friend
(Hint: if you guessed the dissenting vote from the beginning of the paragraph, you can easily guess this)
If you guys really can't figure out the rest, ask me, but there isn't much left to the story so I won't follow this up with any exciting conclusion.
Current Location: Home
Current Music: Blue skies Bring Tears - Smashing Pumpkins
|
|
09:39 pm
[Link] | I've realized that since my handle is the same everyone I go, my LJ is probably more public than I realized, so we'll pretend the last two posts never happened. Besides, in hindsight I was just blowing off steam and being irrational. People will do what they want to do, and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it.
On to happier thoughts, I went rock climbing yesterday for the first time. It was surprisingly fun, and not so scary. I mean after you are 10 feet of the ground, another 10 isn't that bad. I had to take belay lessons, so I could tie in to the harness right and not drop my comrades. At the end of the belay lessons, the instructor wanted us to do a test climb while he was watching and everything went fine while I was belaying. In my climb, halfway up me and the instructor had this conversation
Instructor: "Shyam, Do you want to fall now?"
Shyam: "Umm... no, not really."
Instructor: "Don't worry, Andy's got you."
(Shyam looks worried)
Instructor: "Go ahead and let go"
Shyam: "Um.. ok"
Andy did in fact have me, but that fall sucked, cause the harness pinched parts of me that should not be pinched. It stung like hell, but I think I can still make babies.
When I went climbing for real, I finished an easy one really quick, floobed two harder ones and finished a climb that was hard as the ones that I flubbed. Climbing becomes easier, when you realize that you can hold yourself up with just an arm and a leg, you don't need to be hugging the wall the whole time, and you have a harness so you can gamble on a few moves.
I'm looking forward to going again this weekend.
Current Mood:  cheerful
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bjornick's journal