Remember how I was all “Is there available, on planet Earth, REALLY good C++ training?” The answer turns out to be YES! We (the place where I work) just finished a week of training provided by DevelopMentor, using materials created by Scott Meyers, and presented by Steve Dewhurst. It was absolutely excellent! I had recently been in a phase where there more I learned about C++ the less I liked it, but during the course I think I hit some sort of Tipping Point™ where I started to like it again. You can (and should) complain about a lot of things in C++, but no other language spans a greater range of the abstraction spectrum from the lofty and metaphysical down to gritty opcodes and registers.
Here are two statements from ICANN’s announcement that they will be opening up registration of top-level domains:
“The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey.
Yay! I would love to be able to “express myself!” http://messy.78/ here we come!
There will be a limited application period where any established entity from anywhere in the world can submit an application that will go through an evaluation process.
Oh.
Another thing I realized while reading this is that some day very soon “.com” will be passe… and then shortly afterwards extremely cool and retro.
Answer: up until yesterday, it was the current date. But starting today, it is AN ERROR MESSAGE! Why? DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!!! This wasted about 1 hour of my time today.
We’ll be going back to Taiwan this year, in April! Highlights will be Jenny’s grandfather’s ∞th birthday (and other family type functions), a visit to Sandwich Lady, and going up to the top of the Taipei 101 while it still holds on to the “tallest” title. (The last time I saw the 101 it looked like this!)
This word count bookmarklet searches through the page you’re on, and attempts to report the word count of the selection. It will first look for the text selection, and if there is none, it will search for a textarea that has a selection. It should be working in Safari and Firefox, and possibly even IE and Opera.
Researchers have worked out the neurological trick used by a species of wasp to turn cockroaches into ‘zombie slaves’. The discovery explains why, once stung, cockroaches can be led by a much smaller master towards certain death. Researchers have proven their theory by replicating the effect, and by using an antidote injection to release the cockroaches from their zombie state.
This YouTube video (embedding disabled) shows the view from the cockpit (with HUD) of the last 7 minutes or so of the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing. You can also hear the running chatter back and forth from the shuttle to ground control. The pilot is enjoying himself exactly as much as you would expect, I mean, he’s ACTUALLY FLYING THE SPACE SHUTTLE.
The video seemed to originate from this somewhat broken site which has some other videos, but I haven’t found any that are as good.
And if you want to try this landing for yourself, you can! Just install X-Plane.
OK, apparently we totally missed the boat the two times Jenny and I have been to Japan. RAMEN MUSEUM? Are you serious? Why were we not informed!!! At least now I have a way to try to convince Jenny to spend 13 hours on a plane if I ever find myself going back.
Random information for Vietmanese food seekers in Montreal:
For some reason, “Pho” is called “Tonkinese Soup” here.
There is another soupish dish that called “Mytho” which is ubiquitous and very good. Maybe named after the place Mỹ Tho? Anyway, it was pretty much like this, minus the quail eggs. I had it with the broth on the side and was recommended (twice!) to put some sweet vinegar on top which turned out to be a very good idea.
Our favorite Vietmanese restaurant here is Cafe Saigon in “Le Village”. Like the review says, “so out it’s in”.
We went to the finals of the Pilot Pen tennis tournament yesterday. It was fun, even though we didn’t get to see any really good matches. In the women’s final, Svetlana Kuznetsova lost the first set to Ágnes Szávay, and then just as it was getting interesting Szávay had to give up because of an injury. Too bad.
James Blake beat his friend Mardy Fish in straight sets. We were sitting right next to one of the few Fish fans in the crowd which made the match a little more exciting. “COME ON FISH! SHAKE IT OFF!!!!”
We even hung around to see the women’s doubles championship match, which was a complete blowout: somehow the world’s top women’s doubles team lost 6-1 6-2! On the winning team was Sania Mirza, originally from India, who had attracted a respectable number of Indian fans who we watched filming and taking pictures of her somewhat obsessively and quickly scurring to try to get autographs after the game.
Just out of curiosity I checked today to see how much it would cost us to see the US Open. Tickets for seats at the finals as good as the ones we had are around FIVE THOUSAND BUCKS! Yowza!!! Jenny would like to see Federer play a whole lot… but not that much.
There were way, way more people out there than I had imagined! Who knew particle physics drew the crowds. They split the tours up into different groups, and first we took this bus and listened to this Actual Research Scientist™ describe a few of the buildings on the BNL campus and the basics of the RHIC experiments. Our first stop was the PHENIX experiment.
This is, if I’m not mistaken Stefen Bathe, (more publications here) standing in front of the PHENIX detector. He’s explaining the experiment, which among other things is creating a Quark-gluon plasma, and fielding questions from other people on the tour (can this be used to generate energy? no. how loud are the collisions? silent. what practical benefit will this research have? possibly none. how do you turn it on? a team of scientists and engineers go in that control room over there and work for a few weeks. are you sure it’s completely silent? well, the air conditioners do make some noise).
PHENIX has lots of interesting stuff on its website, including this Java applet that lets you visualize the results of collisions (although one of the scientists seemed to imply that these visualizations are for PR purposes only and she really is only interested in crunching the raw data - “I’ve never looked at one of my collisions, actually”). Also, here are a series of games where you can try to run the collider yourself. If you get a high enough score, the results of your experiements enable time travel.
We spent a little more time at the STAR experiment. The goal of this experiement is… exactly the same as PHENIX! The two teams are in competition and are trying to beat each other to results, and also create the same findings with two different methods.
Here’s one of STAR’s gigantic detectors. I’m not sure but this may be part of the FORWARD TIME PROJECTION CHAMBER, which sounds really cool.
We also got to see the control room for STAR. It was full of racks of computers, which of course drew my interest. By the way if I’m not mistaken this is STAR’s entire CVS repository: here’s a commit somebody made just a few days ago. I guess this is the real stuff. Also, STAR: the weblog. Subscribed!
Science runs on Linux!
OK, also sometimes on Solaris. And Love.
A chilling sign. Toto asked the obvious question: “What do you think happened to Dennis?!?!?!” By the way, RHIC is the collider that was in the news a few years ago… remember BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH? The article stated that some crazy scientists were doing an expierment that could bring about the destruction of the Earth, or possibly even the ENTIRE UNIVERSE! I asked about this and yes, it was RHIC. I then asked if any of these events have occurred and was assured that no, they have not. I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question involving the anthropomorphic principle and the many-worlds hypothesis. Here’s the report the lab issued: RHIC Speculative Disaster Scenarios.
I did resist the urge to try to turn it on myself.
I’m guessing that a magnet crash would be…. bad?
More serious looking stuff. I love switches behind doors, which is why I was never any good at Steel Battalion. That self-destruct switch was irresistable. (by the way, don’t bother with that IP address - it’s not pingable and a traceroute dies somewhere inside es.net.)
Posted in the control room.
The final stop on the tour took us into the accelerator tunnel. This tunnel contains two “pipes”, one with particles moving clockwise around the RHIC, the other counterclockwise. At six positions around the ring these pipes cross over, so that collisions (at 99.995% the speed of light!) are possible. At this point of the tour we got an extremely enthusiastic and technical description of exactly how the superconducting magnets guide the beam, and the various safety systems that keep the collider from destroying itself if anything goes wrong.
All in all, it was a great trip and completely worth the two hour drive out to long island. And the icing on the cake was that Jenny got to cross another resaurant off her TODO list, Momofuku. Nano-review: good!
I don’t remember where I picked it up, but Anarchaia by Christian Neukirchen is one of my current favorite feeds. It’s an incredibly eclectic combination of deep geekism, pictures, random links, IRC chat snippets, and occasional poetry (which I skip - especially when it’s in German!).
trivia: it’s also the site that caused the mysterious _why to coin the term “tumblelog”)
One of my friends suggested over email that maybe our circle of friends should form a book club. She even proposed a book that we could try. Reaction ranged from complete apathy, to violent emailed screeds against book clubs, and finally culminated in a horrible photoshop defacement of the proposed book’s cover.
That idea rejected soundly, the next time we got together we realized that now that there are no shows on TV anymore that anybody could possibly care about (Lost and Battlestar being both on hiatus), we need some other excuse to get together once a week. Remote control helicopter club? Nintendo DS club? Badminton club? Shaw Brothers movie club? Sitting around and rotting club? All good ideas, but finally I came up with an idea that everybody immediately agreed on: CHEESEBURGER CLUB!
Tonight was the inaugural meeting! Jenny made incredibly thick and juicy and RARE cheeseburgers, with caramelized onions and sauteed mushrooms available as special toppings. She followed that with home made french fries (I called them that at least, I guess they were really baked potato wedges). And then to finish it off, A CAN OF BEANS. What could possibly be better? I guess maybe some local corn on the cob might have been nice, but it’s not quite the season yet. Oh, and for dessert: chocolate cream pie! The “classic cheeseburger” has now been knocked out of the park, and the other members of the club are considering more exotic styles. And by exotic I mean really radical stuff like maybe seasoning the meat or using non-american cheese.
Despite my complete lack of cooking ability (I did help Jenny set the table) I think cheeseburger club is one of the better ideas I’ve ever had. I’m assuming local chapters will start cropping up all over the country - wait, what am I saying, I mean THE WORLD, and will look to me as a sort of spiritual leader, a role I am ready to graciously accept… as long as it means I get more cheeseburgers.
In the end there were just too many classes. The coupling was too severe; the dependencies too subtle. The Samurai is beaten. The blades of destruction spin down. Not so much Kill Bill – more my very own horror film, The Refactoring.
There is only one course of action left for the true Samurai:
Programming is hard; parallel programming is way the hell harder; compsci courses have turned into votech Java pap; and enrollments in compsci are in any case as lively as the waiting list for the Lusitania the week after it was torpedoed. People want their programming to be easier and more casual, and they’re about to have it jammed into their eyesockets on bamboo stakes instead.
By the way, I know what he’s talking about, because I’ve had some fun with a type of parallel programming recently. Each screen = one CPU, plus one more, just for fun.
Easily recognized by television viewers in the Northeast, many people believe that the woman who has rocked, reclined, and lounged her way through numerous TV and radio commercials for Bob’s Discount Furniture is Mrs. Bob Kaufman. In reality, Bob’s sidekick is Cathy (Horan) Poulin ‘89.
She first met Bob Kaufman while working for a cable advertising company in Manchester. The company had launched a new local access channel and needed to develop its programming. In 1992, Poulin created the half-hour show “Cruising Connecticut” in which she drove around in a Corvette with a male cohost and visited the company’s local clients.
Poulin resides in Hebron with her husband, Paul, and one-year-old daughter, Madison, who she acknowledges is her “greatest accomplishment by far.”
This has been yet another public service announcement from messy-78.
And for the record, the official editorial position of messy-78 is that Bob is awesome, and his commercials are not so much annoying as they are… “memorable”.
If you’ve ever used it, then you know ClearCase sucks. But let me tell you, if you haven’t used ClearCase MultiSite, which is the version for distributed development, you don’t yet understand the meaning of the word “suck”. If you can, imagine a slower, harder to administer, more expensive version of ClearCase. That’s MultiSite — but only if your sites are working on completely seperate projects! If your distributed developers want to work together on the same project, or god forbid, on the very same files, then I can guarantee that your imagination is not sufficient to fully envision the universe of pain that awaits your every working hour.
You might think all that money would buy you a system that lets developers on different continents work together as if they are in the same building. How naive! No, instead MultiSite allows developers on different continents to work together just as easily as if they are on different planets.
It’s by now a well established fact that there is an opera singer on the Minutillo side of the family. OK, that may be an overstatement. What I meant is that there exists an opera singer named Hana Minutillo, and as far as I know, I’m not related to her. But, get this: new on the opera scene is Tsu-Ching Yu — Jenny’s cousin! We missed her debut solo concert, but through the magic of YouTube we (and you) get to see at least a few parts of it.
