Category: Random

  • Making the Sentence Structure of Paragraphs Apparent

    This post is about a tiny thing that makes a big difference in practice because I spend so much time writing. Usually, people compose paragraphs as monolithic blocks of text. For several years now, I’ve written paragraphs like this: Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead…

  • Hacked

    As people probably noticed, lately someone hacked my WordPress installation and turned this blog into a pharmaceutical link farm. I asked Dreamhost for help and they sent me sort of a friendly “have fun fixing that!” message, but they did run an automated scan indicating that something was wrong with my wp-config.php file. Sure enough,…

  • Google House

    Although I use Google Earth fairly often, I generally leave “3D buildings” turned off since my machines tend to have the crappiest possible graphics cards. But the other day I randomly turned it on and was surprised to find that Salt Lake City is now heavily populated with building models, even including some residential neighborhoods.…

  • Embrace WTF

    Most people who do quantitative work, especially involving computers, mutter “What the fuck?” or something similar pretty often. Lately I’ve been thinking about WTF in more detail. WTF is good because it stems from dawning recognition of one’s own ignorance, and without recognizing ignorance we cannot eliminate it. Here I am only discussing serious WTF,…

  • Iterating Over The Full Range

    Every couple of months I need to write code that runs for every value of, for example, a char. This is usually to exhaustively test something so the code should be fast, so I write it in C. At first I always want to write: for (c = CHAR_MIN; c <= CHAR_MAX; c++) { use…

  • Polar Bears 2011

    My work life, as readers of this blog have probably gathered, seems to mainly involve trying to keep funding agencies happy, teaching concepts like deadlock avoidance to bored undergraduates, exhorting grad students to work harder, going to pointless meetings, and spending any remaining time responding to emails. Of course I have a blog where I…

  • Almost Everything in Subversion

    Every file I use on a day to day basis — excluding only data shared with other people, email folders, and bulk media — is kept in a big subversion repository. For the five years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve averaged 3.5 commits per day. Overall it works really well. Advantages of this scheme…

  • On the Synergy Between Facebook and CAN Bus Error Confinement

    One of my favorite lectures in my embedded systems class covers the design of CAN bus: a highly robust network most often used in automotive applications. CAN’s design is elegant in many ways and it includes several mechanisms to help keep the network operating under adverse conditions. One of these mechanisms is error confinement (see…

  • What Blogs Are Good For

    My colleague Suresh (of Geomblog) likes to say that blogging is passí©. The first time I heard this it annoyed me because — dammit — I’ve been blogging for only about six months. It took me a while to figure out that blogs are irrelevant and I could care less if they’re passí©. The important…