Local Extrema

NetworkManager, stealthy scoundrel, corrupter of resolv.conf

2011-05-24T23:22:00.005-06:00

So NetworkManager is the culprit in my mysteriously changing /etc/resolv.conf. How do I know?Because it said so.I was about to cut'n'paste the helpful comment that it put at the top of the modified resolv.conf, but when I went to look at it this time, it wasn't there. It knows that I'm on to it. Probably monitoring my Google searches...My thinking now is that it's not adding an OpenDNS server

More evidence that I don't know what I'm doing.

2011-05-22T08:32:00.002-06:00

Twice now, an entry has been added to /etc/resolve.conf without my intervention. Some program somewhere is deciding to help me out and hose my internet connection. Which program, and for what nefarious purpose?The problem, I think, is too many layers. This is something that bugs me about the design of lots of things, computer UI's and information management systems in particular. I don't doubt

Sharp as a Marble - Geek humor of the day

2011-05-16T13:55:00.001-06:00

Hah!Sharp as a Marble - Geek humor of the day

GHC, Haskell Platform installations.

2011-05-15T22:46:00.003-06:00

So after great angst, a good night's sleep, and a day not spent thinking about it, the problems of yesterday were dispatched pretty easily today.GHC 7.0.3 installed without a hitch. As did the Haskell Platform. "Configure, make, sudo make install" for the win. Then, after a tweak to the cabal file, my code compiled as well. It was limiting base library versions to <= 5. Hence, it couldn't be

More adventures in Linux

2011-05-14T22:09:00.006-06:00

After a distro upgrade, my Haskell code suddenly stopped compiling. The error message from cabal was less than helpful: cabal: Package parallel-particle-mc-0.0.1 can't be built on this system.Okayyy...Apparently some packages I needed went missing in the upgrade. Tried cabal-installing them, which went without a hitch, but compiling my package still doesn't work."You know, " I said to myself, "

Huh. Don't do that, I guess.

2011-04-22T22:00:00.002-06:00

One quick change to resolve.conf and here are the new numbers:> time netstat -anreal 0m0.047suser 0m0.000ssys 0m0.010s> time netstat -areal 0m0.312suser 0m0.000ssys 0m0.020sAhh. Much better. The random hangs seem to have gone away as well. Apparently having both the router (and DHCP sererver) and some other DNS server listed in resolve.conf is a bad idea. Some time ago, I put two server lines in

Diving into the depths of Linux network configuration

2011-04-21T22:07:00.003-06:00

Send help if I don't emerge in a few days.Here's the situation: My internet connectivity sucks. It's fast (enough) when it works, but connections, e.g. opening a new web page frequently "hang": taking somewhere between very long to forever to conclude. A reload and retry will frequently work instantly.First clue was that the issue might be DNS related. Consulting the great Google yielded this at

Mathcha

2011-04-16T23:05:00.003-06:00

While I appreciate the appearance of mathematics in captchas (or anywhere else, really), I was unable to answer this one correctly.

I'm on Google Streetview! Sorta...

2009-02-21T23:18:00.003-07:00

Even Google gets things wrong sometimes. My house is the one on the left. Follow the link in the title or click "view larger map" for the, uh, interesting version.Update: Somehow, it got fixed. The misplaced image that had part of the road floating in space has been removed. Way to go Google. Make a liar out of me...View Larger Map

Disorganized thoughts on unit testing software

2009-01-18T21:41:00.002-07:00

I've been on just enough software projects in my career to form marginally supported hypotheses about the value of testing. Here they are.Postulate One: Tests suffer from the same, or complimentary, defects as the code they test.I'm speaking about unit tests here. Specifically, unit tests written by the authors of the code under test. The first part should be no surprise, since the same author

Why having kids isn't all bad

2009-01-18T21:38:00.001-07:00

The other day, my three-year-old son informed me that when he grows up, we will have coffee together.That makes me completely unreasonably happy.

Testing code highlighting

2008-11-15T09:18:00.003-07:00

I'm giving Google's code highlighting library a trydef subsets(elements, size): """ Generates all subsets of the given size of the given set. """ if size > 0: while len(elements) > 0: first = elements.pop() for the_rest in subsets(elements.copy(), size-1): yield (first,)+the_rest else: yield ()The colors are a tad funky, given my

More TECS

2008-07-22T22:08:00.002-06:00

Finally finished the exercises for Chapter 2 in TECS. This chapter builds on the basic logic gates introduced in Chapter 1 to build more complex circuits, including a 16 bit adder and an Arithmetic Logic Unit, which will be the basis for the computer developed in subsequent chapters. Designing the ALU is the first exercise which gave me some trouble. There are some things that you can't easily do

Back to study blogging

2008-07-04T15:28:00.002-06:00

Finally got back to reading "The Elements of Computing Systems" while I'm waiting for the rest of my family to arrive at Mom and Dad's place. We're gonna go to my sister's place and eat. I suspect fire and meat will be involved. Then, we might blow some stuff up. I love America.Anyway, I'm still reasonably happy with TECS, but the combination of the book, study plan, various tutorial pdfs and the

It's done!

2008-07-03T22:27:00.001-06:00

But was too tired to take a picture. I think I nailed down the last board at about 11:40pm and went to bed. By 1:00 today I was on the way to the airport to get away from the %&^#@%& floor for the weekend.

Almost done!

2008-07-01T19:20:00.003-06:00

If you see any spots I missed, kindly keep that information to yourself, thanks. Dinner time. Not sure if I'm going to get to the rest of the floor tonight. My record at that isn't very good.

End of Day 2

2008-06-29T21:54:00.001-06:00

Here's the end of day two. G'night. I'm freaking tired.

Progress, measued in inches

2008-06-29T12:03:00.002-06:00

After a good day of work, this is how far I've gotten. Since this is about half-way, I'm going to have to flip the workspace around and get all of the tools off of the unfinished part. I think that's when I'll take a break and paint the opposite wall. Might as well do it while there's no floor over there that needs protecting.Didn't work on "Elements of Computing Systems" this week. But did

Floored

2008-06-25T22:40:00.004-06:00

Mot much progress on study-blogging tonight, on account of my other project.That's my living room floor. The rest is still in the box.

Study-blogging!

2008-06-24T22:22:00.003-06:00

I'm going to work though The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles and blog about it. Why? Well, I think I've already discussed my compulsive need to be studying something and I have a blog, so why not? The link above is to the amazon page (with affiliate money-making goodness) and there is a companion website with a study plan. First impressions? Good! I

The Programmers’ Stone » Blog Archive » A First Haskell Experience

2008-03-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

An interesting read about coming up to speed with Haskell, what Haskell needs to lower the barrier to entry and writing real code in Haskell.The Programmers’ Stone » Blog Archive » A First Haskell Experience

Matt Blodgett's Dev Blog: Matt Blodgett's First Law of Software Development

2008-02-11T12:54:00.000-07:00

Matt Blodgett's Dev Blog: Matt Blodgett's First Law of Software DevelopmentSo true, it hurts.

9/11 was four days ago.

2007-09-15T22:00:00.000-06:00

I don't plan on ever trying to write about what I think about Iraq, Islamic Fundamentalism, and foreign policy here. I probably should, since I've always told myself that the only real value this blog has is forcing me to express myself more clearly, and by doing so, try to make myself think more clearly about things.But the signal to noise ratio on this subject is already way too high, and I

Belabored Day

2007-09-07T23:14:00.000-06:00

Spent Labor Day according to the customs of my people. Working outside in the yard instead of inside in the air conditioning. Did the same thing today, which was my Friday off. Yay for 9/80 schedules. On the subject of labor, I've been thinking a lot about knocking it off and retiring. Not yet, of course. Although, I do have enough money to last the rest of my life, as long as I don't spend it on

Growing up

2007-08-31T21:37:00.000-06:00

It was inevitable, I suppose. The last artifacts of my free-wheeling single life are now gone.My wife sold my futon at a garage sale.What's next? Fiscal responsibility and sensible shoes?

Once in a Red Moon

2007-08-28T19:38:00.000-06:00

I got Collin up at 4:30 this morning to go outside and look at the lunar eclipse. It was well into totality by then, and a nice shade of red. He pronounced it cool, and went back to sleep while I held him, and sat in our backyard. Fostering your child's inner geek is best done slowly and with gentle encouragement.The world is is a different place at four in the morning. Even without the red moon.

Random Access Memory

2007-08-24T23:02:00.000-06:00

Did something tonight I haven't done in a long time. Drive alone at night. Being a family man now, and a dyed-in-the-wool homebody, this isn't something that happens very often. And, of course, driving alone at night is very different than driving when the kids, and probably the wife are sleeping in the car. The window is down, the radio is up, and everything feels different. Almost limitless

Stuck

2007-08-22T21:45:00.001-06:00

Scant days after blogging (bragging?) about all of the self-study work that I do, I fell off the wagon and have been a worthless sub-human ever since. Actually, I've just been watching more TV. This happens occasionally, and the culprit is usually the same. I get stuck on something, often something that I should skip over, stop making forward progress and then it's all HGTV all the time. (I end

Bummer Solstice

2007-08-21T20:56:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was the first day of the summer that I got up before the sun. I figured it was a fluke, but it happened again today. I suppose the chance of the sun getting up late one day is no more than the chance of me getting up early.Sigh. Fall is coming. Collin is off to Kindergarten. There are thousands of rotting apples in my yard. So much stuff that I wanted to get done this summer is just

It is better to be fed than hungry

2007-08-17T20:10:00.000-06:00

My new life-long ambition it to open an sandwich shop in D.C. called the Machiadelli.Well, not really, because 1) Somebody must have done it already and 2) I don't want to live in D.C. But still, Machiadelli. I crack myself up.

Tool time!

2007-08-16T19:27:00.000-06:00

Not power tools, mind you, software tools. Nobody's going to loose a finger with anything discussed in today's post unless you're really good with emacs. (The command you're looking for is M-x sever-digit. Remember to preface it with C-u to put it back on.) I'm slightly obsessive about tools, and learning to use them well. While I think this is a trait of good software developers, the correlation

Home schoolin'

2007-08-15T19:44:00.000-06:00

No, not the boys. Me.Self improvement is a great idea. It's just a big pain and a lot of work. I spend probably 10 hours a week after the kids are in bed on various projects to sharpen my programming skills (or, less kindly, to acquire them). To do this, I've given up television, except for the odd Futurama re-run, and conversing with my spouse (not really). Is it worth it? I'm not sure. In fact,

Insane as Folk

2007-05-21T23:16:00.000-06:00

The folk definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. A working definition of drunk is doing the same thing over and over again and not noticing that it isn't working. I am beginning to understand why programming drives people to drink.Complaining about systems that don't work is all well and good, and probably has some therapeutic benefit,

Yak shaving, yak herding and project management

2007-05-07T22:30:00.000-06:00

Yak Shaving is, according to the lovable geeks at MIT,...what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task.The example given on the other side of the link is excellent, and extremely typical, but not entirely

Sisyphus was lucky...

2007-04-30T18:57:00.000-06:00

... because nobody expected him to actually get anything done.I have fairly practical reasons for not blogging about my job too much. For instance, I'd like to keep it. So, I'll just say that today was a case study in what happens when your configuration and build system blows steaming chunks. And when the guy who wrote it left two weeks ago.Yea, I'm bitter.I've always been amazed by the

Always-on networking

2007-04-25T18:54:00.000-06:00

There was a long stretch of time when I was continuously looking for a new job. It started with a particularly rough time at my employer, and ended with a job offer from Google two and a half years later.Constantly searching for a new job is distracting and tiring. It's even worse if you're not completely committed to the idea of packing it in and getting out. After turning Google down, I doubled

Timesink indeed

2006-12-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I just managed to delete an entire post, and then post it, entirely by accident. Must remember that Ctrl-a is not "beginning of line" like in emacs. Instead it is "select the entire entry, making it possible to delete the whole thing with the next keystroke". Follow this up with another random keystroke and whatever key combination means "post this immediately" to Blogger and you have

Pointless optimization

2006-11-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

Came across this gem while cleaning up somebody else's c++ code. Irrelevant details like variable names are changed to illustrate the pointif (!nearly_equal(m, 1.0, 1.0e-12)) x *= mThe function nearly_equal takes three arguments: two values to compare and a tolerence. It returns true if the values are equal to within the tolerance and adjusts between absolute and relative tolerance as needed.

About all that copius free time

2006-09-25T00:36:00.000-06:00

Finally checked something into timesink, my time-management app. Crud, but it is hard to find free time these days. Yay for insomnia! I'm using Python properties in this first class. Since it contains derived quantities and has various consistency invariants which need to be maintained, this seems like a good application for them. The alternative is a lot of boiler-plate code for setters/getters.

An entry from the four-year-old lexicon

2006-09-17T13:33:00.000-06:00

Tryannostep: A really big step.

The End of Science?

2006-09-11T21:24:00.000-06:00

There is an interesting article in this month's Discover magazine by John Horgan, author of "The End of Science". The article is a look at the scientific advances of the last decade since the book came out and how they support or refute the coming end times of science.Just about everything I know about his views comes from this article, so I'm not fully qualified to discuss them. It did get me

Oh, for crying out loud.

2006-09-08T13:45:00.000-06:00

Evidently my emacs lisp notes are too racy for Google Base. All I did was quote Bender for some sample text in string processing examples!That can bite my shiny metal a**.It's their drive space, and I suppose that 12 year olds and easily offended grandmothers might be looking at my lisp notes, so, of course, I'll play by their rules. Rather than compromise the integrity of my original artistic

The Wisdom of Children

2006-09-08T12:31:00.000-06:00

So my son comes home from pre-school with an "all about me" book. A little book they made in class which contains their favorite things, pictures they drew of their family, and other things about them. On the page about their physical attributes, after the fill-in-the blanks for "My eyes are ____" and "My hair is ____" was "My skin is ____". His teacher dutifully filled in his exact answer: "My

Thinking about the singularity

2006-09-03T13:08:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking about the Singularity recently. This is the idea that at some point in the near future, technological advance will become so rapid that our ability to predict the future will shrink to essentially zero. The term is reminiscent of it's use in physics and mathematics, where a singularity is where the laws of physics as we understand them break down completely, or a point is

Yay, Spam!

2005-08-07T17:07:00.000-06:00

I just had to delete my first piece of comment spam ever. Guess what it was for! Pr0n? Viagrga? No, celing fans.My blog is so lame it even attracts lame spam.

Gratitutioius Python script

2005-08-07T16:51:00.000-06:00

Learning about generators in python recently. Getting recursive generators to work as expected was a little harder, but here's an example:def k_subsets(n,k,s=0): """Yield lexiographically ordered k-subsets of the set {s..n-1} The default case is s=0, for k-subsets of {0..n-1} """ # To make a subset, select the first available element s, and # iterate over all of the k-1 subsets of the

Blog haitus!

2005-08-07T16:27:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking. And what I've been thinking is this: I really don't have it in me to be an a-list blogger. No, no, please, hear me out. This is an amusing diversion, but real blogging takes a level of dedication that I just don't have. Really good blogging either needs to be intensely personal, or deeply insightful, or ideally both. For that go read Jeff at The Shape of Days and forget you

Stupid idea of the day

2005-06-14T18:21:00.000-06:00

I think frozen dinners should have an RFID tag in them that the microwave can read and automatically cook your dinner for you. The microwaves would also destroy the RFID tag so that people with scanners wouldn't be able to tell that you eat way too many frozen dinners.

Back from vacation, dammit.

2005-06-09T00:20:00.000-06:00

Can't sleep. Guts are acting up. Missing the sounds of the ocean. Five hours until I have to get up to go to work.Damn, but it really sucks to be back. If this is going to happen every time I take a vacation, I may have to rethink the whole idea. Screw that. We're allreay planning on going back next year.

What I did on my summer vacation, part the second

2005-06-05T14:57:00.000-06:00

Still in La Jolla. Still glad I'm not at work, wherever that is. Spent some time with old friends who moved away from Santa Fe a year ago. They like in-state a ways, so the drive wasn't too bad for them. Collin and their son are good friends who play like three-year-olds always do. They either love or hate each other. Weather is chillier today. Not great for being in the water, but the park is

What I did on my summer vacation, part the first.

2005-06-03T21:48:00.000-06:00

We're on vacation again. For real this time. No visiting relatives. We're blowing the facation fund and staying ocean-side in La Jolla, CA. So far we've seen dolphins from the deck and sharks and a sea lion while in the water. I'm assuming that we were not in physical danger from the sharks. But what the hell do I know? I'm from New Mexico for god's sake.Some other random moments and observations

Why I get along with theists.

2005-05-28T19:11:00.000-06:00

I'm an athiest, in the literal sense of the word. Theism is belief in god, atheism is a lack of that belief. I'm not interested in changing anybody else's mind on the subject, and I certainly don't "evangelize" my atheism.Here's the implicit deal under which I conduct relationships with theists. I am willing to believe that theists are perfectly capable of rational thought despite their

Stuff I Think #1

2005-05-24T22:27:00.000-06:00

I think that our modern education system of herding children into instutitions where they interact mostly with other children for twelve years is a fine way to turn them into adults that still act like children.This is only way I can explain the behavior of some of the people I work with.

A brief observation on paperbacks and being a dork

2005-05-22T17:51:00.000-06:00

One of the coolest things about paperback books is that, under typical circumstances, you can stuff them in your back pocket. No, you're not going to be able to get Atlas Shrugged in there, but your typicl Sci-Fi paperback will fit nicely. (Your mileage may vary. No comments about the size of my ass). I was reminded of this fact when I stowed the book I had taken with to watch Collin at the park.

Finding a blog voice

2005-05-18T20:38:00.000-06:00

Why exactly am I doing this? I'm not going to fall into the trap of whining about how I don't have any readers. I'm not writing anything worth reading yet. When I started this blog, I had in mind being able to create something like this. If you are reading my blog (not that I'm complaining if you're not) and you want to read a better one, go read his. Start with this. Here's a sample:So you know

Searching for perspective

2005-05-07T18:57:00.000-06:00

Okay, having a pipe leak and flood your house is a downer. I think we could all agree on that.I have a friend who's father will die soon of cancer. Another friend of mine died in a horrible car accident a month ago. His kids are now orphans. My sister's house basically required a complete plumbing bypass operation because their leaky pipe was in the foundation.Perspective. Breathe in, breathe

FLOOD!

2005-05-05T22:43:00.000-06:00

Major flood in Collin's room tonight. The hose bib out front started leaking into the wall. Gobs of wet carpet went out the window, along with my back. Looking at some drywall damage also. $110 to get a plumber to come out and tell us he'll be back tomorrow. I'm in the wrong business. Now I'm going to miss more work hanging out here while they rip holes in my wall.Yay. The variety of ways that

Whoo! A comment!

2005-05-03T21:21:00.000-06:00

Not here, mind you. In addition to this pretentious nonsense, I maintain a journal at Ubuntu forums. One my my posts garnered a helpful comment from someone who knows a lot more than I do.Why is this a big deal? Beats me, but it's cool. It may have something to do with the basic blogging impulse that drives this pretentious nonsense also. It's about being read as a way of making contact with

Time is Money, but how much? An emprical study on garage sales.

2005-04-23T13:42:00.000-06:00

We're having another garage sale today, along with the rest of the world. This is one of the first really nice spring days here in Santa Fe, and several of our neighbors also decided it was time to get rid of a lot of junk.Melissa (The ExtremaWife, heh.) runs the show. She's got a good grasp of Spanish, which helps a lot around here. I watch Collin and help load stuff into people's cars. She has

Yet Another Reason to Hate Daylight Savings Time

2005-04-20T22:17:00.000-06:00

Ever try explaining stuff to a three year old? Like why he is supposed to take a bath and go to bed while it's still light out?So who was responsible for this inanity, anyway? Farmers? No, apparently it was urban businessmen who believed it was a way to get people to spend more. Now, I'm all for a healthy national environment for the conduction of business, in fact, I think that our (relatively)

Back again

2005-04-17T22:13:00.000-06:00

Back from Arizona again. Both hospitalized patients are doing well. Dad is up and about after his surgery. His sister has made great strides in reocvering from a nasty infection, but still has a long road ahead of her.More later. Too friggin tired.

Networking fun!

2005-04-09T02:31:00.000-06:00

One of the most aggravating things about having computers as a hobby is the sheer number of different things that can go wrong. I just complained about my new Ubuntu installation, but hey, I'm dealing with that. What has had me going for the last hour is why I couldn't get to google.com with Firefox. I could ping it. I could grab their front page with wget at 20Mb/s, but I point Firefox there and

Kurdistan Bloggers Union

2005-04-09T01:49:00.000-06:00

Another reason that the web is so cool. Want to know what things are like for the Kurds in Iraq? Why not ask them? The cartoon in this entryis astonishing, considering it's from Le Monde.

More Linux laptop fun

2005-04-09T00:56:00.000-06:00

After giving up on the T21 thinkpad, I upgraded to a brand-spanking new (to me, anyway) T23. Resized the Win2K partition to make some room, burned a CD of the latest ubuntu release, and fired away.Dammned if there aren't more problems. Some packages failed to install, leaving me without a working Xorg setup. Some futzing about with aptitude to re-install and at least I have X working, but some

Doom and gloom

2005-04-08T13:26:00.000-06:00

My father is recovering from back surgery this week. We're going back to Arizona to help out while Mom goes back to work. His sister was going to be around instead, but since she just recently came out of the coma she was found in Saturday, she's not really up to it.Now Dad is recovering, my aunt is hassling the hospital staff and life seems to be getting back to normal.And it's late, I need to

5,000 dead bugs later

2005-03-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Back from vacation. We skipped visiting the graveyard. Maybe I shouldn't have, but at the time, it just didn't seem like the thing to do. Spent more time among the living instead. Left the boy with his grandparents for a night, and snuck away with Melissa to spend the night in Bisbee. Caught the old-west show in Tombstone. Saw some of Melissa's old friends in Tucson. All in all, a restful few

Mmmmm...... Vacation

2005-03-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

There is simply no way I can adequately describe how nice it is to not be at work right now.

Exploring the dialectic between personal needs and harsh reality

2005-03-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

What I need: A week in margaitaville.What I'm getting: Four days with my in-laws and a visit to the grave of an old friend.Reality bites.

Why I hate Linux

2005-03-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

That's not really true. I like Linux, I really do. I like using an operating system that I can control. I like the idea of people creating really great software just for fun. I like the fact that I can get the source code and hack at it, although I almost never do. I like not paying for software. But man, sometimes, I just want to give it up and buy a fricking Mac.My laptop worked flawlessly with

Highlights, low points, and the occasional point of inflection.

2005-03-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Should a first blog posting be well-thought-out or just a quickie to get things moving? I'm going with the latter. Really, I'm just trying to get this to work.