ThePanda

Amusing how problems change to counter your predictions, this could be in part because of one of the Hitchhiker’s Guides pronouncements, “the moment someone begins to understand the universe, the universe rapidly degenerates into an altogether more complex place”, and well where if not in problems, does the true meaning of the universe lie. It is the day after Thanksgiving, one which has been altogether different from last years, one where I joined something like ten other people for umm an actual (?) Thanksgiving dinner, and listening to amongst other things, Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Heavy Metal Christmas, which despite its name I can thoroughly recommend. This has been a somewhat nice Thanksgiving break, though I have lesser amounts of code written so far than I had hoped for, which probably means I’ll be spending a larger portion of tonight, tomorrow and the day-after coding. No the STL is not a problem, in fact over the years people have done an amazing job of documenting it, no it is Intel’s PNL that is the cause of my current woes, it being well documented in a way that every major function has been ignored, and leading me to rely to an unholy extent on example code, which is perhaps the way hackers usuall hack, but come on, it never hurt anyone to provide good documentation for their libraries. Lulling me into a falks sense of security by providing documentation which is unusable does not bode well for people/me :D.

It snowed Wednsday night, and into early Thursday morning, with the coming of snow I am happy to report we finally have winter. For a while there I was worried about where the winter had dissapeared, it is not exactly natural to have really warm 70 degree weather at the end of November, while still in the northern hemisphere, specifically in parts of the northern hemisphere where such things as snow are to be expected…

I have been spending part of this break (that would be the part where I am not sleeping or eating, sound familiar, well OK there’s also the small amounts of coding, and wadling through code which needs to be better written) reading stuff by Isaac Babel, and while I like most of his writings, he doesn’t quite fit into my view of Russian literary authors. For one he’s both a pre- and post-revolution author, having been killed during the purges ordered by Stalin, however he doesn’t write like any of the other Russian authors I seem to have read. He complains of the Tsarist treatment of Jews, and anti-semitism in pre-revolution Russia, but yet does not seem to either embody as much of the anoyance, or anger some of his contemprories do, he seems to be content in skating along the line of accepted doctrine, and not complaining to an extent where his books would be banned, something which is very different from most of the other Russian authors affected by the purges. Well the book says he was a big follower of Gorky, and I really haven’t read too much Gorky, and most of what I remember about Gorky is the disdain with which Solzenithsyn describes him in the First Circle, and I like Solzenithsyn, and he seems to think of Gorky as this author who toes the official line, who wrote for the party bosses.

I have been watching parts of Firefly, the TV series on which Serenity was based, and while I admit that due to circumstances not entirely controlled by me, I have never actually seen the movie, but the TV show so far seems like fun, it has the requisite Farscapish attitude to life in space, while still not being Farscape (fewer creatures involved, though there are certainly characters who resemble some of the characters from Farscape, there’s definitely the Trillian like character, the inocent, but not naive ship mechanic, there are others out there, sure as hell beats wading through example code for the PNL.

We are going through the entire Secret Santa exercise again this year, ooh what fun, except people almost brought in exclusion lists, there being people they did not want to give out gifts to, there being people they did not want to receive gifts from, amusing what living together does. It seems like every nightmarish scenario we ran over last year as a part of arguing whether the house was a good idea or a bad one has come to bear out on us already, and the first semester’s hardly over. I have never been happier at people leaving, and going their separate ways, and writing towards the end of this break, I am not really happy about imagining people coming back to the house anytime soon, sure it is inevitably true that they will, but I do not wish to have them back this soon…

Hmm I feel like eschewing words of wisdom on coding practices which suck. Do not for the love of God, ever equate ints and pointers in C, or C++ code, I am sure you have a valid reason for getting an address into a numeric data type, but some of us people who work on university computers end up working on 64-bit machines (with certain of the new Pentium-4 class, Prescot machines supporting a 64-bit mode, this is not exactly rare, and umm ClawHammer and SledgeHammer, ehem excuse me, Athlon64s, being out for a while, there is no excuse for you not knowing about 64-bit machines) which have Linux kernels compiled to use 64 bit modes, and it really is quite a pain explaining to your machine why a 64 bit data type (pointers are 64 bit long) is being squeezed into a 32-bit (ints), and when your oh-so-cool library happens to be accessible in 20 languages, and other such things, it isn’t exactly easy going through figuring out such changes and then changing the ints to longs there, because honestly people use casts more often than they should. Casts rock and suck simultaneously.

Oh and what is up with DiskUtilities not allowing FAT16/32 and HFS+ partitions to exist simultaneously, I could swear this was OK with everyone not that long ago. Bah, Mac OSX is in serious need of some new partitioning tools, non-destructive partitioning which actually works, hmm…

So there are more than three people in the house right now, and it still is quite, with no real underlying stress points, I guess what SCE mentioned some weeks ago is true, dealing with people as individuals is so much better than dealing with them as a group. Oh well, I am going to cross my fingers and wait for all of them to come back, wait for the trenches to be reinhabited, and wait for the mines to be laid again, and perhaps familiarity and a break would have made people saner.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 1:54 pm and is filed under article, meaningful labor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.