Those fine folks out at Cupertino have another iteration of their operating system out. They tend to be really good at timing these things, and I find myself contributing to their coffers every year right around my birthday. So after being delayed for a weekend (they didn't ship copies to university bookstores in time for the release, and university bookstore's were selling it for cheaper than the Apple Store), I finally have Leopard. Which is good, I guess. I bought this OS in part because of the promise DTrace held, and in part because of Time Machine. I am currently not doing anything requiring DTrace, and I haven't yet taken the time to teach myself enough about it, and Time Machine requires that I reformat my external, something I am not quite prepared to do yet.
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October 30, 2007
Leopard and General Absence
October 21, 2007
Random Thoughts
Funny man in Rome, fat man in France, strangely unrelated. I am writing an essay on one. The other is this weird childhood memory a book in the living room brings back. There's some sort of a British connection between both, but some connections are worthless. Besides I am pretty sure Roman virtues from the Early Republic had fairly limited appeal for the Gaulic tribes inhabiting France back then. That said, the Gauls seem to have been less Asterix like, and more Spartan like every day. Here lay a group of people who were so fierce that the Romans were afraid of them, fierce not weirdly clever mind you.
I was walking around New York a couple of days ago, one of those short visits where one gets to enjoy expensive hotels and rain. I went to an Afghani restaurant, supposedly owned by someone who was a judge in Kabul in the late 70s. Funny considering his leaving the country would neatly coincide with the rise of the communists, and such things usually have interesting stories. The restaurant itself didn't have a story, it wasn't even exceptionally good. At least I didn't really pay for the food. The rain did actually suck.
I am not sure why I wrote this, I didn't have that much to say. Observations for the night: scheme's cool, coding is fun, writing papers is less fun than it used to be.
Panda
October 16, 2007
Somewhat General Update
I keep meaning to post, but never really get around to doing it. This is somewhat of a general post, glossing over some of the stuff I have been meaning to post about. In reverse chronological order even. We had this startup talk today, and this thing was probably better attended than any recent CS talk in recent history. The free food helped, but considering all the other people give out free food too, that couldn't be the only reason for attendance. It's interesting to look around the room to see who's attending one of these things, for instance today's was attended by quite a few CS professors, professors who don't normally attend these things. And then there were all the other people I had never seen, and the usual CS department attendees at these things. But this in general fits in with Itay and other people's observations about how everyone in the class below us seems to be infected with the startup bug. Well not everyone, but the people we happen to be close to, and it is sort of interesting, since most people my year seem to be looking for more traditional jobs. Traditional jobs with exciting work, but traditional large companies nevertheless, and one wonders what changed between now and then.