Wednesday 10 April 2002

Dan was learning about comparing strings and how when you have a statically created string and a dynamically created string, you can't compare them directly using equality. He had discovered the library function to do so before I had come in. I added (helpfully, or at least I think so) that he should put the strings into canonical form if he wants the test to be robust. This was my head-smacking a-ha moment to the quandary I was in earlier. Dah-rr! 9:55:01 PM    comment []

Late start today. Woke up fuzzy headed. When Dad got excited about the time I swore I stared at the blamed oven clock for two minutes, not knowing what he was talking about. Sure it’s 8:45, we’ll catch the 9:13. I woke up an hour late! Thank you, DST! 9:45:53 PM    comment []

At around three, when I finally deigned to look, I found out I had moderator status again on Slashdot. 9:02:59 PM    comment []

This morning, I tried to purchase Rosetta using the Kagi secure order form over the Net. No go; they declined my Mastercard. I used it at the train station, and it worked. I tried my Visa debit card; it was declined as well. I am not sending a check. 8:45:54 PM    comment []

categories: Regrets; Things that are Gone

Last night I had to restart Mac OS X. Uptime: just about seven days. Nuts. The trackpad and mouse were tracking fine, but the applications (including the Finder and Dock) were not responding to mouseDowns or mouseUps. The Dock registered mouseEnters when I Cmd-Tabbed through the open applications. Fsck -y showed a bunch of orphaned nodes, and a second one rearranged something. I think it was because I didn't have the TiBook in a sleeve when I banged against the construction scaffolding going into the subway at Pearl St. Frick. Speaking of uptime, isn’t there an Uptime screen saver? 8:41:02 PM    comment []

Whoops. Forgot to mention: first full day of registered Radio bliss. 2:52:53 AM    comment []

categories: Hostage to Crap

Oh my golly! I am so very much an Aquarius bastard! I picked How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Signat Barnes & Noble along with J Crowley, A D Foster, G Cook (!), a TCP/IP programming book, Poetry, Game Developer, and a Creeley compilation. It’s for women, but when I read about the Aquarius bastard, I had to buy it because of all the coffee, which is also the reason I’m up at this time. 2:40:30 AM    comment []

I think I’m on to something here concerning a pattern language for complex systems. Now, if one can envision a complex system as a series of reproducible events (with bounded, defined effects) upon a known (or empty, which amounts to the same thing) state, then that system is itself reproducible. This pattern is heavily used in creating discrete event simulations of real-world phenomena. Ultimately, any object instantiation usually participates in a rudimentary form of this pattern, which probably means it is not as powerful as I think it is. It all comes down to the single processor; since all desktop computer systems at some point have been created by the serial processing of assembly code by the single processor, then this pattern holds for any system you want to represent on a single-processor machine. Anyway, the smaller the effects of the individual events (and shouldn’t we try to make these trees granular and orthogonal?) the finer the grain of the resolution of the system itself. The larger the effects, the more compact the representation. Complex systems can usually be constructed as trees, and trees without cycles can be traversed by means of a stream (or iterator), which is a serialization pattern. 2:10:09 AM    comment []

categories: Computationally Minded

Installed OuroborOSX preview 2. I really like how it integrates with the other applications. It doesn’t seem to have a virtual desktop though. [note: I put the link up, because every week or so someone dings this particular entry with the same misspelling of OroborOSX that I had. Good luck, whoever you are! —Allan, 9 June 2002] 1:50:55 AM    comment []