The Twilight Report

things that we don't like, and later do like

2006-03-31T21:49:00

For me, perl started out as this programming language that I didn't like because schallee liked it. I had a boss in my summer-job days who liked perl though, so I was forced to use it long enough to realize its power, and now I sometimes joke that English is a second language to my first language: perl (yes, I am a computer dork).

TWiki was introduced to me as this web application that I had to get working ASAP on doublethink, because they fired the only person in The Company who knew how to keep it running. At first I didn't want to use it any more than required to in order to get the job done. Now it is an integral part of the way that I plan and keep track of tasks, and bits of information which needs to be taken care of. I can't imagine living without it, frankly.

(incidentally, TWiki is written in perl, so these things that we don't like at first but come to like tend to build on each other)

There are a lot of things like this, but now that I am looking for work I am actually thankful that I got stuck with TWiki in my last year or so at The Company, because it gives me something concrete to talk about when people ask me certain kind of IT related questions now that I am looking for a job. It really was a good experience, though it didn't seem like it at the time.

Now I am seeing other things that I'm supposed to know that I am sure I will be extremely resistant to adding to my tool set, mainly because they will be some amount of work to learn and (ironically) they aren't perl or TWiki or one of the many other technologies that I already know. Which ones will I later be glad that I know?

I put Photoshop, along with dark room experience and studio lighting on my resumé in part because I had some of that kind of experience, but mostly just for fun, because I couldn't imagine possibly ever using that in my job (which is a pity). Today I actually gave my resumé to someone and he was like "oh, they would actually like someone who knows a little photoshop in addition to all this computer stuff."

L. A.

2005-01-28T12:52:00

In a week I will be in LA, visiting a friend who I have seen exactly once in the past five years. We chat on-line all the time, but I am looking forward to seeing him; hitting the streets, ordering a thing with stuff, transforming into a train and driving around, seeing the easter eggs in the game that he worked on at EA, and generally having a good time.

And all of this... ls_slbd_dtop_pmac and DoubleThink II will be little more than a memory and something which I won't have to worry or care about until March.

Tired

2005-01-25T03:58:00

They must have uploaded a virus into our download stream to counteract the hexadecimal code rectifiers.

I really shouldn't have had that one glass of wine at Joe and Cicely's tonight at Action Tuesday (now scheduled weekly on Mondays). I really should have had two or three. Now it's making me tired and I have to submit some jobs to prove that Parallel Abstraction actually runs faster than Serial Abstraction. One would hope. I should really work on getting DoubleThink II up and running as well, but my mind isn't clear enough to focus on that right now.

They must have uploaded a trojan into our download stream to counteract the hexadecimal code rectifiers.

I was watching that trashy show 24 over at Joe and Cicely's and the bad guys were using massive amounts of bandwidth to hack into the nuclear power plants across the country. All these years I thought it took talent and knowledge to be a hacker, and here I found out all I need is a faster computer! I need to upgrade to a Pentium 4 so that I can hack into the CIA and download Adobe Acrobat and Micro$oft Word. At least they weren't abusing the term virus tonight. No, they instead decided to use trojan incorrectly instead. It really irks me when ever they start using computer techno babble on TV. Now I know how physicists feel when they have to listen to Data or Geordi drone on as they are oft to do.

They must have uploaded a worm into our download stream to counteract the hexadecimal code rectifiers.

I checked in a whole heap of code today. It's the first time in months. I am now hoping that I don't break the build. Lint is useless. It flagged a whole heap of non errors when I checked in my code. This for example is not a syntax error in ANSI C :

...
for(int i=0; i<max; i  )
  ::printf("%d\n", i);
for(int i=0; i<max; i  )
  ::printf("%d\n", i*2);
...

because unlike earlier versions of C , each i is scoped for just its loop, not the entire code block.

Dude, my bastard child of Bill Gates and Debian burned this trojan virus to this cheesy media; have you checked it out yet?

Update: Sure enough, I broke the build.

Insomniac

2005-01-20T09:07:00

Drinking lots of water to compensate for suspected illness. I think the UPS man tried to deliver my iPod today. Must rush home tomorrow before 5 so that I can be here to sign for it. The new AMD64 (Doublethink II) gets posted tomorrow I think, so I might not get that until next week! I can't see how I can possibly get everything done before I go to LA and Australia in February.

Funny... I didn't Ask for a new computer...

2005-01-11T19:46:00

Getting a new computer at work. If you have been reading my tirades of late then you know that I didn't ask for one, but now that I'm getting it I've decided to be gracious in accepting this gift.

It's going to be an AMD64 which means I will gain experience with that platform. It comes with only 512MB RAM, which may not be enough. Paul just reminded me that the pointers are all going to be twice as big for any application running in 64bit mode (and of course the kernel). Still, I used Starscream for years as a web server, and that was an underpowered 64bit machine by today's standards with a staggering low128MB of RAM.

I will christen the machine Doublethink II, and decommission Doublethink I. It will probably then be destroyed so that The Company can depreciate it for tax purposes. Kinda sad really.

Funny thing about this new machine. They are going outside of the normal procurement procedures on this one which means that it will cost a fraction of what it would otherwise. Those of you know which company I work for know how often they give us a computer without The Company logo on it.

doublethink

2005-01-07T17:55:00

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any facts which become inconvenient.

George Orwell 1984

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction and division of society.

John Adams

Doublethink is also the name I chose for my web server at work. It is named for the application it runs, which collates information collected by BigBrother (a component of our tool software which tracks usage) and presents it in a readable way. At some point I inherited a Twiki which is also hosted on doublethink (the machine).

Last year when complaints about the web servers performance were made, I said that the machine needed to be put on a faster network. There is no technical reason why this cannot be done. When I'm at home and I need a new fast Ethernet port, I go to Best Buy and purchase one... here is one for $39.99 [broken link]. The reason this cannot be done at work is that there is security on the port at work so that the IT department can charge us per computer instead by bandwidth. Charging by bandwidth would make sense, since that is the service they are providing, not use of the computer. That is neither hear nor there.

So, as mentioned earlier, there was an "experiemnt" on Wednesday to see if the web server would run faster, as I said it would, on the faster network. The LAN team's position is that the performance problems have nothing to do with bandwidth, but the speed of the machine. Put succinctly, this is rubbish. I knew this, but I ran the test anyway, and sure enough twiki and doublethink (the application) ran much faster on the faster network than it had on the slower network.

I felt vindicated by this result and assumed that we could now push to get port security turned off in my office. I know this has happened for other high priority projects, and now that the managers are using twiki, this has become a high priority.

The guy who is spearheading this little adventure just came by my office to tell me that they are getting me a new computer to replace doublethink (the server). Normally this would fill me with rage because they are obviously not listening to me, but because of recent events I view the entire affair with a rather comforting sense of detachment. Why should I complain, after all, if they give me a new computer? Even if I didn't ask for it.

Still the original doublethink - still humming underneath my desk for now - and I have been through a lot and it will be sad to see her go.

Amazing...

2005-01-05T17:43:00

So we did an "experiment" at work today. Just to let you know the results, the web server was faster on the faster network than it was on the slower network. I realize this shouldn't come as any surprise, but for some reasons this is surprising to people around here.