The Twilight Report

Ivan

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:54:00 GMT

I have an overseas coworker named Ivan, and yes he is terrible. I have another overseas coworker named Alexander and he's great. That is all for now.

picnic

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:14:00 GMT

On Saturday we had a very nice picnic in Rock Creek Park. Sunday it rained. All Day Long.

firepit

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 22:41:00 GMT

fort foote

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:49:00 GMT

Defending Washington from the South.

baldness

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 20:52:00 GMT

this:

www.facebook.com/BeautifulandBaldBarbie

reminded of of her:

en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ilia

They were talking about the beautiful and bald Barbie campaign on NPR.

crackers

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Here is an excerpt from a recording my mum made for nanna and grandpa in 1980 when we were living in Connecticut. It is a moment in time shortly after arriving in the United States and long before I ever came to terms with the fact that in English there is a name to meaning hash collision with my name.

I got some

Hello I mean

Hello folks!

I got Graham Crackers I had them for lunch

(mum) Breakfast.

Break- break- breakfast and lunch

(mum) We don't have them for lunch, Graham Crackers are for Breakfast cereal.

I was really talking about Graham Cracker biscuits.

(mum) Oh, that's right, they do have Graham Cracker biscuits too, don't they.

(mum) There's lots of Graham Crackers in America in all sorts of different shapes and sizes aren't there.

Yeah

(mum) I wonder why they named them after you?

Yeah. I wonder.

That's my name.

AND I LIKE YOU AND THIS IS THE POINT I LIKE YOU.

I sound almost wistful when I say “Yeah. I wonder.”

The theme of my liking my grandparents is common throughout the tapes. The significance of this passage is that in Australia they don't have Graham Crackers (or Dr Pepper) whereas they do exist in America (but they don't have Vegemite)^[1]. I believed for a long time when I was younger that my parents had made a terrible mistake in naming me Graham because kids used to tease me calling me by calling me Graham Crackers. Things were happier when I figured out that kids teased me because they could get a rise out of me, and the best thing was not to let their jeers bother me. Now of course I love my name and you couldn't pay me enough to part with it. Even in Australia it is not common amongst people my age.

Mum was here for the weekend. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about the bullying culture in Australia. My mum says that Australia has a bullying culture. I mentioned the film that has been released here lately without a rating: Bully. One of the people involved in the film said that in New Jersey (for example) they have very comprehensive set of laws and procedures to stamp out bullying in the schools, but they are not (in the film makers eyes at least) effective. He said that you need to get the kids themselves to police themselves. For bystanders to say “dude, that is not cool.” It sounds like the right goal, though I am not sure how you get from here to there. Mum described how she was trying to change the environment in her organization to one based on teamwork rather than every-man-for-himself.

The idea is that you don't make a comprehensive list of rules about how you should or should not behave, but you instead take a couple of steps back and remind yourself that we're on the same side here, how can we work together. It's not easy accomplishing that. A few weeks after starting at NetCon, PHP Guy said something disparaging about Women and Perl. I take offense at both, but I should have at least said something about his being demeaning of women, because it is comments like that which contribute to a hostile work environment. When I was working on my presentation recently, one of the Professional Services guys tried to bully me, but I didn't bite. I told my boss about it and he of course completely dismissed my concerns because my boss is a jerk. Interestingly, the guy who tried to bully me was an Australian, so maybe my mum is right.

it's also worth knowing that in Australian English the word biscuits is used when in American English you'd say cookie

8 bit april fools

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:01:00 GMT

Well played Google and Square, but I am pretty sure there should be more desert in Australia.

reflecty

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 14:36:00 GMT

a penguin and an onion walk into a bar

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:16:00 GMT

There are three things on my bumper. The Penguin represents the cool collected logic of winter, the Onion represents home cooking and a sense of family, the Dirt represents mother earth from which all things are formed. Well, actually the Penguin is named Tux and is the spokesbird for the Linux kernel, the Onion is a reference to the Perl programming language^[1] and the dirt is simply because I am too lazy to clean my car. The only thing missing from my bumper are Decepticon and NPR logos. My mum is visiting and she noted the differing organizational structure that Lena and I employ with regard to our desks in the computer room. I favour the “strata” or “geologic” organizational scheme, while Lena prefers a more structured approach. Mum and I are going to the Smithsonian tomorrow to maybe play Pac-Man and maybe Flower. Lena and I went to The Art of Video Games exhibit a few weeks ago. All of those games I grew up with^[2] are now in a museum.

just as an aside, depending on context a onion, a camel or a butterfly can represent Perl, but I have never seen a pearl representing Perl
well at least some of them

FindBin in ruby land

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:44:00 GMT

I needed an equivalent to Perl's FindBin in ruby. The usual explanation given by rubiest is thus:

File.dirname __FILE__

This badly misunderstands the nuance of FindBind, and is wrong in two important details for my needs:

I want to find the directory for which the program is, not the current ruby source file (hence equivalent to FindBin).
I am sending this path to another program and relative paths will not do, which this construct could easily generate depending on how the program was run (again, FindBin handles this).

The correct appears answer is:

File.dirname File.expand_path $0

There are probably some caveats and it probably isn't portable (FindBin is), but it will be good enough for my needs.

Developing the same library in two separate languages is interesting, as you see relative merits of each. I miss this construct from Perl:

sub foo {
  local $0 = 'some test value';
  ...
}

local is used less often in modern Perl than my, but it still has utility, here I am temporarily assigning a value to $0, and don't have to worry about forgetting to restore the value. This is critical if foo is a non-trivial subroutine and returns from multiple locations. I personally find the scoping rules in Perl to be much more powerful than those in Ruby, and more expressive of intent if used carefully. Ruby's scoping rules are certainly less complicated, and thus easier to learn.

C Ruby 1.9.3 has a slightly less rubbish garbage collector than in previous versions. Unfortunately it is still not copy-on-write friendly. C Ruby has proper OS level threads, but they do not utilise more than one CPU core because of the GIL. Perl threads are pretty rubbish as well because each thread is its own interpreter, and this wastes a lot of memory, but at least they are properly concurrent, and at least forking lots of Perl workers is a real option on UNIX because the kernel support copy-on-write.

I really like blocks, closures and meta programming in Ruby, they remind me of some of my favourite features of the Perl programming language.

days become weeks

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:13:00 GMT

I don't think I have ever looked forward to going to Australia so much. I think maybe because this is the first time I was coming back since living here for four years. Living here wasn beutiful, but sometimes not quite right. I told my mum that I wanted to live in Australia for three months of the year with more conviction than usual. Maybe in a year or so I can make an arrangement with NetCon for this. Ideally it would be before my mum sells grandma's house so I'd have a place to live. I think we'd keep the house so long as there was someone to live there. I was living there until I moved back to the states.

I have a few more days left down under. I've done everything that I wanted to do on this trip and I have enjoyed every day here. I'll be ready to go back when it is time.

smoke

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Smokey Sydney after the fireworks.

Same shot this morning.

nye

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:22:00 GMT

Happy New Year!

Lena and I saw in the new year in Sydney. Hello to everyone stll in 2011, catch up already :)

nikon new year

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:08:00 GMT

Rumor about the Nikon pro level camera replacement (commonly referred to its probable product name “D4”) popped up today on the usually reliable nikonrumors.com. The D800 (which will be Nikon's replacement for the D700, which I own) is expected to be announced at about the same time, probably early next year. I jokingly told Lena that she might inherit my D700 if the D4 specs are sufficiently drool worthy. The differences between the rumored D4 and D800 seem to be more significant than the differences between their predecessors the D3s and D700, as Nikon attempts to differentiate the two lines. The D800 will have a higher megapixel sensor aimed at gear heads who think that is important whereas the D4 will have high fps and low light capability which professional photographers appreciate.

english

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:29:00 GMT

electronic gadgets

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:25:00 GMT

Electronic gadgets I plan on taking on the flight to Australia with me for entertainment:

Nintendo 3DS + Super Mario 3d Land
Kindle Fire (for movies? I won't be getting it till Monday probably so not really sure how useful it will actually be)
Kindle 2 (for books)
Thinkpad T500
Bose QuietConfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones

... and I will probably just sleep through the flight anyway.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and someone made a comment about 2007 being the stone age of technology, because we didn't have “apps”. Call me crazy, and phone apps are handy for some things, but I still appreciate having a computer with enough processing power to run applications without having to use trendy abbreviations. Do I sound like an old person yet? I know that the rate of change on technology accelerates that process.

test

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:06:00 GMT

Way back, between when I was working on ChipBench and when I was working on EinsTimer at The Company, I had a temporary assignment with the lawyers to clear a third product (BooleDozer) so they could sell the source code to another party. A lot of the other developers I talked to disparaged the lawyers, and having to work with lawyers. I enjoyed the work and the lawyers, or at least one of the lawyers that I worked with. It was a nice change from the work that I normally did, and it wasn't random, I was qualified for the work.

Today I was asked to do some testing, which turns my usually approach to everything on its head. Usually as a Software Engineer, I get defects on my code, or worse yet on Bad Code or His Highness' code and I have to fix it. As a Test Engineer, I get to push buttons and try to break stuff and open defects when I find broken stuff. The best part is that defects instead of feeling like a burden feel like an accomplishment. I opened three defects today. Awesome. And I don't have to fix them. Awesomer.

Will I want to go back to being a Software Engineer tomorrow?

Oh, and I sent the defects to Bad Code. Awesomest.

film

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:04:00 GMT

My dad once told (I think it was) Lena that I was a film snob. In some respects I take it as a sort of back handed compliment, yes, I do think film is an art form, but no, I can enjoy trashy films too in the right context. I've been watching the Robocop movies for example, the first one was surprisingly deep, although they look really dated. It's like the future except people still have wood paneled station wagons and laptops the size of desktops. I wouldn't really recommend any of them, but ever since I read an article explaining that the first movie was full of Christian symbolism I decided I needed to see it. My mum downloaded the 25th anniversary episode of the (Australian) ABC's At the Movies for me, because I can't download it being outside of Aussie, and I really appreciate the thought. David picked two movies in his best of the last two and half decades that I had actually seen, All About My Mother and Lantana, both of which were good examples of film as art. I really miss their reviews. They consist of detailed analysis of the film, followed by a heated argument about the relative merits of the film, and then they rate them to within half a star of each other despite said heated argument. I care less about the stars though, and more about what they have to say. I like how they deconstruct film as an art form. Lantana was such a good film that I invited my friends over when I was still living in New York and fed them Australian lamb while forcing them to watch it. I thought the film was amazing, and my friends were too polite to say otherwise if they didn't like it.

australian politics

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Australian politics explained using youtube cat videos.

qantas

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:35:00 GMT

Dreamt that I was flying to Sydney on Qantas, only there was a mix up in the booking and when I got to Kingsford Smith International I got transferred to a regional airport which didn't actually have a landing strip so I had to take a bus. They didn't let me get out at SYD, even though that is where I needed to go. When I got to hicksville, a gay bar tender was hitting on me, to which I responded that I was flattered but not interested.

Qantas was probably on my mind because of the recent lock out and government intervention, or maybe because they just signed up with NetCon as a customer. The last time a gay man was interested in me in that way though was way back in college when creepy Clint and and creepy Trina followed Guthrie, Tyler and myself around, apparently because they lacked anything better to do in their directionless lives. Trina was engaged to an unseen character who by all accounts was the punch first and ask question later type. She had the unrequited hots for Tyler who was at the time already spoken for, but even if he wasn't probably not interested. Clint and Trina initially took a dislike to me, but one day Trina called me up pretending to be Clint to play a trick on me, but she got to know me better in the course of the call and decided that I was not a bad person. I retrospect the whole calling me up pretending to be someone else thing should have been a red flag, but instead I told her not to do it again and forgave her. I was the unwanted fifth wheel in a love triangle mostly between Guthrie and Ellen and my sad tale of woe somehow endeared myself to Clint in particular. He decided that not only was I gay, but my friendship with Guthrie had homosexual overtones. I've always been comfortable with my sexuality, so you can make up your own mind. In short, Clint and Trina are the sort of train wreck that really ought to be avoided by anyone with any sense. Tyler recognized this almost immediately. I was sort of neutral on the two of them, being obsessed with my own drama hinted at by the whole Guthrie and Ellen situation. Guthrie though, he was the one who let them into our lives. That train wreck was his fault.