The Advogato Experience
Boy, milestone 16 sure makes reading Advogato a pleasant experience. A fair sight better than Netscape 4.7, at least.

Coding
I signed up my project on sourceforge.net - it's called " Flashlike", because it's supposed to read/generate files in the Macromedia Flash format. I'm new to library design, but I'm learning a lot, just thinking about what the interface really needs, and really shouldn't have. I hope to have it in way-pre-alpha phase soon.

On the road again...
The big move is rapidly approaching, from Ann Arbor to Boston. It's nerve-wracking, but everything's coming together.

Forgive me, icemonk, for I have sinned. It has been several days since my last diary entry... :)

Don't look now, but...

I scored one of those convex-rear-view-mirror doodads for my monitor (I lucked out, by walking into our marketing director's office at just the right time - thanks, 'ILOVEYOU'!), and it give me a nice angle of the world behind me.

Problem is, I haven't gotten used to it yet, so I think I hear something, and start turning around, and realize halfway there that I don't have to. ("Must... retrain... neck...")

Algorithms

andrei, I was just reading Programming Pearls this weekend, and Bentley was working on a very similar problem in chapter 12 (for generating random test examples, I think). Here's hoping I remember it correctly: (pseudo-code, of course)

int num_needed, num_available; /* pre-initialized */
List NewList;
for (element = List->first; 
      element->next != NULL;
      element = element->next) {
    if (@random@number@ < (num_needed/num_available)) {
        append(NewList, element); /* sort of - really just
the data */
        num_needed--;
    }
    num_available--;
}

"@random@number@" and "append" are mostly hand-waving, of course. This should guarantee that you'll get exactly num_needed elements in the new list, and the order from the original list is maintained (I wasn't sure whether that was important, from your posts). And I believe the distribution is uniform, too.

I hope this matches the problem you're working on.

Connections

I think my ISP's having problems with e-mail. I mean, when was the last time I got absolutely *no* e-mail in an entire evening? What are the odds? It's like a ghost town in that mailbox - I keep getting the whistle from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly every time I tab past that window.

My desktop got a lot cleaner when I discovered PowerShell. Well, my computer desktop, at least. My physical desktop's still beyond hope.

First diary entry

I must admit, the first time or two that I came to Advogato, I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. But I think I'm adapting. Browsing recent diary entries is cool!

I'm currently trying out the Hacker's Diet, because it makes sense to me, and because I really need to lose weight. I'm finding that being on a calorie restriction makes me pretty cranky, which is a switch from my usually quiet, laid-back demeanor. But, somewhat surprisingly, I'm finding that being cranky is kinda fun. (Well, for me, at least.) I find that I have to guard what I say more carefully, especially responding to webmaster e-mails and tech requests.

Boy, there's so many cool open source projects out there that I'd love to be involved in, but absolutely no time to do them! Sometimes, having a wide range of interests sucks.

That's it for me. I hope everybody's doing okay.