Older blog entries for nutella (starting at number 238)

Can't get any sympathy 'round here...

Me: My girlfriend says I am too nerdy because at the moment I keep my whiteboard in the living room.

Colleague: You have a whiteboard?

Miscellanea...

Now that the rain is declining I am trying to walk to work as often as I can. Until lately I have usually tried to make use of the time by spending it planning out my day. However I finally caved and entered the 21st century with a portable audio player. I now have a Sandisk Fuze and after some experimentation it runs Rockbox (3.7.1), mainly because the original firmware will not allow you to add compatible files, other than MP3 format, unless you register at the Sandisk site and install some Windows software. Rockbox works very well (and does waaay too many things) so that I only have to activate the legacy firmware for USB transfers. Beaujolais to the Rockbox developers! The only gotcha was that I don't have easy access to a computer with both an internet connection and administrative privileges. To reduce the chance of bricking Rockbox wants to download the appropriate files for you but I can't install Rock box on the internet machine and can't access the internet from the machine with the Rockbox installation. I didn't know how to get the files directly but then found I had overlooked download.rockbox.org. Doh!

So, I finally deleted my bookmark for Slashdawt. I realise I am probably the last person to do this but I had clung to some positive memories from years gone by (1990s) when postings there were occasionally funny (as well as being duplicates, poorly-spelled, poorly-worded and totally lacking in facts). Alas, the version of the site introduced at the beginning of the year seems to have eliminated humour as well as pumping up the space devoted to adverts. The main symptom is that all article tags have to be in corporate suitspeak. I miss the days of andnothingofvaluewaslost, noshitsherlock, zomgponies and goodluckwiththat. It is also very telling that the recent polls have all been thinly veiled market surveys ("will you be using cloud computing in the future?", "what storage devices do you purchase?"). These days there are better things I can do with a few minutes free time. ANDNOTHINGOFVALUEWASLOST

Another recent goodbye was my local Borders store. I will miss them much more. Unfortunately they decided to play nasty at the end as I received a message that "everything will be 20% - 40% off" and that I could still use my Borders card. I turned up at the store and looked around and could see the prominent "20% Off" labels. After some exploration I gave up and asked one of the staff to point me in the direction of something that was 40% Off. They were unable to do so and argued that "20% - 40% Off" didn't actually oblige them to have anything available with a greater discount than 20%. At the counter I also found the Borders Card was a waste as the person at the register pointed out that they were "not actually Borders any more" but were a liquidation company so they didn't have to honour Borders' offers. (Can you say "Bait and Switch"?) I'm still not awarding them an ANDNOTHINGOFVALUEWASLOST as they've been a source of much happiness over the years. However, I'm less likely to be venturing to any of the remaining stores. Time to make more use of the local independent stores.

One other oddity I noticed recently. Like many of the people I know my Gmail account has lately been bombarded by Tea Party spam ("the sky is falling!"). The weird thing is that Gmail will not allow me to classify it as spam (it always appears in the Inbox). Maybe the crazies have all the Google juice.

Too kind, people. Too kind.

You shouldn't have.

Spam in mailbox has gone down but non-useful new accounts at Advogato seem to be on the rise. I don't know if this is due to their appreciation of Google-juice or due to most real people posting indirectly through syndication, so that they don't see it happening. Having said that, the system for flagging annoyances is a big help.

I realised that I don't read language descriptions for fun any more. This occurred to me when I was writing a little script for my TI-89 Titanium and the syntax for statistical functions was a little bit unexpected. I didn't know this ahead of time because I didn't RTFM in advance. In contrast I have warm and fuzzy memories of a younger me going to the library checking out programming manuals for Fortran, ALGOL and PL/I even though I had no real access to any kind of computing resources to try them out. The nearest I could do at the time was to fill out programming forms with BASIC code and hand them in at school to be mailed off to be typed in to an ICL 2900 Series machine, that we were never able to see. I liked reading those old manuals and in my untutored way I could see the strengths and weaknesses of the languages. I continued reading with Jensen & Wirth's Pascal book (and Wirth's Programming in Modula-2), Leo Brodie's Forth books and Clocksin & Mellish on Prolog. Naturally K&R was easy and compulsory reading.

Now I realise that I don't read manuals for fun any more. I think that this is due to a mixture of recent languages being *big* (there are way too many ways to do things), the availability of electronic help (contextual or through the internet) and because I am older, impatient and more pragmatic. With small languages like C differences in code implementation are more at the algorithmic level (flamewars on brace style notwithstanding) whereas bigger languages have many options to write essentially the same code. This makes bigger languages more for lone coders as they are somewhat write-only (unless institutions force you to use a particular style or your coding partner is your conjoined twin).

This lack of pre-reading was probably exacerbated by my target for today being my TI-89 Titanium. No context-sensitive help there. Graphical calculators are also somewhat schizophrenic as they are simultaneously trying to be a fully fledged computer you can hold in your hand, but also a simple little calculator where functionality is intuitive and you never have to look at a book. Some people think that these calculators will go the way of the sliderule as they are replaced by netbooks and smartphones but I like the challenge of optimising my code so that it takes less than a minute to run. I'm not so much of a junkie that I'm programming with TIGCC or M68k assembler but I have fun. I also don't know whether the designer of this calculator should be shot or praised as the key labeling is illegible under dim or fluorescent light (GAR!) but this means my muscle memory has been forced to improve so now I almost never have to look for the [2ND] or [DIAMOND] functions. Anyway, I should have realised that a calculator with a built-in algebra system would be happiest being told that ranges can stretch to +/-infinity. Instead I watched my mis-implemented code fail when it crossed a particular boundary. It doesn't help that the TISTATLE functions seem to be happiest when called from the List Editor rather than used in a program and the documentation for them is fairly sparse. But it is available...

The human brain is a very weird device, and I can't tell how many background processes I have running at any one time. I will spend some time learning the boundaries of a particular problem and trying some basic solutions. Then I'll forget about it for a long time. Then I'll wake up with a hunch that I have to try. This happened this morning and netted me a somewhat obscure victory.

I have a quick script on my TI-89Ti to run linear regression on a pair of lists, spit out some statistics and then plot the data and the regression line. It can be a nice thing to have on a portable device. The one glitch that was keeping me from nirvana was that I couldn't easily limit the regression line so as to be plotted in the region encompassed by the data. In "TI-BASIC" (cough cough) the lists for a data plot have to be stored (not program-local) variables, so it makes sense to call the program with pointers to those lists as the arguments:

progName("arg1","arg2")

(putting the quote marks around a variable name turns it into a pointer) and you can then dereference the pointers when you need to in the program code:

LinReg #list1, #list2

where e.g. list1 is the variable name of the first argument defined in the program prototype. You can create a function graph of the resulting regression line with:

Define y1(x)=regeq(x)

but this will give you a line that stretches through +/- infinity (or at least crosses the entire graphics window). So you can constrain the domain of that function using "WITH" limitations, e.g.:

Define y1(x)=regeq(x) | x>0

which will limit the display of the line to the region with the dependent variable greater than zero. I wanted to limit the upper end of the line to the data and you can calculate that as max(#list1) so you *should* be able to use:

Define y1(x)=regeq(x) | x>0 and x<max(#list1)

but the interpreter does not parse that before passing it to the Y= Editor to set it up for function graph display. The ugly method I had been using was to save the x limit as a non-local variable and then referring to it for the limit in the definition. This morning I woke up with the idea of packing the graph definition into an expression that could be interpreted prior to it being delivered to the Y= Editor. So this ended up being:

expr("Define y1(x)=regeq(x) | x>0 and x<max(" & list1 & ")")

Nirvana! The bizarre thing is that I hadn't known that my mind was working on this. I'm now worried that part of my brain's capacity is occupied working on optimising some difficult Lego building exercise from when I was 5. People who say that we only use a fraction of our brain's capacity should probably be forced to qualify the statement to indicate that we're only using a fraction of the brain's capacity "for what we are working on consciously at this moment in time".

Yikes, is it nearly a year since my last post? I have been reading and enjoying Advogato on an almost daily basis but haven't had the time or inclination to write. My personal life has been way more interesting than it has been for a long time, so I'll see how it all works out.

This post was partly provoked by a previous entry by someone talking about R, which I have now been using regularly for over six months. I'm still using MATLAB and Mathematica, but R has all that Free Software goodness, which means I can just send the scripts to my colleagues and let them play. The other person's post was about graphics, and I believe that they were using the lattice/trellis form. That's overkill for my needs. However, one glitch I have encountered is with split.screen() as multiple runs of the script with different row and column values causes problems and I can't find where the persistent value is stored. Things I don't particularly like about R are the sparse documentation and poor examples (better than nothing) and that the language is big and doesn't follow the principle of Least Surprises (I am reduced to web searches for capabilities). One thing I do like is the Tinn-R editor.

The other provocation for this post was this XKCD gem.

Calculator frenzy!
I mentioned before that I have a Ti89 at work and this was recently spotted by an HP-phile colleague. To show off to me I now have their HP 50g on extended loan and I have to say that I am quite jealous. I love that Forth-like goodness of the RPL option and some of the more weird (but useful) functions. I miss the spreadsheet-like Table Editor of the Ti89, but I should be able to mimic that with vector manipulations on the HP - and there are also some third party apps for the HP. I'll play with it some more. I'm hoping that someone else has an NSpire CAS for further comparisons, but I hear that one is a bit of a disappointment.

Yes, it has been over a year since my last post. I've been reading Advogato regularly in the interim but haven't felt moved to write anything.

The trigger this time was experiencing some strange behaviour in my Advogato diary. Maybe I'm seeing the result of code designed to stop spam. Basically most of the hyperlinks in my old diary entries are served artificially so as to point back to my diary. The text of the affected diary entries is unchanged as if I open the entry in [Edit] mode the original links are there. This starts about 32 entries ago. It is not caused by bad links (most of them still work) and they are a mix of random .org, .com and even some .gov sites. I don't see anything about this in the FAQ. Feature or bug?

A fair portion of my older entries describes activities intended to keep old boxen functioning well past their compulsory retirement age. Since my last entry I moved (to a house!) which meant a cycle of packing and unpacking, which meant testing to see that everything survived (although the journey was short). Nearly everything works fine but I've been spurred into shopping for CMOS batteries - maybe I ought to have a regular replacement schedule the way that some do for smoke detectors. One hard drive (a problem-era Western Digital) refuses to spin up and some boxes required component jiggling to reseat memory and expansion cards. The other failure unrelated to the move was the LCD for my IBM T23 laptop. This had been a little flakey (a row of pixels would occasionally turn black) and was caused by me abusing it, often lifting it up by the open lid, and possibly due to my habit of running it without the battery (a state which might have reduced structural itegrity - as it did for my TP500). I grabbed it one too many times and the whole panel darkened and died (not just the backlight). Unlike the person in the Slarshdawt thread I decided to fix it and managed to find a local supplier of refurbished (ex-RMA machine) panels - Alan Computech in Union City. It arrived by UPS. It works. They also gave me a crazy (40%) Mothers' Day week discount. So far so good. This also gives me a better appreciation of the fragility of laptops so, for the meantime at least, I am being a little more gentle with my 8-year old ThinkPad.

Weird! It seems that a reasonably high proportion of the time I visit Central Computers (San Francisco or Santa Clara) Don Marti is there. Clone? Mistaken identity? Eerie coincidence?

Zoiks! Is it just me (Firefox 2.0.0.11) or did someone (<cough> adulau <cough>) forget to close a [bold] tag in their RSS feed?

1 Dec 2007 (updated 1 Dec 2007 at 17:44 UTC) »

While using truly Free software allows totally unrestrained joy when passing on tips and tricks to others, there's still some happiness to be gained when the software is proprietary but the recipients of the tip are people with whom you work. Here in the Real World[TM] I have to deal with (non computer) hardware manufacturers who sell overpriced computers running horrible equipment control software and who refuse to give you the "administrator" password, presumably because they believe you'd immediately copy the kludgey software to a more affordable box. Argh! Mercifully there's also equipment specific software written by Real Programmers and they've embedded macro languages that allow you to express yourself and get the job done. Thank you, Oh Sensible Ones! Today I managed to use such a a TIMTOWTDI rich macro language in a strange way and it was clearly The Right Way. It was so beautiful. My co-workers immediately appreciated the extra stability and efficiency, if not the beauty of the code. That was reward enough.

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