The Glass is Half Full of Guinness, Half Empty of Harp

lexical_closure @ 2009-10-31T17:36:00

2009-10-31T22:37:34Z

My children decided, collectively and without each other's knowledge, to be "Internet Cliche" for Halloween this year. (Correction: I have been reliably informed that my wife was heavily involved in the outcome of costume selection)

My oldest son decided he wanted to be a Ninja.
My youngest son decided he wanted to be a Pirate.

Together, they combine to form ....

Ninja Kitty!

2009-10-16T15:09:19Z

So check this out -

We have some people coming over to do some work on the house, so we put some food & water in the laundry room and put Chaos in there so that she won't get in the workers way while they're here. (there's plenty of room in there for her to move about and the like, confined on a temporary basis - she's usually got the run of the whole house).

She is launching herself at the door handle and OPENING THE DOOR. She is doing this repeatedly, it is not an accident.

NINJA KITTY!

Yay for cheesy horror flicks

2009-08-23T02:36:50Z

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113349/

The house I lived in from the time I was six until around twelve is in this movie for a quick split second at the start.

lexical_closure @ 2009-08-02T23:39:00

2009-08-03T04:41:40Z

My wife rented E.T. for the boys a while ago, and they didn't want to watch it. I saw it today on one of the free on-demand channels we have, put it on, and tried to get them to watch it. I knew they'd avoid "E.T." ... so I told them they should come watch "Dude, Where's My Alien?".

They didn't buy it. But they giggled a lot. ;)

lexical_closure @ 2009-05-20T09:04:00

2009-05-20T14:06:40Z

There are people on top of my house tearing the roof off.

I have White Wedding stuck in my head, but Billy Idol is wailing about how it's a nice day for new roofing.

(We needed a roof, bad - and the hailstorm that hit a while ago cracked one of the glass pieces on the overhang, one of the ones that covers the inside - so we did an insurance claim for whatever damage the hailstorm did and we're using ti to put a new roof on)

To effect the proper use of effect would affect those who do not use affect

2009-05-03T02:27:52Z

I keep seeing people write effect when they mean affect. Effect and affect as verbs have different meanings, and ... I wouldn't call it annoying, it just jars my reading flow a little.

But I don't want to be that guy who runs around correcting what people write on the Innernets. That guy can be an asshole. ;)

lexical_closure @ 2009-04-14T03:36:00

2009-04-14T08:47:03Z

I'm not sure he's thought this through:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090414/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_journalist_detained_2

Jamshidi criticized the United States on Tuesday for saying Saberi was innocent and
calling for her release.

"That a government expresses an opinion without seeing the indictment is laughable," he told a
press conference.

When the government in question is the government that would have received any classified information, according to what Iran is saying the charges are, why would that government need to see the indictment to make a judgment? I mean, the State Department might be lying, or not know for sure (through not asking or whatever - but it's certainly not laughable to think our government wouldn't know, somewhere, whether this journalist is actually a spy. I would certainly think that, say, the appropriate agency of the U.S.S.R. knew, somewhere, that the Rosenbergs were giving them data ...

So I think his statement can be pretty safely chalked up as 'political bullshit'.

Writer's Block: Grab and Go

2009-04-07T04:56:59Z

Scenario: For exactly 1 minute, you get access to all the databases of all the intelligence agencies in the world (CIA, FBI, KGB, MI-5, etc). What do you want to find out before time is up and you're caught and jailed forever?

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If I were actually in that situation, I'd probably be looking for something that my having knowledge of would allow me to somehow prevent them from jailing me forever. (Such info probably doesn't actually exist, but it's what I'd be looking for, for sure).

lexical_closure @ 2009-04-06T23:44:00

2009-04-07T04:49:06Z

The coin flips of randomness in the NCAA tournament bracket brought me 4th place in the group of people playing at work and dropped me in the 69th percentile overall.

Obama beat the coins by 180 points, and I'm wondering if Nixon ever played fantasy football.

lexical_closure @ 2009-04-03T13:58:00

2009-04-03T18:58:56Z

Hmm.

I'm dead last in the bracket standings for the March Madness thing at work. If UNC wins twice, I come in third. Not too bad for flipping coins ...

lexical_closure @ 2009-03-19T13:56:00

2009-03-19T18:59:09Z

Every year, my boss sends out a link to the ESPN march madness bracket thing. Last year was the first year I actually made a bracket. Understand, now, that I know jack about basketball - so last year I just picked based on what teams I thought were cool, and did OK at the very start but ended up at the bottom of the group by the end of it all.

This year, I ran down each game, flipping a coin, starting with the first round of games, then going to the next one, etc.

I expect it to be much like last year, but at the moment, the coin flips are three for three.

Edit: Currently ahead of President Obama. (That will probably change, but it's funny ;) )

Are you kidding me???

2009-01-23T07:29:22Z

About to fall asleep, watching court TV ...

There's a show called "Principal's Office".

I just watched a coach at a high school somewhere give about ten or so kids detention for standing and talking at the back of a truck in the parking lot. At a high school with a grand total of 509 students. The rule they broke was that they're supposed to go straight in to the cafeteria after parking their cars. The justification for this rule was "sometimes kids do drugs or make out in their cars"

So bust the kids that do drugs or make out in their cars. Seriously. "You get detention because you're standing in the parking lot" just seems so insane to me. To be fair, one kid made a slightly smart alec remark ... but still, all of them? I can understand that kind of discipline (if one messes up, all messed up) in the military, especially in boot camp, but in high school?

I mean, technically they were in fact breaking a school rule. The rule they broke just seems so ridiculous to me in the first place, though.

lexical_closure @ 2009-01-15T08:33:00

2009-01-15T14:36:27Z

I used to listen to Suicidal Tendencies just cranked to the max - and I liked pretty much every song. There's a song here and there now that I can still get into - but I'm all up on pandora radio right now, and "I Feel Your Pain And I Survive" came on - and I'm not into it. I used to really, really like that song.

Cake's "The Distance" falls into the queue, and I'm all into it.

Maybe I was a really, really, pissed off at the world kid back then. And I'm not that kid anymore.

lexical_closure @ 2009-01-02T11:53:00

2009-01-02T18:25:28Z

There really ought to be a simple protocol for network card games that's standard. As far as I can tell, there isn't one.

I'm going to be making one, loosely modeled on the IRC protocol, but initially I'm only going to handle one game type.

Basically, what I'm doing is building a Hold-Em server, and I want it to be extensible enough to handle any game that can be modeled as one or more players sitting at a table with cards.

lexical_closure @ 2009-01-01T02:45:00

2009-01-01T09:34:37Z

My deal-card function is basically a Knuth shuffle spread out over multiple calls to the deal-card routine. E.G. (shuffle-deck deck) just resets the card count, the actual "shuffling" is done by deal-card.

I originally implemented this by making my deck type a vector with a fill pointer - the fill pointer being the means to hide the already dealt cards in the deck. In other words, I'd grab a random number from 0 to the fill pointer (which is (random 53) for a newly allocated deck, making the range 0-52 inclusive, exactly what we want for a proper Knuth shuffle), get the new fill pointer value (one less than whatever it was before), and do the card swap, returning whatever card was at the random offset we picked.

This worked great - but when I told the compiler to be fast, it started complaining about not being able to optimize away a call to one of SBCL's internal access functions.

; note: unable to
; optimize
; due to type uncertainty:
; The first argument is a (VECTOR FIXNUM 52), not a SIMPLE-ARRAY.

The problem is that (make-array 52 :element-type 'card) returns an array of type (simple-array FIXNUM (52)), while (make-array 52 :element-type 'card :fill-pointer 52) returns an array of type (vector fixnum 52). The fill pointer makes the array not simple (in accordance with the language spec).

So with the fill pointer, the function disassembly contains calls to SB-KERNEL:%DATA-VECTOR-AND-INDEX all over the place - basically, anywhere I called aref. I initially thought I just wasn't being smart enough to declare the types right (and this might be true), but I found old mailing list stuff saying you can't get rid of that note, or the calls.

Yet an aref on a (simple-array FIXNUM (52)) compiles down with no function calls at.

This is what I get for trying to be tricky. So i got trickier. If I allocate a 53 card array without a fill pointer, and treat offset zero as space to hold my "fill pointer", I get back a simple array - which SBCL will optimize nicely.

So I end up with something like this:

(defun deal-card (deck)
  "Return a random card from the deck."
  ;; This is effectively a Fisher-Yates/Knuth shuffle spread out over 
  ;; multiple calls, using a psuedo "fill-pointer" to maintain state
  ;; Originally this actually used the fill pointer, but non-simple arrays
  ;; mean function calls to SB-KERNEL:%DATA-VECTOR-AND-INDEX under SBCL :/
  (declare (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (debug 0) (compilation-speed 0))
           (type deck deck))
  (macrolet ((fpointer (deck) `(aref ,deck 0))  ;; 'fill-pointer' like syntax
             (prandom (count) `(1+ (random ,count)))) ;; Handle the random right
    (let* ((fpointer (fpointer deck))
           (newpointer (1- fpointer)))
      (declare (type (integer 0 53) newpointer fpointer))
      (if (zerop newpointer) (error "No cards left in the deck!")
          (let ((index (prandom newpointer)))
            (declare (type (integer 0 53) index))
            (let ((card (aref deck index))
                  (newcard (aref deck newpointer)))
              (setf (fpointer deck) newpointer
                    (aref deck index) newcard
                    (aref deck newpointer) card)))))))

That compiles down to code where the only function calls are to update the random state (because the range is so small on the random call, the actual function call to the mersenne twister gets optimized away) and to error if the user ever calls it when the deck is dead.

Sixty-one assembly instructions. This makes me happy.

Although it might be interesting to figure out what I'd need to change to get SBCL to be able optimize the calls away with the fill-pointer version ..

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-31T02:15:00

2008-12-31T08:16:36Z

This may just be because I've only ever had cream corn from a can, or the fact that I haven't had cream corn in forever, but ...

The cream corn at Rudy's is some magical awesome substance that I can't get enough of.

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-28T20:19:00

2008-12-29T02:21:09Z

I converted http://www.suffecool.net/poker/evaluator.html to Common Lisp code. Instead of looping/recursing over all 21 seven-card hand combinations, I wrote a macro to expand to what is basically an unrolled loop that checks them all and returns the best value. I have implementations of both versions, the original binary-search version, and the faster perfect hash version. The hash function depends on 32 bit word overflow occurring (but ignores the overflow bit), so I had to (ldb (byte 32 0) ...) around any calls to + in the hash function to get it to work.

Using a test function that loops over every possible five-card hand, the perfect hash version evaluates them all in about one second - most of that is hash-table accesses to keep the hand statistics. The binary search version takes a little over two seconds.

Now that I have that evaluator, I'm pondering converting the 2+2 evaluator as well, assuming I can write code to generate the lookup tables correctly. (The code for that evaluator is dead simple, and the card representation is just a positive integer less than 52)

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-27T10:14:00

2008-12-27T16:16:48Z

We'll never get away from William. (I reissued a command from my history buffer just now - !1066)

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-24T10:34:00

2008-12-24T16:39:38Z

Youngest son likes to sit at the Linux box starting a ridiculously large number of xcalcs. Like, forty or fifty xcalc processes, his display is literally tiled with them. And then he starts giggling, as he's starting up more. So I decided I'd ssh in, su to root and issue 'pkill -f xcalc' to kill all the processes - he's watching his display all confused, then started giggling more and ran away ;)

Then with my older son ... "Did he break it? Can you check you can still start that calculator?" ... looking directly at him while with my right hand I'm surreptitiously moving one line up in the history buffer, and hitting enter right after he starts the calculator ... "Ok, what's going on???" ... more giggles, "I don't know" ... this went on for a while until he finally saw my shell commands on the other computer, then he *really* started giggling. :)

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-24T10:28:00

2008-12-24T16:29:18Z

I was pondering how I learn stuff and was thinking - I might have been pretty good at electronics, too, if components didn't tend to do things like pop and start smoking when you put them together slightly incorrectly. :D

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-21T12:30:00

2008-12-21T18:32:45Z

When I saw the video clip of President Bush getting shoes thrown at him, my first thought was that at some point in his childhood, an old Chinese man told him he had the bone structure and chi of a Kung Fu genius, and sold him a Buddhist Palm Manual for $10.

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-20T05:54:00

2008-12-20T11:56:33Z

Someone should write (or film) a new Hardy Boys book (or movie) where they're all grown up. Joe gets knocked off by the mob and Frank is out for vengeance.

And make sure it's super dark. Like, Harry Callahan and Kaiser Soze get run over in the street by a yellow jalopy dark. With Chet in the trunk.

Writer's Block: Prophecy or Fallacy?

2008-12-15T03:36:17Z

Happy birthday, Nostradamus. Many people consider the prophecies of Nostradamus to be uncannily accurate, while others remain skeptical. Do you think it's possible to predict the future?

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No, but I think it's possible to say a lot of vague stuff - and inevitably, people will look back and insist you were predicting the future.

Writer's Block: Untimely Passing

2008-12-10T00:42:34Z

RIP John Lennon. The list of sudden and unexpected celebrity deaths is long—Princess Di, Heath Ledger, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, and many more. Which one affected you the most on an emotional level?

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Hmm.

The "celebrity" deaths that I felt saddest at weren't really celebrities, not in that sense.

W. Richard Stevens. The number and quality of technical books he wrote ... I wish he'd lived to write more.
Gary Gygax - how can you not be a little sad when the guy who designed the game you spent a ridiculous number of hours playing passes on?
Douglas Adams is someone who I wish were still around writing things. Or just generally being Douglas Adams.

I don't know. It's hard to think of people. They're all people who did awesome things and I wish were still around to do more awesome things. Although, to be quite honest, none of their deaths affected me in the same way as the deaths of people I actually know affected me, and I don't really get how a celebrity death can affect people like that - although it apparently does.

lexical_closure @ 2008-12-07T15:41:00

2008-12-07T21:48:06Z

The people that run a site called 'never get busted' and have some reality show in the works called cop busters put a couple of lamps up over a couple of Christmas trees, and the house got raided.

I'm not sure I believe their side of the story completely, given that they in fact seem to have a pretty good motive for trying to make sure that the cops raided that house.

Their website was showing "account suspended" just now, and now has "Due to high traffic, our website is down. We are working around the clock to increase our server capacity."

Strange. Maybe their hosting provider shut 'em down for too much traffic. It's just barely possible that someone made a call to the hosting provider to get 'em shut down, then they called back and got turned back on again ... http://kopbusters.com/

(The video itself is pretty boring, I'm not sure how they could work that up into a reality show anyone would want to watch - and this is coming from me, who is absolutely addicted to shows like Cops, etc.)