Donnie’s Blog

I just finished a prototype for what I hope will be a good “fun Java lab” for my students. It’s an implementation of the Traveling Salesman Problem, as “solved” by genetic algorithms. I have it running on a map of 200 locations right now, and it is slowly but surely progressing in the right direction. That’s always encouraging!

It sure beats my artificial-ant simulation where the ants went away from the food! That one still needs some work…

With N locations, there are (N - 1)! / 2 different paths that can be chosen for the salesman to follow. So, for my 200 locations, there are around 2×10^372 different possibilities to be considered. The GAs search a whole lot less options than that (understatement), and they almost certainly won’t find the optimal solution, but at least you can watch them get better over time!

I have half a mind to leave this running overnight, but I’m not sure if my implementation can even cover the search-space completely. There might be a bug that prohibits it from fully exploring the search-space. But, I’ll let it go - see what I find in the morning!

Last night I tried to make an Asian-style peanut dipping sauce, for some well-cooked poultry that needed a little extra help. It really didn’t turn out like I had hoped it would. The main ingredients were peanut butter, soy sauce, and brown sugar, with a few other things added for flavor. I think it really needed a bit of coconut milk or coconut cream in there. I will have to get some smaller cans of coconut milk at the store next time. I should be able to make a bunch and then freeze it, so it shouldn’t be a problem to make a bunch at once.

I saved the stuff that I made last night, but the more I think about it, the less appetizing it seems! So hopefully I’ll eat it, rather than putting it down the sink. But hey, sometimes that happens when you experiment with food…

I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I ran away this weekend. I drove up to the San Francisco area to see some friends who happened to be in town, and had a fantastic time catching up.

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Yesterday was a sad day. One of our neighbors, a good man, died. He was always very friendly and kind to us.

I got home right as the EMTs were arriving, and I saw the whole process of trying to revive him. It is quite a sobering thing, seeing how absolutely helpless we are in the face of death. Our western civilization has made astounding progress when it comes to medicines and surgery and health, but once someone is dead, that’s it. Nothing you can do is going to bring them back.

Better to go to the house of mourning
Than to go to the house of feasting.
For that is the end of all men;
And the living will take it to heart.

I think I actually was able to transfer my site onto another server without too much hassle.

I still can’t believe it.

Well, let me know if you run into any issues. Hopefully this means my life will get back to normal soon.

It’s always interesting going through the restore process, because you realize all the bits and pieces of information you didn’t have, and how hard it is to get things restored. It’s made even more complicated when you are restoring onto hardware that doesn’t necessarily match the original system, because you can’t just image the original disk!

As I have gone, I have made some good notes of what I needed to do, and that will help immensely for the future. I suspect I have at least one more change-over to go. However, if I automate things, it should be done in an hour, instead of a whole day like it did this time. (There are always little niggly details hiding out in various config-files when you are getting networking and mail set up again… sigh…)

One useful note: http://www.abuse.net/relay.html has a decent spam-relay testsuite. I always use this thing to make sure I’m not inadvertently enabling bad behavior. Thanks, abuse.net!

It’s too bad that software has to run on hardware. Software like my website, running on hardware like the now-useless power-supply sitting here.

I want to apologize to all the web-bots and crawlers that didn’t get a chance to explore my site while it was down. (Hey, they’re 13% of my traffic! I have to cater to my fans.)

Coming soon - a new server!

Last night I had some salmon that needed disposing of, so I went ahead and cooked it up nice and good.

Of course, salmon can use a good sauce, especially when you’re not sure where that fine line between “just right” and “completely overcooked” is. So I came up with a simple shallot cream-sauce. I wrote up the notes in my Cooking Notes page, if you are interested!

It tasted very good. Plus, this sauce would be great with chicken breasts too, which are even harder than fish to get “just right!”

Yesterday my brand-new copy of LightWave 3D showed up! That was pretty neat. It was fun looking through the material that came with it, and recognizing scenes from Battlestar Galactica and a whole bunch of other TV shows and movies. This is cool. Initially I was thinking, “Why do I need this??” I really like Blender - it does what I need, and it’s free! But now that I see how much LightWave is used in the SFX industry, it’s getting pretty exciting to start learning it.

This is also the first software that I have ever owned that needed a dongle. Yet one more thing to worry about losing.

I went straight to the LightWave SDK documentation, since I want to learn how to drive LightWave with programs that I write. The API looks pretty good, and hopefully it won’t be too difficult to get a plugin working. My only concern is that I haven’t seen any documentation about computational geometry APIs, or collision detection APIs in the SDK. But that shouldn’t be a problem, since there are some pretty good open-source libraries available.

Tuesday nights are usually a cause for celebration for me, because all the hard work for the week is done by Tuesday night. This week, as a special treat, I got together with my friend Scott, and we went to a local restaurant/brewery to hang out, have a few beers, and just generally have a good time.

This was most definitely one of the most interesting and entertaining dining experiences of my life.

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My car has bad breath!

It just failed its first smog-check today. Well, technically that isn’t true; it failed the last smog-check because my check-engine light was on, and that means an automatic fail on the smog-check. This was the first time it failed because of emissions.

My car is producing too much NO, nitric oxide. (To quote my mechanic, “It’s way more than the limit.”) And, hopefully it won’t be too expensive to track down and fix. The current culprit is a little sensor that has stopped working correctly, but who knows if that is the whole problem, or just part of it!

Well, my car is eight years old, so I guess this isn’t too big a surprise.

The good news is that, along with its oil-change, my car got a brand new radiator today. The old one was starting to break down, and it finally sprung a leak. So it’s good to have that taken care of.