Last night I actually scraped together the energy to get out the ol’ telescope. Jupiter is out early at night, and the weather has finally started being clear at night, and I had never used my new Canon 20D camera with my telescope, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity.
When I was working at home this morning, I found my favorite stapler. I got it at Powell’s Bookstore a long time ago, back when DALi was still young and nobody was bitter. Good times.
So, I brought it in to work, since I have a good large-capacity stapler, but not something for smaller documents. Here is a picture of it zeroing in for a kill:
Today I decided that I’d had enough with the Jorgensen stairwell doors. Doesn’t matter what floor; you open one of those doors, and it just squeaks like crazy. So I borrowed a can of WD40 from one of the other denizens and let the hinges have it. Now they’re silent - stealth doors! We’ll see who notices.
Ideally, caching is only an optimization; it doesn’t actually change the behavior of the system, except to make it go faster. Of course, that is quite often not the case, because:
Yesterday I spent about four hours trying to get a particular software library to work. That is one of the most aggravating and frustrating things a person can deal with; hours of making little to no progress on a problem. The issue was simply that when caching was enabled in this library, its behavior changed, and my usage was incorrect. Once I turned off caching, everything started working exactly like it was supposed to. Now, since this is an external library, I was simply trying to follow the approach outlined in the API docs. Too bad it didn’t explain the differences in usage when caching is enabled or disabled!
So I think this falls into the “lazy” category. A couple sentences in the API docs could have saved me four hours…
Well, it’s the end of the term, and this also happens to be the first term that I’ve had an Advanced Java track to teach, so I have kind of been looking around for good topics to cover. It always seems to be this way with Just-In-Time course development. Anyway, next week’s topics are going to include Java logging frameworks, and that is quite an interesting topic all by itself. Unfortunately, it’s far deeper than I will have time for in class…
Few things can snap you out of an afternoon reverie like the wet spatter of bird droppings. I caught a bit of the shrapnel too; I was just barely within range. I have to say, though, I really feel fortunate that they landed where they did: not directly on me, and not in my coffee! That would have been catastrophic…
Yesterday was Ditch Day. Hopefully all the students had fun and didn’t have any injuries. When I was a student I sustained a pretty serious injury on one Ditch Day, I think it was my sophomore year. (I won’t recount the gory details…) When I finally got to the hospital emergency room, the staff were saying, “What’s going on over there at Caltech today?? You’re the third person who’s come in here so far!” And I think another student showed up while I was there getting taken care of.
Anyway, Ditch Day is a nice excuse to cancel classes and catch up on grading, so that’s what I did!
Last week I covered version control systems in one of my classes, and of course I covered CVS and Subversion. That part wasn’t so difficult; it’s pretty easy to present the facts and the details and give the students the whole picture. (Well, as much as can be covered in a single class…) The challenge came about when I had to write up the lab assignment for the week. Should I make them use CVS or Subversion? Hmm!
Today I received a really nice flyer for an art display at the Pacific Grove Art Center, all about the interlocking wooden puzzles made by Lee Krasnow. Here is the flyer; very impressive! It’s even more impressive on paper.
Lee has really mastered the technique of creating interlocking wooden puzzles, using a custom-machined sled to make all of his cuts within thousandths of an inch of true. Lee is also really open about how he does all of these things, which is just great; anybody who has the same passion and interest can learn how to do these things as well.
It was two or three years ago when I started getting into woodworking, and I contacted Lee to get some input on good table saw blades. I was having a big problem getting good, clean cuts. He was really helpful; he really spent a lot of time explaining all the details of saw blade tooth configurations and how those affect the cuts you make. It was because of him that I decided to get a Forrest table saw blade; it wasn’t until then that I knew what a really good saw blade is really like. (There are others too - Skarpaz, for example.)
Anyway, maybe I will be able to get up to Lee’s show, since the academic year should have wrapped up by then. It’s just about within driving distance for a long day trip…
Ugh, sometimes doing consulting work is like riding a rollercoaster.
Lately I have been working on a really interesting project that involves integrating a couple of libraries into a very large and powerful application with accompanying SDK, along with whatever code that I write to make it all extra cool. Only problem is, the libraries are open-source libs (LGPL, thank you!!), primarily developed to build on UNIX systems, and the application I am integrating into takes Win32 DLLs. That by itself is enough to make my hair stand on end… but, off we go!
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