Halfway up the mountain

Last night, my wife Cathy and I passed our level 5 test in kuntao. That’s a halfway point to level 10, which is the first “guro” level, roughly equivalent to black belt in a Japanese or Korean art. Ranks aren’t the big deal in kuntao that they are in most Americanized martial arts, but this… Continue reading Halfway up the mountain

Announcing microjson

If you’ve ever wanted a JSON parser that can unpack directly to fixed-extent C storage (look, ma, no malloc!) I’ve got the code for you. The microjson parser is tiny (less than 700LOC), fast, and very sparing of memory. It is suitable for use in small-memory embedded environments and deployments where malloc() is forbidden in… Continue reading Announcing microjson

Never let an invariant go untested

I’ve been blog-silent the last couple of days because I’ve been chasing down the bug I mentioned in Request for help – I need a statistician. I have since found and fixed it. Thereby hangs a tale, and a cautionary lesson.

A Closed Future for Mathematics?

In a blog post on Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics Stephen Wolfram lays out a vision that is in many ways exciting and challenging. What if all of mathematics could be expressed in a common formal notation, stored in computers so it is searchable and amenable to computer-assisted discovery and proof of… Continue reading A Closed Future for Mathematics?

Published
Categorized as General

Review: Collision of Empires

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided… Continue reading Review: Collision of Empires

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Categorized as Review

Review: A Call to Duty

A Call To Duty (David Weber, Timothy Zahn; Baen Books) is a passable extension of Baen Book’s tent-pole Honorverse franchise. Though billed as by David Weber, it resembled almost all of Baen’s double-billed “collaborations” in that most of the actual writing was clearly done by the guy on the second line, with the first line… Continue reading Review: A Call to Duty

Review: The Abyss Beyond Dreams

The Abyss Beyond Dreams (Peter F. Hamilton, Random House/Del Rey) is a sequel set in the author’s Commonwealth universe, which earlier included one duology (Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained) and a trilogy (The Dreaming Void, The The Temporal Void, The Evolutionary Void). It brings back one of the major characters (the scientist/leader Nigel Sheldon) on a… Continue reading Review: The Abyss Beyond Dreams

Reality is viciously sexist

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit. What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a… Continue reading Reality is viciously sexist

Adverse selection and old technology

Yesterday I shipped cvs-fast-export 1.15, with a significant performance improvement produced by replacing a naive O(n**3) sort with a properly tuned O(n log n) version. In ensuing discussion on G+, one of my followers there asked if I thought this was likely to produce a real performance improvement, as in small inputs the constant setup… Continue reading Adverse selection and old technology

Mysterious cat is mysterious

Our new cat Zola, it appears, has a mysterious past. The computer that knows about the ID chip embedded under his skin thinks he’s a dog. There’s more to the story. And it makes us think we may have misread Zola’s initial behavior. I’m torn between wishing he could tell us what he’d been through,… Continue reading Mysterious cat is mysterious

Published
Categorized as General Tagged

Phase-of-moon-dependent bugs suck

I just had a rather hair-raising experience with a phase-of-moon-dependent bug. I released GPSD 3.11 this last Saturday (three days ago) to meet a deadline for a Debian freeze. Code tested ninety-six different ways, run through four different static analyzers, the whole works. Because it was a hurried release I deliberately deferred a bunch of… Continue reading Phase-of-moon-dependent bugs suck

Spam alert

Yes, I’m aware of the spam on the blog front page. The management does not hawk dubious drugs. Daniel Franke and I just did an audit and re-secure of the blog last night, so this is a new attack. Looks like a different vector; previously the spam was edited into the posts and invisible, this… Continue reading Spam alert

Review: Once Dead

Once Dead (Richard Phillips; Amazon Publishing) is a passable airport thriller with some SF elements. Jack Gregory should have died in that alley in Calcutta. Assigned by the CIA to kill the renegade reponsible for his brother’s death, he was nearly succeeding – until local knifemen take a hand. Bleeding, stabbed and near death, he… Continue reading Review: Once Dead

Alien cat is alien

One of the reasons I like cats is because I find it enjoyable to try to model their thought processes by observing their behavior. They’re like furry aliens, just enough like us that a limited degree of communication (mostly emotional) is possible. Just now I’m contemplating a recent change in the behavior of our new… Continue reading Alien cat is alien

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Categorized as Science Tagged

Demilitarize the police – and stop flinging false racism charges

I join my voice to those of Rand Paul and other prominent libertarians who are reacting to the violence in Ferguson, Mo. by calling for the demilitarization of the U.S.’s police. Beyond question, the local civil police in the U.S. are too heavily armed and in many places have developed an adversarial attitude towards the… Continue reading Demilitarize the police – and stop flinging false racism charges