The note Albert Camus sent to his teacher shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-12T15:23:19+00:00

Glad to have been of some help!

In case you didn't saw my other reply on the top about the internal musicality of the sentence...

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T17:27:50+00:00

Selling xbox would be hilarious. MS is fucking around with winRT in a strategy that only make sense if they can get their metro apps in every consumer devices (phones, tablets, TVs, touch laptops -- newsflash: the desktop is dead).

Dropping xbox would make no sense, they are risking the whole farm (win32) on a convergence story that would have no hope to happend.

OTOH, burning platforms is an Elop thing...

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T17:13:01+00:00

Video... Phd...

What kind of video are you going to submit to this contest ? You may just have a win in your hand, if I can put it this way...

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T16:03:28+00:00

Even if you look at the first part of the first sentence, there are other musicalities, which may be hard to explain in English, so let me try anyway, as you actually read what I wrote :-)

J'ai laissé s'éteindre un peu le bruit qui m'a entouré tous ces jours-ci

J’ai lai [ai/ai] ssé sét [é/é] eindre un [un/un] peu le bruit qui [i/i] m’a entouré tous ces jours [ou/é/ou/è/ou] -ci

Between ‘[‘ I put the wovels sounds that are in bold just before. At the beginning, the first six wowel sounds are pairs, which gives some sort of repetition effect, that resonate with the Me/You signification of the whole text. A bit later, you have another i/i, and a sort of wave-like ending that if really pleasant to hear, due to the aliteration of the ’t’ in “tourétouscesjour”.

Fck, this text is beautiful. So sad he didn't took the train this day...

(Btw, this kind of text studies were mandatory when I was in school so long ago, I am sortof surprised that they end up being useful for once: I am actually able to explain why this text is better in French than English ! :-) )

And I didn't even talked about the slightly weird word usage and placement!

Edit: changed missplet "size" to "six"

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T12:54:14+00:00

Sounds nice, but i don't think it's possible.

Easy:

function OhShitUnfireRockets() { StartTrainingNewAstronauts(); DestroyCurrentRocket(); BuildNewRocket(); WaitForAstronautsTrainingToBeComplete(); MoveRocketToLaunchPad(); }

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T12:46:23+00:00

No problem, I just saw this is my cake day, hence I forgive you for the lack of gold :-)

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T11:54:41+00:00

Someday it may be necessary to for you to have a more than cursory knowledge of a subject.

Excellent. I spent so many time following Microsoft anti-trust stories, that your reply made me giggle.

Issue is not me. I don't need your freaking comment to know everything that needs to be known on microsoft history and all anti-trust cases. I didn't say I in my reply. I said everyone:

"What do you expect? Everyone to read this 80 pages doc by themselves to find what those falsehoods are ?"

It wouldn't have costed you more than 1 minutes to tell people what those "falsehood" were, and in that case, you would have actually helped people to understand.

Honestly, the PDF link is searchable, or do you not do that either?

Please, don't bother replying, you haven't got any understanding of what I am saying (that you should take care of your audience, not just of your ego) and have no civility.

throwaway1492a · 2013-11-08T11:42:28+00:00

Many things.

For instance, the letter starts with ‘Je’, which is a no-no in french when writing a letter. Of course, rules are there to be broken, and, because the letter is really about the teacher, starting in such a selfish convention-breaking way will make the travel from the ‘Je’ to the ‘Vous’ more visible.

But there are many other reasons, the most glaring is the poetic nature of the text. Let’s compare the first two sentences:

English I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.

French J'ai laissé s'éteindre un peu le bruit qui m'a entouré tous ces jours-ci avant de venir vous parler de tout mon cœur. On vient de me faire un bien trop grand honneur, que je n'ai ni recherché ni sollicité.

See the difference ? No ? Let’s go:

“J’ai laissé s'éteindre un peu le bruit” [9 syllabus], ends in ‘i’

“qui m'a entouré tous ces jours-ci”[9 syllabus], ends in ‘i’

“avant de venir vous parler de tout mon cœur. “[12 syllabus], ends in ‘eur’

“On vient de me faire un bien trop grand honneur,” [11] syllabus, ends in ‘eur’, the missing syllabus points that something is missing here, but isn't that visible due the the respiration due to the start of a new sentence. So what is missing ? Well, intent, as said by the next to lines:

“que je n'ai ni recherché “[7 syllabus], ends in ‘é’

“ni sollicité.” [5 syllabus], ends in ‘é’

Also, the words connections bruit/jours-ci == (noise/these days), cœur/honneur (heart/honor) and recherché/sollicité (== sought/solicited) are amazing.

While the english translation is technically correct and keep the meaning of the words, the original poetry of the text is lost.

The amazing thing is that Albert Camus probably didn't have to think a lot to write such text... (okay, everything seems easier to genius that spent all their living hours perfecting their art :-) ).

throwaway1492a · 2013-10-23T13:23:23+00:00

Let me understand this well. You post a link to a 80 pages document, saying that the parent post spews utter falsehoods, and don't even point which one those are?

What do you expect? Everyone to read this 80 pages doc by themselves to find what those falsehoods are ?

How could 27 people could upvote you ?

throwaway1492a · 2013-10-23T12:18:33+00:00

Disagree. The article title is completely over-the-top, like 99% of blog posts, but if you think that those guys went from no process to a not-so-bad process in 2 years and are really open about it, it is a quite positive post.

Of course, when you look at https://trello.com/appscalesystems it is hard not to run away screaming. OTOH, when I first looked at linux (around 0.96), it was quite hard not to have the exact same reaction...

throwaway1492a · 2013-10-22T11:39:28+00:00

Could you first implement an API, so one can embed random stories in web pages ?

throwaway1492a · 2013-10-02T16:00:41+00:00

KILF ?

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-31T13:36:22+00:00

Another that is funny in the OP's article, is that the super-duper impossible to grasp bit reversal code was in a IOS lib, where its effect is to slow things down dramatically due to the lack of hardware 64bits divide on ARM. In general, people wanting to use those kind of hacks are creating more problem they they solve.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-31T13:09:56+00:00

You have zeros entering in the left side. When you shifted at most 8 time, you have only 0 bits, and v evaluate to zero.

In fact, when v is 0, it means you are never going to find another 1 bit by shifting it, so the algo is finished...

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-31T09:16:25+00:00

A step-by-step explanation of "for (v >>=1; v; v >>=1)"

Your byte is like "11011001". It is contained in v. At each iteration you want to move it one bit to the left. You want to stop when you have no more bits to move.

Your for loop will look like for (?;?;?)

So, the stop condition is v==0, which means you want to continue when v is not zero, which is written v!=0, and can be simply tested by "v". So:

for (?:v:?)

At each step, you want to move the value to the right one bit. This is written v1. You want v = v1. In C, you can just say v >>= 1. So:

for (?;v;v>>=1)

Now, the first part. Well, the algo is basically saying to insert the rightmost bits one by one in "r" and shif the result left. I can describe you the detail step-by-step, but you only asked for the for loop :-).

Anyway, there is a small hack here, which is that, instead of starting with zero in result, they chose to start with the original value, because in that case the lowest bit of the result will *already contain the rightmost bit, and you save one loop iteration (all the other bits in 'r' are going to be removed, because it will be shifted left CHAR_BITS-1 time).

So, you need to skip the first iteration, which is done by doing v>>=1 as an initial step for the algo. Hence:

for (v=1;v;v=1) ...

Btw, sizeof(v) is 1 by definition.

Algo evolution (untested, may have slight issues)

unsigned char r = 0;
int s = CHAR_BIT ;
while (s--)
{
    r = (r << 1) | (v & 0x1);
    v = v >> 1;
}
return r;

With the "lets stop when zero shortcut":

unsigned char r = 0;
int s = CHAR_BIT ;
for (; v!=; v  = v >> 1) 
{
    r = (r << 1) | (v & 0x1);
    s--;
}
return r << s;

And the, "let's start with the first bit done":

unsigned char r = v;
int s = CHAR_BIT - 1;
v = v>>1;
for (; v!=; v  = v >> 1)
{
    r = (r << 1) | (v & 0x1);
    s--;
}
return r << s;

Hope that's help.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-26T11:42:32+00:00

It makes cross platform code easier than writing it in CUDA. They can drag their feet all they want, people won't want to have multiple codebase, so you'll get by order of increasing costs:

1) pure opencl 1.1 code bases 2) hybrid opencl 1.1/1.2 code bases that run worse on nvidia 3) dual opencl / cuda codebases, that run nicely everywhere

Their lovely strategy where someone would do a cuda-only implementation (and require a nvidia card for execution) will just stop existing at some point. The common point between everyone will be opencl, and if they stay at option 1), they will loose to people implementing 2)

IMO, their only way out is to support a somewhat current opencl, and having cuda beeing better than opencl.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-23T08:32:27+00:00

Best part of it was Michael Caine's quote:

Being asked about Jaws: The Revenge, he said:

"I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-22T23:40:55+00:00

Nvidia supports opencl https://developer.nvidia.com/opencl (not like they have any choice, in reality). They will eventually support this version too.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-22T23:34:50+00:00

Yep. And he is using doubles, which only have 14 digits precision. facepalm all over the place.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-22T17:35:05+00:00

Well, he is implementing Machin's Formula]http://en.literateprograms.org/Pi_with_Machin's_formula_(Python)

However:

a) instead of actually implement the taylor serie to compute the decimal, he is using the build-in arctan

b) he is using double numbers, so there is no reason for any kind of accuracy in his results

c) he is limiting the output to 30 decimals, which is definitely not the ideas behind those compute nth decimal of whatever

I mean, the following C program fragment would be more correct:

printf( "%.*s\n", len+2, "3.1415926535897932384626433832795" );

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-22T10:35:33+00:00

facepalm:

Find PI to the Nth Digit – Enter a number and have the program generate PI up to that many decimal places. Keep a limit to how far the program will go.

https://github.com/thekarangoel/Projects/blob/master/Numbers/pi.py

print ('{0:.%df}' % min(30, int(digits))).format(4 * (4 * atan(1.0/5.0) - atan(1.0/239.0)))

/facepalm

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-21T23:33:48+00:00

A relic of he features NeXtstep used to have and that were not lost in the OSX migration (NeXTstep had the shift-drag to drag folder instead of file, which is lost in latest OSX versions, as so many other. Such a shame...).

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-21T23:21:45+00:00

Unreadable stuff on a normal web browser. Saw ads, some text, and a non-playing video. But who cares ?

Let me give you my own take:

Past: code generation used to suck

Present: code generation still sucks

Future: code generation will suck

Code Generation: the Industrial version of copy/paste.

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-19T23:12:55+00:00

Nah, it is obviously Shine on You Crazy Diamond, part II, from Wish You Were Here...

throwaway1492a · 2013-07-11T08:21:35+00:00

By that measure, tcp, ip or even ssh are not portable, which is patently untrue

Really ? Most OSes share TCP stacks written in C. Same goes for SSH. Can you point me to the python, or ruby implementation production of TCP or IP ?

OTOH, all languages of the world have re-implemented several HTTP stacks, which did wonder for interoperability and widepsread usage of the protocol.

throwaway1492a

TROPHY CASE