We’ll be holding down the fort in Sugar Land while Rita reads our meters. Will update.
Archive for September, 2005
Consider this article that appeared on February 18, 2004: Fuck everything, we’re doing five blades.
Followed by Gilette unveils 5-bladed razor with two lubricating strips which appeared on CNN.com on September 14, 2005.
The Rice network is down again tonight (a planned outage to replace the ancient power supplies in the data center, in anticipation of some Very Big Iron they’re getting next month), so I can’t do my homework. Yay! Update: See below.
I’ll take this opportunity, though, to express a thought I had about college courses.
There are three ways a student emerges from a course with true mastery of the material:
- Gifted student. The material comes easily, naturally, instinctively to the student; with a moderate amount of work the student outstrips the lecture, tosses off the homeworks, etc.
- Brute force. The material doesn’t come naturally to the student, but she works every example problem she can find, goes to office hours, attends study sessions, makes study sheets, and passes the exam. [This is probably the most common case.]
- Gifted teacher. This is perhaps the rarest, and the best case; gifted students and the hard workers will always do OK, but only the gifted teacher can make the material come alive for everyone else.
The gifted teachers are the ones you talk about years later; they’re the ones who turn average students into gifted ones.
(continued…) (265 words)Programs tested: 24
Tests failed: 0/144 (0%)
A few hours ago I finally got both of my register allocators generating correct code. There are still inefficiencies, but it’s far too late to add further optimizations (to the allocation scheme, not to the instruction stream itself!) without risking the stability of the code. So, a few comments and it’s done. (Now for the 5–10 page lab report—oof.)
Today, del.icio.us turns two years old. Thanks to everyone who tolerated our burps along the way.
Congratulations, Josh! (That icon is the best.)
The community GEO IP project isn’t doing so well for Rice hosts:
(guessed) Prescott Valley, AZ, UNITED STATES
(guessed) ABSECON, NJ, UNITED STATES
(guessed) Fargo, ND, UNITED STATES
(guessed) New Brunswick, NJ, UNITED STATES
(guessed) Bellaire, OH, UNITED STATES
(guessed) Junction City, OR, UNITED STATES
Hmm. I wonder if you can get the Hamlet text adventure as an Infocom z-file? Update: I guess not. According to the help file, it’s a custom JavaScript engine. Well done, sir. [Also: this was apparently inspired by a Usenet Internet Oracle supplication. When was the last time you thought about the Usenet Oracle?]
As promised, TiVo now allows networks to delete their own shows off your hard drive if they think you’re keeping them too long. No more hanging onto last season’s Lost finale until the next season’s première, or even to watch during the dry summer months. See also TiVo’s page about this antifeature, which claims that TiVo is no worse than any other TV equipment. But didn’t we all shell out for TiVos because they were better? [via /.]
Is it just me, or are the “edgy” new advertisements Sun is running in newspapers (and, ostensibly, trying to run but can’t) a little … you know, desperate?
They’d be reasonable for, you know, a younger and more credibly hip firm, but coming from Sun they’re like the dad who buys beer for his kid, or the university eatery named after a goofy student tradition.
(continued…) (83 words, 1 image)The landmark Six Flags AstroWorld theme park will close at the end of this season, the victim of rising land values that overshadow its worth as an entertainment attraction.
The 37-year-old amusement park south of the Reliant Complex will be sold to reduce the debt load of Six Flags, which has put itself up for sale after a key investor pressured it to boost its stock price.
This is sad, despite the fact that I hate rollercoasters. (I do have fond memories of our O-Week trip to the water park, though. Wow, that was ten years ago!)
Coverage: Chronicle, Houston Strategies blog, obligatory Google map.
Friday’s conversation began thusly:
FYI: I’ve disabled my own scraped feed, replacing it with a redirect to John Allison’s official Scary Go Round RSS feed.
I can’t believe I got myself out of bed at 2:30 just to make sure my latest work had been checked into Subversion. [On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the thought of losing six hours of poster design to some kind of freak cat/water/keyboard spillage scenario would have kept me up all night anyway.]
