Tey eman doog on

Feeling: content

I skied yesterday. I will ski tomorrow. Life is good.

Having DNS troubles? With Rogers? Try using 64.71.255.202 rather than 64.71.255.198 as your DNS server. Worked for me.

Sarah and I are back from Britain. Sarah has already posted many pictures to her photo gallery.

So, I found through Facebook the homepage of Patrick van Kooten, who took the school bus with me during high school. I don't know if this is because of wearing glasses (which I've only started to do recently), Windows ClearType, or because of something else, but the blue text on his research interest page looks about a centimetre deeper into the monitor than the orange text. Does anybody else see this?

Today, I test drove a 2006 Toyota Corolla CE. It was slightly differently outfitted than the one I’m getting, but it gave me a feel for the car, and I liked it!

Feeling: giddy

I just paid off my student loan! Yippie!

Feeling: pleased

I fanboy the Business Express. Down to 1h15m, baby, yeah!

Feeling: blank

We’ve got five new senators. When I read that, I wondered why there were none from Alberta, since I thought half their seats were vacant. Turns out they were filled in March.

Feeling: irritated

Last week, I noticed that I was getting less email than normal, but I thought nothing of it.

Today, when I was using aptitude, I noticed that I had a security update available. I didn’t remember receiving the DSA email, so I searched through my GMail account and found it in the Spam box, along with seven other advisories. So I set out to manually sort through the spam box, which had about 500 messages in it. Of those, 42 were not spam, mostly from mailing lists. 37 of those had been sent since July 21st.

In the future, I’ll have to be more watchful of GMail’s spam-detection ability.

Feeling: happy

Say you're at the end of your program. All the work is done and you want to quit. But say that you’ve got some big objects laying around. If all you have to do in your destructors is de-allocate memory, I’ve re-discovered that you can avoid having your objects destroyed by calling exit(3) rather than returning from main. This really helped in my situation, below.

1006: alex@minusone:~/fully-factoring$ time ./full 30000000
There are 1857859 primes.
The largest is 29999999.

real    1m16.196s
user    0m40.990s
sys     0m1.832s
1009: alex@minusone:~/fully-factoring$ time ./full 30000000
There are 1857859 primes.
The largest is 29999999.

real    0m35.794s
user    0m32.942s
sys     0m1.621s

The first is with a return 0; the second calls exit(0).

After a long hiatus (i.e. since 2005-04-22 14:35 according to the modification time of ~/.bash_history) galileo is running again! It feels nice to be at one’s own computer, rather than always borrowing someone’s laptop or someone else’s iBook.

Those non-techies may not appreciate this post. Others may already know all this stuff. But I figured it out this morning, and I’m sharing.

1. If you make a pipe, and want to get notified when it gets closed, ensure that both the parent and the child close the pipe. You won’t get EOF until they both do.
2. From scanf(3): White space (such as blanks, tabs, or newlines) in the format string match any amount of white space, including none, in the input. Hence, scanf("%*s\n") will consume all five characters of "quit\n" and block trying to read more.