Tey eman doog on

Back from Sandbacks

2009-08-31T00:27:04Z

Too bad it rained so much. Otherwise, it was a bunch of fun. Saw deer, wild turkeys, and way too many wasps. Actually went swimming!

Hiking in the rain...

2009-05-09T12:37:14Z

sarahdeguelph and I are going hiking today. It's supposed to rain. I think this is a tradition for us, or something. (Posted via XMPP)

(Cross-country) skiing

2009-01-03T04:51:23Z

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

First Hallowe'en...

2008-10-31T22:10:20Z

... from the other side of the door. I hope we have enough candy.

DNS troubles with Rogers

2008-10-17T02:56:04Z

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

I can just tell...

2008-06-29T04:42:02Z

OpenStreetMap is going to be a huge time sink.

Back from Britain

2008-05-18T16:19:28Z

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

Bisphenol A

2007-04-07T15:11:59Z

Bisphenol A also has a bizarre pattern of research results, with the funding source of a study the best predictor of whether scientists find it harmful or safe. ―'Inherently toxic' chemical faces its future

Toyger

2007-03-18T19:11:56Z

The toyger is a house cat bred to resemble a tiger. (Via Reddit)

The Omega Plant

2007-01-24T02:13:34Z

There is only one King’s Lomatia plant left.

Weird 3-D effects

2006-12-31T04:28:17Z

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?

Test drive

2006-10-21T01:16:05Z

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!

LJ fast over

2006-08-05T04:04:44Z

Broke my LJ fast today: posted to shade_42's journal. Considered posting to jstew's, especially over comments about Windows-less laptops and potential wedding gifts. The fact that I'll see him (the latter) tomorrow probably encouraged my lack of commenting.

Student loan, good bye!

2006-01-14T19:33:04Z

I just paid off my student loan! Yippie!

Getting to work

2005-10-27T12:25:31Z

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

New senators

2005-08-03T13:33:30Z

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.

Cleaning out the spam box

2005-08-02T15:19:10Z

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.

exit(3)ing is faster

2005-07-27T15:39:35Z

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).

I(t)... live(s)... again!

2005-07-08T02:15:19Z

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.

Unix system programming lessons learned

2005-07-07T15:30:41Z

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.

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.
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.

Really should be applying for jobs

2005-06-13T00:13:19Z

I really should be applying to jobs, but I thought I would just write a quick entry so that I could link to the photos we took during our trip through Europe, as well as the journal that we kept.

BTW, does anyone know of any jobs in Toronto that start in September? Or of a one-bedroom apartment close to Ryerson?

Last full day in North America

2005-05-02T13:57:27Z

So today is my last full day in North America. I’ve been hanging out at sarahdeguelph’s mother’s house for the last week, and it’s been one of the most relaxing times in the past year. Which is strange, since we’re about to go to Europe and I know that sarahdeguelph is no where near as relaxed as I am. But that doesn’t really say much.

I’m currently delaying re-packing the backpacks to ensure that we each have two sets of clothes in each backpack, so we’re not SOL if only one of them shows up in Europe. I also have to pack the carry-on luggage today. I don’t expect to bring much, since I should be sleeping the whole trip, but perhaps I will since recently I’ve been having problems sleeping through the whole night.

Living in Toronto next year is going to be strange, since it will be the first time since Fall 1999 that I haven’t been living in Waterloo. There’ll be a whole new city to get used to, and all the stuff that comes along with that. I got a taste when I met up with quikchange and Lavalife Dave (who appears not to be LJ-enabled) to explore the Distillery District of Toronto. It was fun and felt very Ottawa-y.

I don’t think I’m going to justify that last remark.

Oh, and if you’re going to Atmosphere, the Smoked Salmon pizza is excellent, the Calabrese pizza is good, and the Cordon Bleu pizza is mediocre. I can’t say average, since that would imply that there are other menu items that I would enjoy less.

Gave my talk

2005-04-18T22:45:05Z

For those of you who don’t regularly read uw.talks, I gave my Master’s Thesis Presentation today. Now, all that’s left is to update my thesis with my readers’ feedback, wait until my display period ends, jump through the hoops to get my thesis bound, and submit the paperwork to finish.

The end is near!

I lived a sheltered life...

2005-04-17T02:05:21Z

... and so never knew about all the fun you can have with a microwave.

No more spuc?

2005-02-25T17:13:11Z

Does anyone know why spuc was deleted?