Saturday, October 29, 2005

Table Tennis

I can get private lessons from the #1 table tennis player in the US. (Possibly the world).. Only a few minutes from my office.

http://dnn.yiyongfan.com/

It is so on.

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Roof Rats@!

God Damn Roof Rats kept me up last night!!!
Finally at 1 a.m. I had had quite enough, no sense in deluding myself anymore, those aren't birds up there.
"Be quite up there!!! SHUT UP! SHUT IT!" -- pound on the wall a bit. --
--more roof scratching--
So I got out of bed, put on my headlamp, and got up on my roof to find those suckers.
I imagine my neighbors think I'm a bit weird.
My initial thought was to try and foam them to death with a can of "Good Stuff" but the can had apparently expired and was no longer good nor foaming. I retreated back to the kitchen to find that the only other choice at that hour was a can of WD-40. After staring at the can for a few minutes and considering the delivery logistics of its little red straw, I declined.
6 a.m. rolls around and I'm first at the Home Depot. I got the Green Cubes of Death(tm), rat traps, sticky traps, another can of spray foam, basically anything I think might be remotely helpful.
7 a.m. It's still a little dark out and I'm back on my roof with my headlamp. Santa has come early and he brings spray foam and Green Cube-o-Death for all the good little girl and boy rats. The neighbor across the street sees me on his way out and stops in his doorway, unsure.

-JD

Monday, October 24, 2005

Ping Tunnel

I'm setting this up on my box:
----
Ptunnel is an application that allows you to reliably tunnel TCP connections to a remote host using ICMP echo request and reply packets, commonly known as ping requests and replies. At first glance, this might seem like a rather useless thing to do, but it can actually come in handy in some cases. The following example illustrates the main motivation in creating ptunnel:

Setting: You're on the go, and stumble across an open wireless network. The network gives you an IP address, but won't let you send TCP or UDP packets out to the rest of the internet, for instance to check your mail. What to do? By chance, you discover that the network will allow you to ping any computer on the rest of the internet. With ptunnel, you can utilize this feature to check your mail, or do other things that require TCP.
-----------


http://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel/

Friday, October 21, 2005

Java Rules joo too

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Java Rules Jooo!

Interesting article about Java garbage collection and memory management.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275.html?ca=dgr-lnxw01JavaUrbanLegends

snips:

Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you -- allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources). And allocation performance is not a trivial component of overall performance -- benchmarks show that many real-world C and C++ programs, such as Perl and Ghostscript, spend 20 to 30 percent of their total execution time in malloc and free -- far more than the allocation and garbage collection overhead of a healthy Java application (Zorn; see Resources).

It turns out that the vast majority of objects in typical object-oriented programs (between 92 and 98 percent according to various studies) "die young," which means they become garbage shortly after they are allocated, often before the next garbage collection. (This property is called the generational hypothesis and has been empirically tested and found to be true for many object-oriented languages.) Therefore, not only is allocation fast, but for most objects, deallocation is free.

The Java language does not offer any way to explicitly allocate an object on the stack, but this fact doesn't prevent JVMs from still using stack allocation where appropriate. JVMs can use a technique called escape analysis, by which they can tell that certain objects remain confined to a single thread for their entire lifetime, and that lifetime is bounded by the lifetime of a given stack frame. Such objects can be safely allocated on the stack instead of the heap. Even better, for small objects, the JVM can optimize away the allocation entirely and simply hoist the object's fields into registers.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Because the highway to freedom, isn't paved!

One of the vehicles used in the DARPA grand challenge (An autonomous vehicle race) was an Oshkosh truck.
http://www.oshkoshtruck.com/defense/index.cfm
I looked these guys up.. wow.. Unimog is out, Oshkosh is in.
I see their stock valuation is up 4x since the beginning of Iraq2.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

How to find a human

List of shortcuts to get to a human on some common IVR's

https://www.quickbase.com/db/bam6rdiey?a=q&qid=5


My favortie is AT&T : "No Easy Escape"

Internet Boom 2.0

Fact #1: Strongest year for Internet Growth ever
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/10/04/october_2005_web_server_survey.html

Fact #2: Ebay buys Skype for $4Billion (Half in Cash)
http://redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=13534&hed=eBay+Acquires+Skype

Fact #3: News Corp Buys IGN For $650 Million, after buying Myspace for $580 Million.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4226170.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4695495.stm


Pseudo Fact #4: Google launches free spreadsheet and Wordprocessor. (Sun's Star Office)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26734

Ok, I threw Google in there just because 2004,2005 is definitely the year of the Google.
But man.. Is it time to party like it's 1999 again?

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Climbing Index #2

Alright, these pics are all from last week, my second trip to Index.
I like Index, WA a lot. I could definitely see myself buying a little cabin out there someday.

So this time out I made a return to Sagittarius and also did the first pitch of Godzilla. Simone brought his girlfriend along, so we really couldn't do any multi pitch routes, but I really want to see what the rest of godzilla is like. It's highly recommended.

...ANYHOW...

The ratings on Index are notoriously low, so a 5.9 here is probably 5.11 at Exit 38. By the time I finish the first pitch of Sagittarius (oh yes I finished this time), sweat is literally rolling down off my head.

Lets liven this with some pictures:

This picture is taken from the end of the first pitch. You are looking down at the crack used to ascend to the traverse.



And this picture is looking back at the lateral traverse:



















And this is a view from the ground, the start of this picture is already 30 feet or so off the ground. You can see the bolts at the very top left of this picture.So, yeah.. It's a great climb, very challenging. My previous fall happened about 10 feet to the right of the bolts, and I ended up hanging.... well... 10 feet underneath the bolts of course.

Did I mention the view?