Radio Songs

Courtesy SomaFM.com:

Brooklyn-based Pete and J's "Sweet Cecilia" from their album "Dressed For Conversation", available online. This song reminds me of Simon and Garfunkle.

Austin, Texas-based Voxtrot's "Missing Pieces" from their 2005 EP "Raised by Wolves" on the Cult Hero Records label.

San Francisco-based Finest Dearest's "Serious" from their EP "Pacemaker" available online.

Melbourne, Australia-based Augie March's "One Crowded Hour" from their 2006 album "Moo, You Bloody Choir" on the Sony BMG Australia label.

Ergonomic Computer Environment

http://ergonomics.about.com/od/office/ss/computer_setup.htm

HelloWorld.tex

Experimenting with Donald Knuth's typesetting language TeX this evening.

Better World Club

I'm a member of one of AAA's most environmentally aware clubs, the Northern and Central California Automobile Club (the CSAA, not named NCAA for obvious reasons).

For most of the same services, including towing, rental discounts, and maps-on-demand, the Better World Club also support mass-transit and the Clean Air act.

I haven't switched yet, but they have successfully planted the seed of the idea.

Young @ Heart

Great flick: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/youngatheart/

The description "comedic tearjerker" fits. A brief review from the Sacramento News and Review's Jim Lane:

"British filmmaker Stephen Walker documents the rehearsal and performance process of the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of 24 seniors (average age 80) who tour the world with a show made up of cover versions of songs by such groups as the Clash (“Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”), the Ramones (“I Wanna Be Sedated”), Coldplay, Talking Heads and others. At first there’s an uneasy sense that Walker may be patronizing these old folks, but no—he plainly loves the group and its patient director Bob Cilman, and by the time they’re all through with us, we do, too. The movie is joyous and brimming with life, but of course, given the subject, the shadow of the Grim Reaper is never far out of camera range, and Walker shows us how they handle that, as well as how they handle the music of Allen Toussaint or Sonic Youth."

At the end of the movie, the credits report that they want to include an emotional performance of U2's One but that they can't gotten permission from the band.

Errata

Hats off to Philippe Deschamp (merci) of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control and Igor Krassikov (Дякую) for their work on errata submissions to the latest Dragon Book.

I found an error with the book (page 528) and at first I thought the errata failed to list it--but it turns out I failed to see the link to the original errata list, which contains quite a few errors--mostly errors involving missing semi-colons, braces, extra parenthesis, and so forth.

It turns out that editions printed after Spring 2008 no longer contain the bugs on the first errata sheet--one reason that purchasing a new book might make sense, as it took me some time to go through and annotate my copy.

UPDATE: "Claudio on comp.compilers writes "But I would wait for a reprint. The first print of the 2nd edition has way too many mistakes." Yes.

UPDATE: Dr. Ullman, a co-author of the book, granted me credit for reporting an optimization error in Figure 9.9, page 594. Another student identified the error during class--I identified the photocopied handout as the figure from the book, verified the error failed to exist on the errata, and followed-up with Dr. Ullman. In fairness to the identifier, I'm attempting to figure out their name(s) so they might receive due credit.

Agent Ribbons

Purchased Sacramento-based indie duo Agent Ribbons' first album, "On Time Travel and Romance" this afternoon from R5 Records (former site of Tower Records). Low-fi and creative, we both liked it.

svn commands

Rebuilding my repository tonight on KUbuntu. So I don't forget:

Porting the repository:

1. svnadmin dump .subversion-repository > repo.dump
2. cp repo.dump ~
3. cd ~
4. svnadmin create .subversion-repository
5. svnadmin load .subversion-repository <>

To check out the project:

1. cd ~/src
   
2. svn co file:///home/schultkl/.subversion-repository/csc-251

Radio Songs

From somafm.com's Indip Pop Rocks!:

Romford, London-born Imogen Heap's "Closing In" from her 2005 album "Speak for Yourself" on the Megaphonic/RCA/Victor/Sony BMG labels.

New York City-based Asobi Seksu's "Mizu Asobi" from their 2005 album "Citrus" on the Friendly Fire label.

Now defunct Ruston, Louisiana-based Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" from their 1998 album In the "Aeroplane Over the Sea" on the Merge/Blue Rose labels. Great vocals.

OMG

Like, the original OMG?


Note: proper Valspeak ends with rising intonation.

Tree Container Library and Wubi

Initial compile of the Tree Container Library (TCL, regrettably, for short) fails--I'm running a version of Debian via QEMU that's a bit behind the curve, with gcc 3.3.5.

I hosed my apt repository during a failed upgrade a few months ago (it wanted to upgrade the kernel, I canceled, corruption ensues). So I thought I'd upgrade--I'm testing out Wubi, an installer that works in a similar fashion to QEMU, in that it allocates a block of space for an Ubuntu install (about 7GB). The nice part is that you can dual-boot into either one, and uninstall it like an app if you want.

UPDATE: Never mind--while waiting for Wubi I discovered an alternate tree data class (thanks Kasper Peeters, I appreciate your contribution)--and it's GPL'd.

Story Arcs

What might a movie about our lives look like?

The thought struck me yesterday as I walked from work to my light-rail station stop. At an intersection, I noticed a trio of teenagers on the opposite side of the street. In the late afternoon sun, one of them had a look of impatience on their face as they waited for the light to change. Perhaps I felt the same emotion--I suddenly felt curiosity about their life, where they came from, where they wanted to go, what lay in store for them in the future--their entire story arc.

The thought stayed with me after passing them and on the journey home--all of the people around me have stories to tell, and stories yet to tell.

I feel the same curiosity when I compare the experiences of my co-workers to my own--where we lived geographically, where we were in our lives. It reminds me of the time I overheard a high-school student wonder aloud where their as-yet-unmet future spouse was, and what he was doing. It's the same thing.

Stepping back from my own life and looking at the big picture helps me evaluate whether I'm where I want to be, and if not, the ability to think about how to get to where I want to be. Looking at others' lives in the same way helps me feel compassion for the burdens that everyone else shoulders.

Hai World

As much as I enjoy learning how to write a compiler for a subset of the Java language, I think I might enjoy writing a LOLCODE compiler more.

Ken Luttke Was Here

Some time ago, Ken Luttke inscribed the message "Ken Luttke was here" into a section of concrete sidewalk I step over on my daily commute. Today it remains, cracked and worn.

What childhood inscriptions might remain as markers of your youth?

Spring

Perfume of flowers
Smell of grass clippings
Sunshine

Friday Cat Blogging

Polydactyl cat
camera fascination
all claws extended

Excel Saga

Dawn and I currently watch snippets of episodes of Excel Saga when we can--which as of late means during breakfast and maybe dinner.

The above picture depicts Menchi, the pet dog of the eponymous character--Menchi doubles as her emergency food supply (thankfully never yet used), which is why she's so happy to escape when she can.

Weird and silly, absurdist, full of corny drama and cartoon-physics, the theme songs have become a recurring theme in my head this week.

UPDATE, 2008-04-27: Finished it last night, including the "legendary" 26th episode. One of my favorite quotes from the series: "Sounds fishy!" as she interrupts Lord Ilpallazzo's evil half's monologue, then continues to pummel it.





And of course, the Japanese voices with subtitles for the win--no comparison, although the English voices come across acceptably.

Sphygmomanometer

Today's word is: sphygmomanometer.

I enjoyed learning how to use it--pump up to 180 mm Hg, then release pressure slowly until you hear the heart beat in the stethoscope (systolic pressure reading), then continue releasing slowly until you no longer hear the heartbeat (diastolic pressure reading).

Another mystery dispelled.

We're both healthy at ~120/80.

Flex and Bison

Saturday afternoon and evening I read the 42 pages of the Flex manual.

Today all day I read 82 pages (of 142) of the Bison manual.

It's all making sense.

Earth Hour

NPR covered reactions to Earth Hour 2008 on Monday--the first exposure I received to it. We didn't participate this year, but hope to next year if we remember: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Hour

It sounds pretty cool--Sacramento's not on the list of supporting cities, regrettably.