Monday, October 24, 2005

 

Being a Mac user makes me feel powerless, sometimes.

Like, I talked to my mom today; her Dell PC has started acting up when connected to the internet, and she's worried she may have a spyware problem. She looks to me for technical help, and I'm clueless. "Sorry, mom," I say, "I don't use Windows anymore, and there basically isn't any spyware or other malware written for Macs, so I never have to deal with it, so no - I don't have any idea how effective those clean-up programs are, or which ones are best, or even how to diagnose whether you really have a problem."

It's tough. I feel bad. But I guess I'll have to live with it.

posted by Miles 11:05 AM

Sunday, October 23, 2005

 

I woke up this morning to a landscape covered in snow. Jess & I went up to Vermont for the weekend, to hang out with my dad & Ruth at the house in Danby . . . and though I knew it was going to be chilly, I didn't expect snow. It's only October 23rd. But snow we got; summer's definitively gone, and fall is on its last legs, here in New England.

posted by Miles 11:48 PM

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

 

posted by Miles 5:36 PM

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

 

The frustrating thing about to-do lists is when they just keep getting longer as you work on a project, rather than shorter.

In other news, there's a new Liz Phair album out. iTunes tells me I listened to her last album about 37 times. So, excuse me while I go download it . . .

posted by Miles 3:49 PM

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

 

I don't remember how it came up, but last night I was reminded of this program I heard of when I was an undergrad, that calculates pi by computing its own area. My memory was hazy, but I managed to navigoogle my way to a wikipedia page on it:

#define _ -F<00||--F-OO--;
int F=00,OO=00;main(){F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);}F_OO()
{
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}
(Okay, I can't get the spacing to come out right at all; properly formatted, it actually does look like a circle. Look at the wikipedia page.)

My new roommates (both programmers) were agog, and we spent some time trying to decipher it, last night. It's pretty neat; this program won an award for "Best Abuse of the Preprocessor", and deservedly so. Here's what we could make of it: The #define line at the top defines the "_" symbol to mean the statement/fragment "-F<00||--F-OO--;" . . . so on compilation, that statement is substituted in everywhere the "_" symbol occurs in the main program (or, actually, in the F_OO() function.) Because of the "--F" and "OO--" clauses, every time this fragment executes, it changes the values of the (globally defined) variables "F" and "OO". Somehow, it does so very cleverly, such that F comes out to the area, and OO comes out to 1/2 the radius. I think. Actually, in no way do I actually see how it does that. But apparently it does.

Pretty cool.

posted by Miles 9:35 AM