Friends

According to the official Hulu.com channel on YouTube:



(image links to page where I found it; let's see how long that lasts...)

Via Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, The C Programming Language by Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie and HP Lovecraft. My favourite part:

I had heard tales of the... thing that C.A.R. Hoare had summoned up in '62– dark hints of choosing one element from an array, and partitioning the rest into lesser and greater sets, and hellishly recursing until the data were twisted into a sorted list– but nothing I could have imagined would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw.

I think any second-semester sophomore encountering quicksort for the first time knows exactly how the narrator feels.

Unrelatedly, was woken by the postman this morning from a dream in which I was giving a talk about error-correcting codes, failures in spoken communication, and formality of register, at a feminist conference (!), using the OSI network stack as an analogy (!!). I had just got through the obvious parts about how explicit, simple protocols and robust error-correction at the application layer reduce misinterpretation (for some reason, my example for that was a bingo game), but when the protocol has no built-in error correction and can be fragmented, the rate of confusion rises (I think where I was going with that was some kind of analogy between natural language and fragmented IP datagrams), but then the doorbell woke me up.

The nice people from the Jordanian chapter of the IEEE gave me this award after my two hour marathon talk. They were really nice and I suggest visiting the IEEE chapter in Amman.

Sunset in the necropolis.

We're standing on the edge of Qatar and the land in the distance is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That's probably as close as I will ever get to Saudi.

I went for a horseback ride through the necropolis of Giza today. This is the pyramid Khafre behind me. My horse's name is Lucky.

Start Time: Friday, December 25, 2009 at 1:00pm
End Time: Saturday, December 26, 2009 at 1:00pm
Location: 167 Church St. app 2103, Toronto

For Christmas, many people retreat to spend time with their family. For those with no family obligations, or those who are comfortable bringing their family, there will be a alternate "ophans" Christmas gathering of friends (and strangers!) on Dec 25.

People are welcome from noon Dec 25 until noon the next day. If you're coming from out of town, there is some crash space available if you do not object to waking up to the sounds of an espresso machine and the smell of fresh coffee. Parking might be available in the building, but I cannot guarantee a spot. Though there is nearby paid commercial parking.

There will be pleasant company, board games, Wii games, movies, yummy foods and drinks (but BYOP). People are encouraged to bring more of their own games and consumables as well. A special balcony is available for those who prefer to combust their consumables. The building also has a pool table until midnight.

Remember: No orphan left behind! Bring a friend!

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/links/ZvUZ/~3/ZQvRnW7zsp4/

http://www.links.org/?p=830

When dealing with the recent SSL fun, I met Marsh Ray, who found the problem in the first place. Marsh has a website, extendedsubset.com. I went looking for what an extended subset was one day and was a bit surprised to discover there was no such thing. So, after consulting with Marsh, I figured I should fix that and write down with some measure of rigour what an extended subset is.

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Oh, hey, it's snowing.