When I listen to Rihanna’s “Shut Up and Drive”, instead of hearing “I’m a fine-tuned supersonic speed machine,” I hear: I’m a fine-tuned super finite state machine Does this mean I’m a nerd?
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Category Archives: Geeky Peawee
Academented Programming
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
I work professionally as a programmer at an atmospheric science department at a major university. One of the biggest things about atmospheric research is our reliance on computers for everything. While we’re nowhere near the limit of what we can do with observational data (and indeed in many areas, observational data is woefully short), there [...]
Opera vs Firefox, Round NaN
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
I’ve always enjoyed the UI of Opera’s desktop browser. Computers should work how I expect them to, and not vice versa, and Opera tends to operate just how I think a web browser should. Firefox has been catching up pretty decently as of late, and after trying Google Chrome, I think that’s a good contender, [...]
Note to self:
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Next time I go to have emacs auto-indent a 12,000 line FORTRAN77 source code, do it before I leave for the evening. It’s now 3:30, and it’s been chugging with roughly 85% of one of my workstation’s two cores for the past half hour.
So long, Open Solaris!
Friday, April 25, 2008
I’ve been running OpenSolaris Nevada on my file server for a while now. While ZFS makes administration of filesystems beautiful, I’ve been disappointed with the zpool functionality. In addition, administering the rest of Solaris is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Things like Perl’s CPAN, which is supposed to have a high level of [...]
Life without iTunes
Monday, April 7, 2008
Apple’s walled garden works well for most people. I, unfortunately, am not most people. This is my story. As I’ve already discussed previously, iTunes has a certain amount of suck involved. So, I’ve discovered Play, which sucks less in some ways, and sucks more in others. As so far, the more suckage hasn’t been so [...]
iTunes headaches
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
As you may guess, I run a mac. On the Macintosh, there really is only one music player in town: iTunes. Granted, there’s plenty others that will play music, but none that will manage it. I have enough music to make this a real issue. On Windows, there’s WMP, WinAmp, Foobar2000, and others I’m sure [...]
Beautiful Fortran
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
One of my more favored software development blogs is Beautiful Code. The concept is that code that is properly elegant is going to be readable, functional, and most of all, working correctly. There’s a lot of focusing on unit testing, proper OO design techniques, and how to squeeze an elegant solution out of the nastiest [...]
ZFS v NFS, 1-0.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
On our SAN at work, we use ZFS across it from a single head node to provide storage virtualization services, which are then exported via NFS to the rest of our machines on the network. At first, performance was a dog, especially on writing many small files to disk. This was indicative of having synchronous [...]