Published over here.

Posted to Dreamwidth. I almost forgot I had an account there.

Part 4 is on Dreamwidth also.

Since the ACM Programming Competition allows schools to send multiple teams that can earn different scores, I wrote a script to produce "average" scores per school. SSU usually places in the middle of all of the schools, but both of SSU's teams got crushed in 2010, giving the school an overall second-to-last place finish by my formula. Did everyone ( Read more... )

More stuff found while cleaning old files:
Perl acquired bignums and smart string/int conversion. I had written an introduction to perl using these two examples:
my $million = "1" . "0" x 6; # Produces the string "1000000" $million += 1; # Results in "1" because the string resolves to zero.
As of version 5.8.8, it produces "1000001".

One of ( Read more... )

I'm cleaning out files and found these half-written notes. See also earlier: some simple assembly

useful assembly links
http://www.penguin.cz/~literakl/intel/intel.hmtl
http://jsimlo.sk/docs/cpu/index.php/jz.html

The first difference between -O0 and -O1 is that -O0 starts with pushq %rpb followed by movq %rsp, %rbp and -O1 doesn't. -O1 ( Read more... )

kowh informs me that Linux has inotify() for this purpose. BSD has kqueue. Since the novel idea in my post already exists and has been implemented for years, I've put the rest of the post below a cut.
( Read more... )

Remember those ideas I had about heavily reworking shell plumbing?
This guy went ahead and did it.

Someone called on the telephone asking for me. When I answered and identified myself, they said "sorry, wrong number" and then hung up after I asked "who is this?". So they were looking for me and ran away when they found me.

It sounds like somebody shady was verifying information about me. Are there any specific scams that I should be on alert ( Read more... )

I had another nifty thought about where I think HTML6 ought to go, so I'll add it to that "spec" that I spilled some of my thoughts onto earlier. Call this Tang's Awesome Markup Language version 0.002.

Major changes from my last post:

• New "aka" attribute replaces proposed "define" node.
• Added idea of "src" attribute merging retrieved contents into ( Read more... )

I recently become aware of a most "urgent" issue that is "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety" -- one of them, no one is sure which -- of the state of California. Governor Jerry Brown proposed a few minor reforms to the state pension system. What makes these reforms so urgent? The reforms can apply to the ( Read more... )