Big-O and other stuff
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

I'm frantic in your soothing arms
I cannot sleep in this down filled world
Found safety in this loneliness
But I cannot stand it anymore
The Unnamed Feeling, Metallica

Okay, if you ever wondered what would happen if post-modernism got into a three-way with existentialism and anime, it would be Big-O. Not knocking the show, it's great and has an entertaining story-line. It's just really, really weird and complicated.

I dunno. If you are tired of hearing me talk about what you know I'm going to talk about, this would be the point at which you might want to turn back. May I recommend User Friendly?

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I was speaking with Shannon tonight about some things, and she brought up a good argument: that I sometimes seem to act as if people are making attacks upon me when it comes to relationships. It's a fairly valid argument, at the least partially correct, most likely more.

I know no one does anything personally or intentionally. It just makes me uncomfortable, I guess. And as time further progresses, it makes me more uncomfortable. It warps me a little bit more.

Hanging out with Chris and his girlfriend today didn't phase me much, because Chris behaves universally. But with others, the behaviors change, at least this is my observation. Not a major change (although that does periodically happen), just something subtle.

It makes me feel like the outsider. Which is what I am, in that case, and rightly so. Humanity, when operating properly, first connects solely in pairs: one human to another. From a biological level all the way up to the meanings we humans impart onto our activities, it is pairs, always pairs. And so, the third is the outsider. The outsider can respectfully leave, or forcefully interject. One is moral, the other amoral.

But because it is moral does not mean it feels good. Which is the way moral decisions seem to work: one has to sacrifice for the others. There's nothing wrong with it, I guess. When I've gone off to the clearing at the end of the path, I hope someone says that I made moral choices.

I just hate that walking, lonely kind of hurt. No... not even really hate anymore; just tired of it. It's a dull ache, like a muscle over-worked, burning inside. But I guess I can shoulder this load a little longer.

I know it seems like I bring it up a lot, but not really, in the scope of all that I think on. These thoughts pass through my head less and less as time marches forward. They just happen to come up as I write in here. I use this place to bleed a little more of it off. But I wonder, what will happen when it is gone from me completely? To the point that I don't even care at all about such things? To the point where I don't even have that desire anymore?

The desire causes the hurt. The desire to not be alone. The desire that is the same among all humans.

So, Shannon, you're argument is right: I sometimes feel attacked by that. And I shouldn't, and I should try to change that. Thank you for calling me on it.

But I'm not bothered so much anymore, especially as I continue to write this and hash things out. I just feel awkward in those places, and that I should leave so as to not impose myself.

If my company is asked, I may give it depending on my own constraints, otherwise I shall occupy myself with tasks of my own. There is always software to design and code, papers to be written, and books to be read.

And this time I'll make it explicit: does anyone have anything they want to say? Any comments at all? I'm soliciting for them this time, and I would appreciate them here and now.

Dropped && Anger
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Well, had to drop the History of Science course. Not a really big deal, I didn't need it for anything and losing the three credits in no way affects my graduation (I was going to wind up with a few over 124). I just couldn't keep up with the 100 or so pages for it a week plus the 20 or 30 from each of my other classes. I need to pass these CSci classes. Ah well, you can't have it all.

...

I guess you could say I'm angry. I won't deny it, I can be frighteningly angry at times. And I guess I show it a lot, at least here on my little corner of the web. Shannon is right in that assesment, that I am a man of layers. If I remember her phrasing: "On the outside you have this happy layer, then underneath it you are bitter. Below that you are really angry. But under it all you have a soft, gooey center that's like a delicious cookie."

I dunno. I'm an idealist folks, and I just get so frustrated that so many just don't get it. I've only ever made self-consistent logical arguments based on solid facts, yet so many would seek to crush my arguments. My best analogy is to try to imagine a wild animal used to roaming around and then being forced into an over-small cage and you get a sense of my frustration.

I do think I am mostly happy, though. I get so much joy out of writing little bits of software, papers on CS topics, and articles. I can think of no better way to spend an afternoon than watching a baseball game. I watch comedies until the sun comes up. I could go for hours on end about these things that make me happy. It's just that by the time I get to writing for this blog that any happiness I have has been eroded down by a harsh world. Bad drivers, rude people, the Republicans on campus, all of it wears at that happy layer. Then, by the time I've finished homework, I'm dead tired. I get five hours a night of sleep if I am very lucky. So by the time I set to writing here, I'm down into those bitter and angry layers.

I would talk on end here about all the things I work on, but many would not follow me, and I may as well have kept the things to myself. It's hard knowing what I do and being able to communicate it to those outside of my profession.

There are some bridges I have to tend to, although, I may let them fall to pieces. I begin to wonder if it is worth the effort to hold my end fast. They wouldn't be the first bridges to come undone on me.

Stuff
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Ah ... classes. Good stuff. Most of my professors are complete nut-cases, which means a relatively fun semester. My classes are about half graduate, half undergraduate in composition, which makes for an interesting mix. The HSci class is a bit weird, though. First there are actually females in the class, which is very odd from having been surrounded by mostly guys doing the CS major. Secondly, I think I've out written all abut the graduate students in that class. Strange indeed. Well, at least there are ladies to talk to.

Hmmm, other things .... I dunno, the usual I guess. I still carry with me only harsh and stark reality. I still refuse to bend to any man, to any power. I refuse to believe the lies and the deceit. I refuse to believe the delusional fools that somehow think this is the end time (people have been saying this since 999 AD) and we should waste our resources. I shall stand tall and fight back mysticism and superstition.

Wanna do stuff and I have no time
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Another sleepless night. So many things I want to do, yet it feels like I have zero time to do them in.

• I want to relearn and expand my knowledge of the LaTeX that allowed me to write such nifty physics papers that were on par with the professors.
• I want to finish up my thread-safe logging package so I can finish up and start working on my encrypted network-transfer client (can we say AES/Rijndael encrypted data with secret keys sent by some asymmetric encrypter (RSA or DSA not sure yet)).
• I want to get into this refactoring project at work; even though it will be a lot of work, it'll be nice to able to start on a clean code-base and run with some of my ideas. I think I can make the new program do its work at least ten times faster, just gotta be crafty and I think with some of the ideas I've come up with for layouts, I may be able to pull it off.
• I want to graduate and see if I can get a job down at the Mayo Clinic working on their nifty new database (there's a reason IBM called the architecture Blue Gene). It looks like fun.

So much to do and so much fun to be had. I just want to get my hands into these things. Honestly, I think I grow faster with my knowledge of CSCI outside of the mainstream. I learned a lot about coding from skimming the works of The Knuth and a few others.

I also learned a lot in my first few classes. Honestly, my so-called "Software Engineering" class has taught me nothing more than how to play corporate politics; the testing and design ideas I already had down. I know software design is an art, and like writing, it is one art I am good at. Stunningly good at as a matter of fact. I'm not going to bog myself into some "design" procedure they teach to people who don't get the art. I can see beyond that and look at the small and the large in design almost at once. I can find what will be bottle-necks and what will be weak points, and then change the design to eliminate them. I won't say my software is bug-free, its "bug-lite", that is, very low on bugs since I design well. I may not be as mathematically capable as The Knuth, but I do get that fundamental idea that he wrote again and again in The Art of Computer Programming, and as such, I generally write good programs. My first stab may not be perfect, but it is always damn near its intended mark.

Take this whole distributed-databased file-system idea that I have been working on for myself based on inspirations from work, Google and Apple. It is a very complex beast: We're looking at six or seven major components each comprised of maybe 10-15 smaller components (some shared and some unique) each needing to inter-operate with some arbitrary SQL database and also inter-operate with each other (ie, the copy mechanism). I would say the complexity of this design is near the order of Projekt Physik, but not that near. And it is definitely less complex than TeX and some other software I can think of, but those have 40 plus years on my software. But I fully understand my design, and it has just the right complexity and interaction to do what I want it to do and still be robust and fast. It fills maybe 30 or so notebook pages worth of diagrams and documents. Crazy.

And I'll bid the world a good night now. I need some sleep as I have a lot to do tomorrow.

Proofs and huge counters....
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Another long night of proofs and hand-calculations. Then again, its technically impossible to construct a true Turing machine, so I couldn't get a computer to do it.

Why? Well, a Turing machine would need an infinitely long tape, a physical impossibility. As such, everything in our computational world is not as powerful as it could be. Even the computer you use to look at this website is less powerful than a Turing machine. I've heard of modern computers being classified along a certain computational model: Deterministic Finite Automata with a shitload of states. Think for a moment about a counter that is, say, 128 bits in size. It then has 2^128 states. Even though this is a very large number and it would take a crap-load of energy to increment this counter fully through all its states, it still has a fixed, finite number of states. So it is a finite state machine. But to describe a modern computer of any reasonable complexity with a finite state machine description would be an exercise in excruciating pain. That 128-bit counter has over 3*10^38 states (more than the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon, or 10^27 times more than the number of stars in our galaxy, it would more or less require that we harness the energy of the Sun directly to run it through all its states). Now remember that 128-bits is only 16-bytes of memory, and in most peoples computers, there is 16777216 times that much memory in RAM alone, not counting hard-disks measured in large fractions of Terabytes and the large on-processor memories ranging from 512K all the way up to 2MB.

Admittedly, many of the possible states a computer could be in are invalid and can be excluded, and generally computers are designed more abstractly than at the bit level. But still, one can speak of a CPU being in thousands of potential states based on its instruction set. In short, we use Turning machines to describe computers, and the tape has an implicit limit based on the memory available in the machine.

Confusing and simple at the same time. What a fucking huge can of worms I opened by studying Computer Science. Also, don't worry about draining the Earth and the Sun of energy, no one would bother with incrementing huge counters like that, most memory is taken up by having to encode humans things in binary (text, pictures, etc). Just remember, in the simplistic scheme, it takes 8-bits to uniquely identify a character, and more robust schemes it takes 16 bits. And integers come in sizes of 8-,16-,32-, and 64-bits, of which we often only use from a few hundred to a few billion. So while it is possibly for me to construct a 128-bit counter and drain the world of power, why would I bother? I would be long dead by the time this particular computer could get there if all it did was increment with every CPU cycle.

Okay, I'm just going to leave things like this before they get anymore bizarre and complex.

ashdkajdhgkajbsfdjaebrfoweiugfojvbwe
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Eeesh, my eyes hurt like hell. And my hands are throbbing from the massive amount of typing. But I think I have successfully remedied our problem, at least on the machines that I could get access to. Of course, this sets the bad precedent that it is going to be expected of me to perform in this same capacity again and again. To which I say, "Fat chance!" Atlas decided not to shrug, but this time he has shifted his load to the turtle of enormous girth.

I'm getting really tired of this shit at work where I am expected to run the entire system from the software side, when I am also told the broken piece of software is the one thing I am not allowed to fix. I am tired of these ridiculous constraints and then getting yelled at for following those constraints. I have no problem playing the game as long as they stop fucking with the rules.

It seems to be the pattern of my life that just as I figure out the rules and may actually have a chance of succeeding, the rules get changed and I get screwed.

I dunno, just feeling really wound up and burnt out. Like a car that is beyond overdue for an oil-change, or that oh-so-fun piece of steel that is just ready to catastrophically fail.

I'm just really tired now, hungry, and slightly irritated from the massively repetitive tasks I was engaged in.

So I think I'll get myself something to eat, brush my teeth, read a little bit of Heretics of Dune and go to bed.

But before I go, lemme ask a simple question: Am I completely off my rocker? I've spent a good part of yesterday and today trying to figure out how to implement arbitrary precision signed integers. Is that odd? I just find it strange that C# and .Net don't have them when Java and a bunch of other languages do (LISP). I dunno.

And now, its time for some sleep.

Later-o.

Friends, colds, cars
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel
Is just a freight train coming your way
Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel
Is just the freight train coming your way

Don't it feel right like this
All the pieces fall to his wish
Suck up for that quick reward boy
Suck up for that quick reward they said.....
No Leaf Clover, Metallica

It sucks to lose a good friend. I lost a good friend of four years. We toughed it out through some bad shit, had our fights, had some fun. But things ended. Partly it was my fault. I become heavily involved with my schooling and a girlfriend. He made his own choices and so things didn't snap or come to a head, just faded away. I think he once put it "The bridge between us is still there, its just shot to hell and no one has time to repair it." So that is that, I guess. It sucks.

On an unrelated manner, I actually did get some sleep last night, but it must have not been enough because I caught some kind of stomach flu, or perhaps it was the Chinese food I had Wednesday or something, who knows. Hopefully it'll pass quickly.

And I got all my stereo stuff out of the old car, and tomorrow I'll finish getting the rest of the stuff out of it. It's kinda sad, I've done so much with that car. It was my first car, and I loved it even though it sometimes would piss me off to no end (seized A/C compressor, failed air-suspension, O2 sensor troubles, broken bolts, fried speakers). Sigh, I'll miss it. If a guy has a really good first car, something he really likes, he'll remember it for a long time. My dad remembers his first car and that was 46 years ago. My brother is still looking for a replacement for his first car (a 1979 Lincoln, big four-door number with 460 cubic inches of Detroit Rolling Iron, light gray). I dunno if I'll try to find a replacement for my first car, since I basically replaced it with the same car, just a few years newer.

Anyway, I'm gonna try this sleep thing again, its kinda fun.

Edutainment
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

I know I've been doing a lot of bashing lately, but it just seems to be on my mind whenever something overwhelmingly stupid comes up.

Lemme put it this way: I want to be fully entertained by what I spend my hard-earned (yes, coding can be very hard) money on. I like watching Anime (English-dubbed is fine by me, I'm not an elitist when it comes to Anime) because I know that, if I start from the beginning, I'm going to get a long, long, long very detailed and enriched story that will engage me and not treat me like a damn idiot. I like "Wolf Rain," "InuYasha," and "Cowboy Bebop" even though I'm only vaguely aware of what the over-arching plot is (I'll leave it up to you to google for it since I won't do them justice). I like Steven King since he doesn't bludgeon me over the head with his themes (okay, he does kind of do it up with The Stand and a few others). Hell, I spent months puzzling out Dune and its various sequels, and I still do. Why? Because it's entertaining, I always find something I missed before, always a new angle to look at.

I just get pissed when Hollywood pumps out some crap, ramps up its hype-machine (the shit is so formulaic it has to be describable as an algorithm), expects me to shell out my money on crap, says that movies are crap due to file-sharing of several varieties (yes, I know downloading movies without paying for them is illegal, but the network is blameless, just as the video-tape is blameless, the people who misuse it are to blame), expects me to buy that line, and then wonders why the fuck their profit margins are plummeting (hint: it's not the file-sharing). Seriously, most of the time these studios are engaged in a collective circle-jerk over the money they want to make. In the last four years, I've seen maybe 10 movies I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm not even sure how many movies Hollywood pumped out in that time-frame (probably in the hundreds). Most were just hunks of junk based on stupid premises trying to ride the wave of what was popular at that moment. Seriously, how many formulaic “feel-good” movies can you name in the last year? Or how abut movies that try to capitalize on New York City (*cough*Day After Tomorrow*cough*)? Seriously, Hollywood you are dying because you are writing fewer and fewer good scripts. There are hundreds of specialty channels on TV that provide what a viewer wants, when they want it, and mostly they get good quality. Why should the viewer deal with Hollywood's schedule? Why should the viewer spend his dollars on something that may very well cause him to leave the theater and waste his time? These are the things that run through most people's minds about movies, at least on some level if not consciously. Seriously, you pay a more or less fixed rate for an assload of channels on TV, so if something sucks on one channel you can switch to another.

I dunno, maybe I'm making no sense here and I'm just spinning my wheels. But I think there is some truth to it.

As for wondering why I haven't spoken about myself lately, its kinda simple. My life consists of the following: get up, shower, go to work, work, go home from work, possibly shower again depending on the day, watch some TV/read, try to sleep, repeat. Emotions wise, meh, just lonely, but that's par for course for me I guess.

Later-o.

Code and broken lines
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Well, I just got a sort of breather from my boss on what I need to do for work. I may not have to port this bit of software from Windows to Linux (its got a lot of little Windows-isms). Which would free me up to do a lot of other stuff, which is mainly move into user-interfaces. I mean, I like writing really low-level stuff, but almost four months of it is a pain. And as my boss said, its too much to ask one undergrad to basically rewrite an operating system.

On a more serious note, here's what I think of our brave new world.

I do not fear terrorists any more or any less since before the 11th of September in 2001. Their reasons for hating us are the same now as they were before. My feeling of safety goes like this: as long as there are religious extremists in the world (Christians definitely included, it started with the Crusades and the Inquisition and about a million other things), there will never be peace or understanding. When people view the world through such skewed lenses, the communication and logical breakdown is so fundamental that there is no other parallel in our world for it. Not between Microsoft and Linux, not between relativists and quantum mechanists, not between any combination of groups is there such a fundamental lack of communication and understanding. So, given this total lack of potential communication, I have no presumptions as to my safety. I will state this simply, in my opinion, I have no safety. Not one iota. Never have and likely never will. And neither have any of you out there. Now don't take me as an agnostic here, I believe that everyone should be tempered with a little faith of some sort. It is when this begins to preclude any other viewpoint is when it goes too far.

I know the isolationist viewpoint has cost the world dearly before (WWI and WWII), but there is also a point where involvement constitutes the crime (Vietnam). It is here where we truly need to stand back, as the wiser and cooler heads in Europe suggested. We need to stand apart and let them decide amongst themselves. And if it becomes too bloody, we need to think long and hard and plan very carefully on how to proceed. But this is hard for this nation to understand, a nation that has seen a major war every ten years since its inception through a war. To the less informed in our society, this is seen as a good thing and a point of pride. But it is a dubious honor: it speaks of our will to survive and our passion, but it also speaks of our inability to control our own temper. I'm not saying that the countries of Europe are guiltless, but they can serve as a lesson. Ever since the end of the Pax Romana, Europe has been in conflict. And from their experience we can truly learn what not to do.

It is a strange world we live in. And it seems as if it'll only get stranger from here. Will we ever peacefully get out of the situation we are in now? Or it does it have to happened through some horrible circumstance as envisioned by legions of science-fiction writers? Who knows.

And with that, I'll pack up my little soap-box for the evening.

Later-o.

I, Coder
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Yeah, I code now. Much code. But its not the quantity of code that counts, but rather quality. I spent close to three hours deciphering someone else's code to determine the best method for solving the problem. Quality, always quality, makes a system better than quantity.

Tomorrow, I'll begin testing on my code to ensure that it works the way its supposed to. Should be fun. Then I'll work on moving some movies around out to the cluster to save some space. More fun.

On another note, I still think I'm a happy guy. I know it seems like I worry a lot about relationships, but in all actuality, it comprises proportionally small amounts of my thinking time. Let me decipher that. Because I can mutli-track think, and think very quickly, I end up thinking on things a large amount of the time. The only time my mind isn't working on something around my life (and those around me, which, by proximity. is a part of my life) is when I'm reading a book or sleeping. I read maybe two hours a day and sleep between seven and nine hours a day. As such, I end up thinking about anything and everything for anywhere between 13 and 15 hours a day. Insane, I know, but I enjoy it, I like solving problems. So, given this, I think on relationships maybe 10 to 15 percent of that total time (I know, kinda weird that I could quantify that, another product of thinking). As an example, I spent close to two hours today with my brother designing an electronic BCD clock and its physical and logical layout. Another example, I spent close to seven hours of thought on the software I was working on today (honestly, it was a very enjoyable time). So yes, I do think and postulate on relationships, yet, I think my problem is that when I turn that problem solving onto my self, I cannot divorce my emotions from analysis and, therefore, I end up running in circles.

So, hmmmm, don't worry about me unless you really want to, then go for it.

I dunno, am I confusing? I find myself very confusing lately. Not really sure what I myself am talking about sometimes. I apologize for dragging anyone down corridors of thoughts they did not feel like treading.

I have hope for my future, but it waxes and wanes. Where time and circumstance take me remains to be seen. Tomorrow, after all, is completely unknown and is only filled with ambiguity.

Before I go for the evening, I shall speak of the one thing I fear. I do not fear for my financial security, nor do I fear for my education, or any of those things that will make me materially successful. Not to seem cocky, but I am fully confident that I will get to a place in life where my skills will allow me to do as I please. No, the one thing I fear is something I have talked about on here before. I fear spending my life by myself. I fear this greater than I fear anything else in the world. I know I'm only 20 years old, but I still kinda wonder. I spent a great deal of my life by myself, with no real friends to speak of and only family. This was not by choice of myself or family, but rather a horrible combination of circumstances and the cruel nature of the little fucks from this horse-shit town (yeah, I know, I'm being bitter, but about this I am more than justified). As such, I fear going back to that loneliness (I know I have friends, I haven't forgot) or some version of it. Maybe my imagination is too active, but I can see myself as an old man in two scenarios. In one, I've had a good life with a good spouse, and as I get closer to passing on, I'm surrounded by my family. In the other, I've made many, many friends, and know many people, and learned much, but lay down and step out by myself. Yeah, I know, gruesome, and I shouldn't really think these thoughts as they'll likely make the men in the white coats come and get me, but they are my thoughts. Hopefully, it'll be some happy merging of the two scenarios. Only time will tell, I guess.

And as such, I bid you all a good night, and thanks for walking down the bizarre corridors of my mind. And thanks again to my friends for listening to me in person as I walk these weird halls and telling me that it'll be okay.

Later.