Hardware Failure
Hardware fails from time to time. And, unlike software, it can’t be fixed by typing or scriptic incantation. One of the harddrives in my primary computer failed. Fortunately, I set up that machine with 2 500GB drives as a mirrored…
Bounding Problution.
Problutions (noun, pl.): the problems that are an inherent part of solution to a very difficult and complex problem. These problems arise from within the solution itself, and are extrinsic to the original problem. Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit…
Learning to Learn.
It wasn’t until I was actually done with my undergraduate years at college, and had already gotten my self a job, that I learned the most valuable lesson of life: The programmer that wants to advance himself cannot afford to…
the Maker Movement
I’ve been ruminating on the subject of personal liberation/gratification/independence that comes as a result of the do-it-yourself attitude. With sites such as Instructables, magazines like MAKE, radical changes in class structure occurring at major universities and development in the third…
The half-derivative
When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the…
Enlightened Materialism
I keep finding interesting stuff on this old HD; Here’s a documented e-mail conversation between myself and a high-school friend Jeff Peoples on materialism and the mind. It was dated 2004-04-07 and appears to have been written in response to…
Fortune is Fated — a short story
Once a long time ago (2003) I took an English course to satisfy UCLA’s bureaucratic notions that I should have a ‘well-rounded’ education. As part of this course we read short stories, and were required to write a mini-essay each…
Godel and Atheism
I was going through a saved home directory from a HD that died a couple years back, and found this piece, which deserves to be saved. The file it came from is dated Mar 8 2004. (if it looks like…
The Designer’s Task
I usually really enjoy having to design a computer application. Lately I’ve been trying to design a multithreaded server that’ll process image frames from a video. Right, that’s MPI, Network and video decoding all rolled into one. Decoding video into…
The Importance of Good Documentation
This entire past week I’ve been reading about the MPEG-2 specs. I’ve got some video files that have KLV data stored in the user_data extension of the MPEG stream. So, right off the bat, I tried using ffmpeg‘s avcodec library….