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….
Do it Yourself!
The phrase “Do it yourself!” can either be a dismissive command that indicates the speaker doesn’t wish to be bothered, or an empowering personal philosophy. All the great geniuses of history were avid proponents of personal independence in thought, word…