jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2009-10-31-2315Z

Tried a bread experiment yesterday, using some homemade cider (made with fresh Sebastopol apples) as the starter. It took care of 3 of the 6 ingredients: the water, sugar, and yeast. I then added salt, oil, and whole wheat flour, kneaded, and baked. It was awesomely good.

I'm finally making progress on some I/O routines I've been wanting to write all my programming life, using memory protection to simplify coding. The idea is to have really small, tight loops using rep movsb, and have the segfault handler take care of the buffering. All the complexity is kept in the handler routine, making the input and output really small and fast in the normal case, and a bit slower in the odd case where buffers need to be read, written, moved and/or altered.

Healthwise: the same fingers are still numb, but I've had full use of my right hand for some weeks now. When in Fairplay, I could hardly snap my right- hand fingers, and now I can easily. My bad tooth has hardly bothered me at all in the past few days. And my cracked feet are being slowly but surely fixed with regular filing down of the dead skin with a "zester". [comment]

2009-10-29-2052Z

My bike and trailer got stolen sometime in the last 48 hours. I'd left it about a block away, coming back from the hardware store the other day, because I didn't feel like schlepping it all the way up the hill... and now it's gone. Lost the solar panel and battery along with it, but most of my other stuff I left at the house where I'm staying, so it's still safe.

That was kind of what I was subconsciously hoping for. Now I have a lot more motivation to work on a new HPV concept, since I have nothing to fall back on. The $100 folding solar panel is a bummer, though.

Learning how to optimize my C code using "register int", "asm" blocks, and if an array can be sized 1024 rather than 1000, using that so the array accesses will be optimized to shl's rather than use mul's. [comment]

2009-10-21-0258Z

Just ordered eyeglasses online after paying $50 for a prescription today at Costco. The glasses from Zenni Optical were only $8 plus shipping, total $13. There are a bunch of these $8 glasses online from various sources. We'll see how usable they are. My prescription is -1.75 sphere, -0.50 cylinder, for both eyes, with an axis of 95 degrees on the right and 15 on the left. Pupillary distance is 62mm.

I've been spending a lot of time on CodeChef lately, doing their practice problems and getting ready for the November competition. Finally, a website that challenges my brain and gives the competitor in me a chance to blossom. I might not be Facebooking as much any more for a while... [comment]

2009-10-13-0138Z

Correction: McNear's happy hour ends at 1800, just had to pay $5 for a pint of Moylan's Irish Red. A very smooth, sweet ale with a hint of strawberry.

Storm is coming our way tonight, gonna hunker down tomorrow. [comment]

2009-10-07-2331Z

Lunched at the Sonoma Wild Food cart at the gas station at 440 E. Washington in Petaluma. Victor served me a nice big venison sausage for $5. Not bad for wild, organic meat.

If you get the urge for ice cream every so often, as I do, you can't do much better for a cheap fix than the little sub-4-ounce containers of Ben & Jerry's. Only a dollar at Safeway.

Got my Petaluma library card today, and checked out Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Got to start reading again. And jogging.

Having a happy hour pint of Fat Tire, $3 at McNear's. Dempsey's has happy hour only on Monday, 5 to closing, while here it's every weekday, 4 to 7. And Dempsey's brews aren't that varied nor that great. Rather have some Fat or Anchor Steam. [comment]

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