I think I like the handheld version of dollarshort.org more then that real, meant-for-the-web, version of the site. Both layouts are pretty nice though I must say. The site belongs to Mena Trott of Moveable Type fame.

And that is that. We’re done. In a half hour I will have been up for twenty-four hours. I’m tired, but it is raining outside, so i’ve decided to stay in the C&D with patrick.

What can I say? If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have taken Networks. No, I suppose I am joking, a little bit anyway.

Compilers has definitely been an experience.

update: I woke up at 8:30 yesterday, so I could make it to my Marxist Theory class. I got home today at 11:15, just before lunch. (My plan is to take a shower and sleep.) I’ve missed all my classes for today. My last class as an undergraduate should have been STAT 231, instead it will be PSCI 321. I kind of like it that way. I didn’t think about it at all till I started walking home, listening to no surprises by Radiohead.

CS 444 / 644 Assignment Part 3 Due March 30, 2004

Complete your Ada/CS compiler by implementing a code generator and run-time environment for the SUN.

Fuck you too, Cormack.

        .file "test/code/simple_assignment.ada"
        .global main
main:
        save    %sp, -96, %sp
        sub     %sp, 4, %sp
        mov     10, %r16
        sub     %fp, 0, %r17
        st      %r16, [%r17]
        mov     20, %r16    
        sub     %fp, 0, %r17
        st      %r16, [%r17]
        nop
        ret
        restore

Assembly has never looked so good.

“O.K., So It’s Not His Funniest Film,” is an interview with Kevin Smith, the man Dave loves to hate. There are a bunch of funny quotes, I liked the following:

CURTIS A lot of people think of you as somebody running away from the conventions of genre films. But you don’t see yourself as that.

SMITH Not at all. When I look at “Clerks,” I don’t think of it as, “This runs away from the genre conventions.” I look at it as, “Well, we didn’t have any money.”

And this one, which I read at Signal to Noise first:

CURTIS You made a controversial movie about Catholicism, “Dogma.” What did you think about “The Passion of the Christ”?

SMITH I haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s funny, though, that people bring it up and ask me, “What do you think of the controversy?” I’m like, “What controversy?” The dude made a movie about Jesus in a country that’s largely Christian — a very traditional movie — and it’s made over $200 million in two weeks. There ain’t no controversy, people. That’s a hit. They took one or two Jewish leaders in the beginning and said, “This may be construed as anti-Semitic,” and then spun it into a must-see movie for hard-core Christians. You’ve got to go see it if you love Jesus. I wish to God I had thought to do that when I was making “Dogma.”

(11:30 pm) I’ve basically spent the entire day at my desk. I woke up late, at 1:00 or so, and started programming again. 10 hours later, I’m still at my desk, and I’m still programming. I wish there was more progress. It seems like things are moving so slowly.

(1:00 am) I am feeling stressed.

(1:40 am) Here is some useful information for those of you who aren’t in CS. A lot of the times when you program in C/C++, you will encounter one of the following two runtime errors:

• Segmentation fault: You are breaking the permissions of the memory pages. Common reasons are

  • You are writing to read-only memory, including the read-only data or the text (code).
  • You are reading or writing the first page of memory, typically because you are dereferencing the NULL pointer.
  • You data and stack segments have overlapped, typically because you have recurred too much.

• Bus error: You are breaking the expected memory alignment, typically trying to read or write a word at a non-word-aligned address. 1

Our compiler currently has neither error.

It's four in the morning, and I'm just about to go to bed. This is going to be a horrid weekend I think. The compiler does a little bit more then it did yesterday, but we still have so much to do.

Well, I have no been to my last fed ever. It wasn't what I expected, but I think things like that are always a bit of a let down. Too much on my mind I suppose. That said, it was nice seeing so many of my friends out. I need to talk to Gary and see what his opinion of the night was as well. He told some girl he was in first-year pre-op. That was entertaining. He eventually showed her his drivers license. She was shocked I'm sure.

The night ended well.

I'm meeting Kumar and Patrick at school to continue work on our compilers project.

I'm waiting for Simon and Steph to come over now. We're going to go to Fed shortly. I don't know how I feel about going. No one loves Fed Hall more than myself, but all I can think about is my compilers assignment. I think it'll be a fun night out.

The compiler is still not really doing anything of substance. We're close to crossing that line when it does do stuff. That's all I want. I'll feel much less stressed once I know it'll compile something, anything.

Shima's walked to meet Matt and Durshan at the bomber. I'm hoping they decide to go to Fed too.

I slept through my Compilers class today. Cormack has gotten better at lecturing in the past few lectures I've been to, but he's still a bit too rambling for my liking. Nevertheless, I still think he is a very nice professor.

Our compiler is doing a lot more stuff now. I think we have pretty much completed A2 now. We do analysis for almost every part of Ada/CS. There are holes here and there, I think the most obvious two are subtypes and function overloading. Regardless, it's quite impressive watching it determine that A(1,1)(1).B(1)(1) is a function that returns an array of records that contain an array of arrays. Well impressive for me anyway.

We have 5 days to get the compiler to make code. I'm hoping we can get it all done. I have faith. We'll have to wait and see.

XFN is a way to describe your relationship to someone else on the web via the rel attribute for a link. XFN is a simple idea, and seems easy to implement, so I may add the information to my links shortly. Basically if Dave is my friend, and I have a link to him on my web-page, then I state that he is my friend in that link.

Update: I'm listed on rubhub now. I haven't thought of anything cool to do with the XFN information, except perhaps highlight links differently depending on my relationship with someone.

I love useless widgets and other crap people add to their sites. This guy tells you the temperature in the area he lives using a banner picture that represents a garden of sorts. His description does his work much more justice then what I have just said.

Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought that this comment authentication thing was interesting:

• TypeKey: The Patriot Act of Weblogging
• Centralised Authentication
• TypeKey? You Blow Me.
• Centralised Comment Registration

I've been getting comment spam at my photoblog, as some of you may know. SixApart, the company that makes Moveable Type, is developing an authentication system called TypeKey that they hope will reduce comment spam. They plan to have people register with this authentication service before they can post comments to sites that are using TypeKey for authentication.

I wonder if it will be effective, and if people will want to use such a system. Some people want to post anonymously, and some people may not want the comments they post on one site to be linked in anyway to comments they post on another site. (Maybe you post comments at a forum for child abuse victims, and want those comments to remain anonymous and separate from comments you post on your friends photoblog, for example.)

Most of all though, I am really curious as to how they will implement the system.

(I found this link at one of my favourite sites on the net, kottke.org.)

Those of you who enjoy writing on the web, but are less then impressed with the way MT converts your writing into HTML, may want to look at the following two programs: Textile and Markdown.

Textile has been around for a while, and is basically a shorthand for HTML. Instead of using the tag <em> to emphasizes some piece of text, you simple mark your text with underscores, like so: _emphasis_. There is similar notation for most of the important html tags you would want to use. Also, textile will automatically encode entities (like &), will convert -- to ’—’, and make your quotes curly. There is a moveable type plugin to let you use textile to format your text instead of using moveable type's lame ‘convert line breaks’ function.

Markdown has all the features of textile as far as I can tell, but the design ideas behind it are slightly different. You can read in-depth the reasoning for the syntax markdown uses here.

I don't use either program at the moment. Most of what I write is short, and not filled with lots of HTML. However, if you find you put a lot of HTML in your posts, then these programs definitely will make the code for the posts much easier to read.

I've been doing nothing but compilers for the past few days. I'm definitely not as productive as I would like to be, or as I should be; i'm hoping that will change in the next few days.

I had promised Gary I would go to Fed with him this week. So, tonight, Gary, Steph, Simon and I all went out. We saw lots of people at Fed: Patrick, my other compilers partner, Victor, Phoebe and Rick, Ahilan's friends Monica and Eddie. Even Liz and Sylvia were there.

When we arrived at Fed it was totally empty. I signed in 3 random brown guys, and then waited for Gary to sign in Barbara and her friend. When we walked inside there were 3 other people in the club, the 3 guys I had signed in. By midnight the place was a lot more busy.

As I said, I saw Liz at Fed. As she walked by, I grabbed her and pulled her over my way, which is something I do when I'm out and drinking. Jeff, if you are reading this, be glad, because she turns around and pushes me away. No fuss. No words. Nothing. I had to get her attention again before she realized I wasn't some random dude looking for some attention. It was a funny scene. I think she may have felt a bit bad, but really she shouldn't. I should probably tap people on the shoulder to get their attention, as opposed to yanking them over my way. The whole thing reminded me of this joke I had read at Patrick's site earlier.

The most memorable moment of the night was at the end. Standing on the dance floor with Gary and Simon, some random girl, walking through the crowd, stops and starts starring at me. Now, I was trying to figure out if I knew her or not, but I was quite sure I didn't. She kept looking at me though, like I should know her. So then I thought, maybe she was one of Ahilan's friends who thought I was him. I asked if I knew her, and asked her name. Her friend told me her name was Jennifer, before they both stormed off. At this point I was worried I had offended one of Ahilan's friends, so I told Simon to go look for her. He was more then willing, for reasons I will leave to your imagination. I decided to go look for Gary, who had wandered off by this point.

I come back to the spot we were dancing to find Simon with the two girls. I pulled her over and asked her, "How do I know you?" Her reply, "I don't know you, stop flirting with me!" Yes, girls can be stupid, but what can you do. I laughed to myself and left Simon to dance with the girl and her friend, while I wandered about.

We left Fed and loitered outside for a bit, talking to people as they left. We saw so many people on their way out. The two girls also left, and Simon and Gary went to talk to them. I sat and chatted with Patrick, well aware that my raw-animal-magnetism would be too much for the girls to bare, that it would result in their confusing my mere presence with some sort of flirting. The girl thought Simon was quite hot, but her friends were quite opposed to her leaving with him. Gary and I left for Mel's, and told Simon he would get mad props if he could get the girl to Mel's as well.

Gary and I arrived at Mel's, and shortly after Simon arrived. The girl, and all her friends, beat Simon to Mel's by a few minutes.

Here are the steps I went through to get public-key authentication working for my ssh connection to school. What this means is that I no longer have to type a password in when I connect; the server sends a message to my machine, which I decrypt, thereby convincing the server I am who I say I am.

First, you need to generate a public/private key-pair. I had to generate a SSH1 RSA key. To do this, required the following command, ssh-keygen -t rsa1. Don't enter a pass-phrase when prompted, save the files in the default locations with the default names. A pass-phrase is not quite needed if your home machine is secure, and it would defeat the purpose of this exercise, as we are trying to avoid typing passwords. This will produce two files, a private-key and a public-key.

Second, upload the generated public-key to the remote computer, using the command, scp identity.pub <user>@<server>:.ssh/authorized_keys. This will overwrite your authorized_keys file, if you already have one. I'm guessing you don't, since if you did, you would already know how to do this.

Third, try connecting to your server. You shouldn't be prompted for a password.

Now, why would you want to do this? Trust me when I say you will quickly grow sick of typing your complicated password every-time you want to do a cvs command which connects to a remote machine.

I like this dude's site, Right Wingin-It. Most everything he posts bugs me, don't get me wrong, but it's interesting to read how the other side thinks I suppose.

How did I stumble on this site? Through a bizarre internet project called Radio Vox Populi, which converts blogs to streamed audio you can listen to.

Toggling the comments on and off now works. Here is how I do it:

    $display = false;
    if ( isset($_GET['comments']) ) {
        // set or unset the cookie
        if ( !isset($_COOKIE['comments_on']) ) {
            // create cookie
            setcookie("comments_on", true, time()+10000000);
            $display = true;
        } else {
            // delete cookie
            setcookie("comments_on", false, time()-36000);
            $display = false;
        }
    } else if ( isset($_COOKIE['comments_on']) ) {
        // cookie was set earlier, and set to display.
        $display = true;
    }

The $display variable is used to determine how to display stuff. Most of the problems I was having came from the fact that after the cookie's value was set, it wasn't available till the browser window was closed. (At least, this is what seemed to be the problem.)

Once you set the comments on they will display on the front page till you decide to turn them off. Let me know if there are any problems.

Now back to the #1 stress in my life, compilers. We have 2 weeks to finish our Ada compiler. We are still trying to finish up the stuff we were missing from the last assignment. This last assignment is 50% of our mark, so it needs to be much better.

Show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream she said
The one that makes me laugh she said
And threw her arms around my neck
Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I’ll run away with you
I’ll run away with you
Spinning on that dizzy edge
I kissed her face and kissed her head
And dreamed of all the different ways I had
To make her glow
Why are you so far away? she said
Why won’t you ever know that I’m in love with you
That I’m in love with you
- Just Like Heaven The Cure.

I am thinking about moving the site over to another content management system, Textpattern. I've been mucking around with it on my machine, and it looks quite interesting. For one thing, I think I could have my photoblog posts and my normal posts all stored in the same place, and they could be displayed together on a main index page easily, but they could also be displayed as they are now, as two quite different sties, just as easily. Anyways, I don't know if i'll actually do any of this. I kind of just wanted to type up a semi-long post to see if the new layout of my index page looks OK.

Someone has written a script to generate episode summaries for nonexistent episodes of 24. Metafilter is good.

You can tell when I'm procrastinating by the number of posts I make to my blog.

One idea I had for an essay topic for my Marxism class was to discuss open-source software and how it may have some sort of relationship with Marxism. The thing is, I don't think there is anything in particular Marxist about open-source software. People talk about how with open-source software the money is being made by selling services, but this is true with closed source software as well. There is just something slightly different about having access to the actual product for free it seems.

I decided to see if anyone else has said anything on the matter. I think I missed a more interesting point, that this fellow brings up.

I've been using the ideas outlined here for quite some time now to create URLs that should fairly clean and easy to read. One thing I've noticed at school is that sometimes pages get served up as text, as opposed to xhtml. Has anyone else experienced this problem. I use a .htaccess file to tell the web-server to serve up files with out extensions as xhtml, but perhaps sometimes it forgets.

What do you see when you look at my homepage? I'm curious. Here is what I see. Now, if you are using Mozilla, Safari, Opera, then you should see what I see. On the other-hand, if you are using IE, I'm quite sure all bets are off. My goal is to fix the site so that it works for everyone. I think that is really the whole point of the web. I hate seeing pages that say, "best viewed with blah."

Please let me know if what you see doesn't match what I see, and what browser you are using.

Also, all you PC users, you should really switch to Mozilla Firefox. I am really curious to find out what IE6 does better then Firefox.

I saw the Fog of War at the Princess last night. The film is a documentary about Robert MacNamara, and the things he did in his public life. The film is segmented into 11 sections, each section corresponds to a lesson MacNamara has learnt in his old age. The man is incredibly interesting to hear, and quite well spoken. Much of the films content seems all the more relevant considering what is happening in the US right now. I wholeheartedly recommend the film.

It's 2:00 in the morning. I've been laying in bed since about 12:30. I don't know why I can't sleep. Maybe it was all the coke I drank for dinner. I went out with Shima to meet her friends Mark and Manson for dinner at the Mongolian Grill. The food was quite good, but a bit pricey. I didn't do the all you can eat thing, as I don't have much of an appetite, but I did drink 2 or 3 cups of coke. Yum.

I have a CO 351 midterm tomorrow which I hope is easy. I haven't been putting as much effort as I should be into the class. I hope I do well on this midterm, because my assignment marks in the class aren't quite good at all.

I will now attempt to sleep again.

Mario!: Anyone that can play songs from super mario on the piano is ok with me.

I just got back from seeing The Passion of the Christ. I thought the film was good.

Charges the film are violent are not unfounded. The film is very realistic, to the point of being very gruesome at many points. The film is about the last 12 hours of Christ's life, so I have to wonder what people were expecting. Especially since Mel Gibson movies are usually quite bloody.

Charges that the film is anti-Semitic are unfounded in my opinion. The film definitely casts the Jewish high-priests in a bad light. (The Roman leaders are more reflective about what is happening. However, I am quite sure that in the New Testament it is the Jewish priests out for blood, not the Romans. They do let the murderer free over Christ after-all.) Now, while the Jewish Priests are being portrayed in a bad light, there are still some priests that realize that what is going on is a travesty, and will have no part in condemning Christ. Similarly, the streets are filled with Jews who are upset at what is going on. There are plenty of Jewish characters that sympathize with the plight of Jesus in the film. I'm not sure if the portrayal of the high-priests is accurate or not. Perhaps they were equally as reflective in the Bible. (Something I'll have to look into.) My point is that anyone watching the film and thinking the Jews killed Christ, probably thought as much before they started watching the movie.

I recommend the film. It is interesting to watch.

Need to sign up for some crap on the internet? Don't want to use a real email address. Check this out: Mailinator.

Just got back from wathcing Monster. The film was quite good. I really have nothing to say you haven't heard before I'm sure. She looks totally different, the film is really disturbing, blah, blah, blah. If you want to see something a little bit different, I'd go check it out.

There comes a point when you just have to say, "fuck it." I am at that point. It isn't that late just yet, a little past 1:00 in the morning, but a week of this is too much. Hopefully we can make up all the marks we'll lose on this assignment when we do the next one. The last assignment is worth half of our mark.

I now know that writing a compiler is a lot of hard work.

For those who want to know, this assignment we were asked to do the semantic analysis needed to process a Ada source file. That means we have to make sure the file makes sense. Examples of things needed to be done are ensuring variables are given unique names, that the scoping rules for Ada are followed, that types are created properly, that expressions are valid, that statements are used properly, etc., etc. We also had to implement a better error-recovery strategy in our parser, as we were just terminating when we encountered our first error.

I'd say we did about half the stuff we were supposed to do. Right now our compiler is 36000 lines of code. I think 25000 of that was generated by programs we wrote.

The compiler does some things, and doesn't do others. We have a day to get it to do everything except spit out code. Whether it'll happen we'll have to wait an see. There is still some much to do. Patrick, the recent addition to our compiler group, has the acronym IGU next to his MSN name all the time. I asked him what it meant, since I was curious why it was always there next to his name. He told me I would reach a point where I would know what it meant. Kumar told me late last night that it meant "I Give Up". That made me chuckle.