My personal hardware-OR impedance mismatch
Prior to working for SpaceCurve, I worked for a major company, doing UI and web services. The experience was a rewarding one. We worked in terms of OO and design patterns; abstraction away from the physical was considered a Good Thing. Java was the language that got us excited. I can’t speak for my peers, [...]
My LASIK surgery
My vision acuity was 20/30 in one eye and 20/120 in the other; I also had noticeable astigmatism in the bad eye. I hated wearing glasses, not only for vanity reasons, but also because they hurt my ears (due to my cochlear implants). So, when I worked up the courage, I decided to undergo the [...]
IPC Benchmarking, Using 2011 Hardware
It was surprisingly hard to find modern benchmarks of various Unix IPC mechanisms on Google. I found only two real benchmarks; both of these were in the range of 10 years old. Thankfully, a page by Gene Stover here did provide source code for benchmarking various IPC methods. I checked over the source code to [...]
Age can be a virtue
The mathematics lesson that made the biggest impression on me was the scenario that personal finance gurus often use to emphasize the importance of saving early. Let’s say you plan to retire when you’re 70. If you start saving $2000 an year at age 20, and invest it in the stock market, and stop saving [...]
Fun with Homebrew Game Theory
Please note, this blog post was written without dusting off my game theory books or browsing blogs, because, well, playing with code is funner than reading. I’ll post an update after comparing my results with the available research. For some reason, I got oddly fixated on a scenario that is similar to a reverse iterated [...]
C++ Volatile – Novice Tries to Sort Out Conflicting Advice
So, it’s 4 months into my job, haven’t used C++ since a job in a small group that was worked by students many years ago, and first corporation-level experience with C++. I was asked to research and prepare a short lecture on the keyword volatile — which I’d been using for shared multi-threaded variables on [...]
Thoughts on Multi-Day Bug Hunts
Most software engineers have at one time or another spent more than one day trying to track down a bug. I’m no exception; there have been times when the hunt for a single bug has spanned several days. These days are among the lowest points of my career; I’m not creating new code, and as [...]