Well, I'm back. I took a mini-hiatus because my life was in chaos. Between school, my TA position, my RA position, and all the company I've been having, things have been nuts. Now that I'm caught up on work and sleep and my in-laws are headed back to Ecuador, things are much more sane. I look forward to sharing more with you in the near future.
It's always nice to hear a practical endorsement of Linux--one that isn't based on techs having a flame war. A member of the LUG at OSU pointed me to this article on Ernie Ball's recent adoption of Linux. Ernie Ball is well-known for guitar related equipment. The article is a bit dated (Aug 2003), but a very good read none-the-less.
Happy income tax day to y'all. I hope this is a happy occasion that involves getting a check instead of sending one in. This is the first year in the last five that I'm going to get a refund. I'm excited!
Ironically, I'm up late working on school, not taxes. Some way to celebrate tax day.
Happy birthday Papa! Thanks for being a great dad: teaching me, supporting me, and loving me. I hope you have had a great birthday and have many great birthdays to come.
Yes, "wiki" sounds like something the Ewoks would say, but none-the-less I'm diving into the WikiWikiWeb. Hystrix pointed me to a few promising wiki engines, but I'm still looking around for good ones. I need a wiki that supports access control. I want it to be easy to install and easy to use. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to post them.
The wiki's that look promising so far are: SnipSnap, owiki, WakkaWiki, and MoinMoin. MoinMoin looks the best for me so far because it supports access control and revision control without requiring an SQL backend.
I want to wish you all a happy and meaningful Easter celebration. I can't help be be reminded of what Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:12-19. If Christ didn't rise from the dead then I am not saved, my sins are not forgiven, and my faith is worthless. Moreover, if Christ didn't rise, Christians are the most miserable of all people. But, Christ did rise, so we can have hope! That is the message of Easter.
I found this nice little summary of the truth of the resurrection. For those who are skeptical, don't ask me to prove Christ rose, prove to me Christ didn't. The resurrection is the only explaination that makes sense.
This week I've been struck by how late it's been staying light outside. Sometimes a feeling of amazement begins to well up inside of me until I remember...daylight savings time kicked in. Once again, I've been tricked. Decieved. It's not really 7:30, it's 6:30 and we just pretend it's 7:30.
It's funny how we categorically redefine time twice a year. But what's more funny is that this seems normal and we all go along with it. Not just the US, but countries all over the world.
Not everyone is enamored with this giant social experiment. Take Indiana for example. Being practicle people, they keep things simple. The state remains on Eastern Standard Time all year long. Unfortunately some fringe counties observered the time-change frivolity of their neighbors and chose to adopt daylight savings time. So, 5 counties on the south-eastern side follow eastern daylight savings time. Not to be outdone by their neighbors, and probably as a result of a drinking game, 6 counties in the north-west and 5 counties in the south-west, decided to adopt daylight savings time AND an entirely different time zone! So, Indiana observes four different time zones: EST, EDT, CST, and CDT. Yes, even their children make websites to help understand the madness. Somewhere I can hear an Amish mother explaining to her child that this time zone insanity is a product of following the ways of the "English."
So, don't be fooled. Tricked. Taken advantage of. Don't set your watch to the wrong time and then systematically accept it. Better yet, when people ask you the time, take the opportunity to give them the "correct" time. I bet they'll be surprised you did.
Normally, I'm opposed to linking to news articles from my blog. It seems silly. I'm sure you check the news. I don't want to be a news aggrigator, that's what slashdot is for. But this time, I can't resist. Really, I can't.
Courtesy of Google News, I found out that Microsoft released it's first genuine open-source project yesterday (Monday). No really, they did. Check out the Windows Installer XML (WiX) project page on sourceforge. It seems like Microsoft is finally able to suck it up, bite the bullet, and admit that the open-source model can makes sense--even for a software giant. Of course, don't expect Microsoft to start open-sourcing a bunch of flagship products, but watch for the trend to continue for non-revenue generating software.
Oh boy! This is so entertaining! What will happen next? Don't you just love the software industry?
In a conversation on Thursday, Dr. Erwig referred me to the Scala programming language. I had never heard of it before, but it piqued my curiosity because the research team claims to have solved the "expression problem". (See the paper here.)
Scala is a multi-paridigm programming language that seeks to combine functional and object-oriented language paradigms. It complies to Java bytecode or the .Net common language runtime (CLR) making integration with mainstream languages a breeze. I hope to do more investigation when I have a chance, but I want to point it out to those who are interested.
The in-laws have arrived. Lisa's parents and brothers are visiting for a couple of weeks. Needless to say we have a full house. It will be fun to see everyone and hang out. Too bad I have to go to school and do homework. Ah...if I could only pause the term for a while. Hm...software to pause school. I wonder if I could get a grant for that?
I ran across this fascinating article about the x86 and instruction set architectures (ISAs). It's a good read. The best part about the article is when it describes how modern processors are doing binary translations on instruction sets right before execution (think "just-in-time" compilation.) Because more optimization information is available at run time, these binary translations can result in significant speed improvements even if the executable is already compiled for the correct instruction set. Researchers have gotten up to a 20% increase in speed when optimizing a binary at run time.
Happy "April Fools" for all of you who celebrate it. I never do because I think it's stupid. Really, I do. No foolin'. Although, there was that time Lisa and I emailed Lisa's mom to tell her Lisa was pregnant when Lisa really wasn't...but other than that....