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an eddy in the bitstream

Author: Peter Karman (Page 16 of 76)

Maker of lunches.
Teller of stories.
Singer of songs.
Crafter of code.
Kicker of darkness.

Rubber Soul

March 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I’ve loved the Beatles since the summer of 1983, when I was 11 and my aunt introduced me to their records (including some rarity vinyl iirc). The first record I ever bought was the blue greatest hits double record. I played the first side of the first record (Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Sergent Peppers, Day in the Life) over and over in 6th and 7th grade.

But it’s taken me nearly 30 years to identify my favorite record. I’ve had lots of favorite songs, but Rubber Soul is now officially my favorite record. I realize no one but me cares, but it feels important somehow to have identified an actual studio record, rather than a greatest hits compilation, as my favorite.

Bug

January 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn’t sound exactly like a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn’t think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered a new one online using my wife’s computer.

When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive, and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board. Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass, and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.

I had thought that the term “bug” used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone found a moth in an early computer. But according to the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug and to fix the problem so easily.

And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.

False Laziness

December 23, 2010 / / 0 Comments

One of the three virtues of programming is Laziness. Beware of false laziness. Andy Lester writes on the problem aptly when he describes an interaction with another programmer:

This person was one of those programmers who tried for the premature optimization of saving some typing. He forgot that typing is the least of our concerns when programming. He forgot that programmer thinking time costs many orders of magnitude more than programmer typing time, and that the time spent debugging can dwarf the amount of time spent creating code.
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