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Clearing up something from my inbox:
Termination of High-Speed Converter Clock Distribution Devices
There has been much talk of the “Hike for Pie” in my family-in-law, and we finally figured our for sure where it is. It’s the trail to clear lake, trail head parking lot at GPS coordinates:
- Latitude: 44.39407007
- Longitude: -122.00163555
Earlier this week, I was doodling a BULL, then gave it a dress, and suddenly it seemed like a good idea to base a logo on for Angel/BULL.
A doodle of a BULL, which, with a dress, also kind of looks like a boobylicious Angel.
I feel that this idea can be refined/simplified into one of these images which can be two different things, depending on how you look at it.
- ^ refers to the last step left in the superpath, never to a step right. (In the A4 notes below, in red, I seem to disagree with what I say here.)
- [^] refers to the superpath’s imprint, [^^] to the super-superpath’s imprint, etc. Referring to a superpath’s imprint from within a subpath is only possible if the subpath’s imprint isn’t included in the superpath’s—that is: the subpath shouldn’t preceed \\ or be preceded by //.
- [[^]] refers to the superpath as a whole, [[^^]] to the super-superpath, etc.
My A4 notebook (p. 23) also bears witness to complicated thoughts and conflicting insights (in red) about what the ^ symbol should and should not refer to.
At some point, I started condensing some paper and digital notes into a TiddlyWiki, which seemed like an appropriate tool for a personal project. Looking at the timestamp (July 26 of 2013), this choice doesn’t make sense, because at that time I had already started this blog and discovered the joy of indexical knowledge management based on links between temporal blurbs (as within a blog) rather than links between named blurbs (as within a wiki). I guess it had everything to do with wanting the execution of the BULL idea to be perfect before daring to share. It’s definitely time to get over that.
The BULL TiddlyWiki.
At work yesterday, during lunch, I started a lengthy discussion that stretched out long beyond the boundaries of regular lunch hours. The discussion topic was my surprise that IT practices—particularly programming methodologies—hadn’t changed much, if at all, between my leaving the industry in 2007 and re-entering the industry in 2015. My surprise wasn’t a rethorical technique; my unpreparedness for this lack of change has lost me a long-running bet with Wiebe around 2007, when we stopped being colleagues for about 8 years. The content of that bet was as follows: I predicted that in 10 years time—now—computer science would have sufficiently evolved so that software would behave intelligently. In fact, I didn’t believe that AI would have emerged by now, but I did expect software architecture to have changed in such a fundamental way that computers would at least have behaved intelligent, even if they weren’t self-taught and self-learning.
I was doubly wrong when I entered the bet with Wiebe: software systems are messier and more difficult to change than they were 10 years ago, and special purpose, self-learning AIs are obsoleting humans even in such areas as driving cars. So, was I fundamentally wrong in thinking that a different type of software would be possible? Should I simply wait for AI to take over my job as a programmer and obsolete these concerns?
I don’t know. I do know that if AI doesn’t make my job obsolete (any time soon), I no longer believe that anybody else is going to make my job obsolete. And I really do believe that my job—the functions that I perform during the majority of my working hours—ought to be obsolete. But, since I can’t seem to convince anybody of this fact, I should suck up my pride and shame and start sharing what I’ve come up so far.
The notes that I’ve made the last few years aren’t as disjointed and messy as they were when I wrote my previous—and first—post about BULL. Here are some of the better-looking notes, from my A4 notebook:
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 18
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 19
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 20
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 21
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 22
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 23
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 24
BULL notes – A4 notebook p. 25
Meanwhile, yesterday, while I should have been clocking work time, I’ve been condensing some of the threads in my head into a README.md in a newly published GitHub repository. This morning, I also rebased my latest half-assed attempt at a formal EBFN grammar and a parser in C++ to that same repository.
During my holliday, somebody may change the settings on my bike, so I want to document a few key ones:
- Angle handle bars: 25 degrees
- Distance frame till top of seat pin: 7.5 cm (not counting the rubber seal)
Our printer is an Epson XP-630, courtesy of Marilisa’s parents who gifted it to us when we moved into our new place together. Suitable ink comes in the following multipacks:
- C13T33374510 (24.4 ml),
- C13T33574510 (47.0 ml),
- C13T33374010 (24.4 ml), and
- C13T33574010 (47.0 ml).
I ordered a supposedly compatible multipack (“Epson 33XL multipack zwart en kleur”) through www.inktweb.nl for our first cartridge replacement (which has been due since Marilisa’s trip to India about half a year ago).
I just noticed that none of my posts older than a decade could be listed:
The culprit was in the following function, where I had to add "century" and "10" to the lists of $periods and $lengths respectively.
function bigsmoke_ago($timestamp_gmt) { $difference = current_time('timestamp', true) - $timestamp_gmt; $periods = array("second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "year", "decade"); $lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10"); for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j]; $j++) $difference /= $lengths[$j]; $difference = round($difference); if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= "s"; $text = "$difference $periods[$j] ago"; if ($j < 3) { $current_day = date('j', current_time('timestamp', true)); $arg_day = date('j', $timestamp_gmt); $relative_day = ($current_day == $arg_day ? 'today' : 'yesterday'); $text = "$relative_day, $text"; } return $text; }
While add it, I also got rid of the useless Google ads.
Plus, I improved the link text replacement for posts without comments and commenting turned off.
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