cogent's Journal

Gibson Recognition

cogent — 2004-01-04T10:35:04+00:00

Whenever I read anything by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, I feel somehow like the book was written for me to read at that precise moment in my life. Actually, that's been happening a lot lately, with many books I've been reading, like the Red Mars , Green Mars , Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and slightly more recently both The Forever War and Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. I suppose there's a pretty prosaic explanation for this.

I'm not sure exactly what the connection is, this time to Pattern Recognition , but I think that part of it is the illustration (which happens to be very useful at the moment) of a woman who is very, very interesting, but entirely unlike the woman who briefly, but quite utterly, replaced Stella in my heart.

Entr'acte

cogent — 2003-09-16T11:30:32+00:00

It is entirely possible that, as of two minutes ago, I have seen Stella for the last time ever.

Schwern and I are on a plane to Vienna in seven hours.

Protests

cogent — 2003-03-21T02:51:45+00:00

At one intersection an Iranian man who expects to become a U.S. citizen soon could hardly believe what he was seeing.
"What sickens me, you see these second, third, fourth-generation Americans criticizing their own country that so many died trying to get to," said Josh Bakhshi, 25.
"To see this kind of demonstration, and I disagree with this demonstration, the fact that people are not getting shot is incredible.
"You do this in Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, at best you would be shot, if not your whole family," said Bakhshi, who said he had just passed his citizenship test.

Contra Costa Times: SF cops arrest more than 1,000 in struggle for city's streets

Heavy Water

cogent — 2002-12-13T19:10:35+00:00

Yow! Am I HEAVY yet?

Favorite quote:

One of our associates, Bill Strauss of California suggested the use of a homeopathic reagent derived from a radionic query process. We sent him the atomic frequency of Deuterium, taken from standard NMR charts which he then had made up into a 2 dimensional geometric pattern designed to reverse the deuterium frequency by 180 degrees.

My girlfriend, who calls herself a chemist, says this is gibberish! What's wrong with taking the atomic frequency of Deuterium from NMR charts and making it into a two-dimensional geometric pattern? Huh?

utf8

cogent — 2002-10-28T07:33:14+00:00

This is make testdb using Devel::DProf on JavaScript::Tokenizer to tokenize a largish bit of real-world JS code when regular expressions include such Unicodey things as \p{Nd} and \x{000A}:

01:20:18 [cogent@birthday] Parser>$ dprofpp Total Elapsed Time = 167.9217 Seconds User+System Time = 151.5851 Seconds Exclusive Times %Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c Name 88.6 134.3 263.93 32590 0.0041 0.0081 utf8::SWASHNEW 7.75 11.74 150.49 22400 0.0005 0.0067 JavaScript::Token::try 3.91 5.930 7.911 32590 0.0002 0.0002 utf8::SWASHGET 3.01 4.562 155.29 1602 0.0028 0.0969 JavaScript::Tokenizer::pop 0.40 0.609 0.235 32579 0.0000 0.0000 utf8::DESTROY 0.31 0.469 0.231 20787 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::__ANON__ 0.12 0.189 0.091 1600 0.0001 0.0001 JavaScript::Token::newlines 0.11 0.170 0.114 4892 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::length 0.09 0.140 0.128 3258 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::bool 0.07 0.110 0.073 3200 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Tokenizer::state 0.07 0.110 0.072 3209 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::BEGIN 0.07 0.110 0.128 1600 0.0001 0.0001 JavaScript::Tokenizer::token_types 0.07 0.100 0.062 3261 0.0000 0.0000 UNIVERSAL::isa 0.05 0.080 0.025 4800 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::lexeme 0.05 0.080 0.062 1600 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::line

And this is the same code, when the unicode is replaced with similar (though obviously not identical) entities such as \d and \n

02:14:27 [cogent@birthday] Parser>$ dprofpp Total Elapsed Time = 3.985910 Seconds User+System Time = 3.932676 Seconds Exclusive Times %Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c Name 111. 4.389 4.051 20230 0.0002 0.0002 JavaScript::Token::try 31.5 1.239 5.505 1447 0.0009 0.0038 JavaScript::Tokenizer::pop 12.1 0.479 0.198 21661 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::__ANON__ 6.84 0.269 0.259 1445 0.0002 0.0002 JavaScript::Token::newlines 4.55 0.179 0.136 1445 0.0001 0.0001 JavaScript::Tokenizer::token_types 3.81 0.150 0.109 3181 0.0000 0.0000 UNIVERSAL::isa 3.05 0.120 0.146 3178 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::bool 2.54 0.100 0.044 4335 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::lexeme 2.03 0.080 0.019 4658 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::length 1.53 0.060 0.041 1445 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Tokenizer::line 1.27 0.050 0.012 2890 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Tokenizer::state 1.27 0.050 0.031 1445 0.0000 0.0000 JavaScript::Token::line 1.02 0.040 0.147 4 0.0100 0.0367 main::BEGIN 0.76 0.030 -0.006 1445 0.0000 - JavaScript::Token::string 0.76 0.030 0.029 8 0.0037 0.0037 JavaScript::Token::BEGIN

autrijus says this is a well-known problem. <sigh.> Out comes Unicode support from JavaScript::Token::Regex .

My first bug report.

cogent — 2002-10-16T09:20:59+00:00

So, I posted my first bug report to rt.cpan.org. With a patch and everything. Wow.

South Park cogent

cogent — 2002-06-11T04:45:39+00:00

Oh, why not. Ev ery body's doing it.

GD::SIRDS

cogent — 2002-05-25T22:54:32+00:00

So, I just uploaded my very first Perl module: GD::SIRDS

I'm pretty fuckin' jazzed.

So, like email me! Tell me whether the module sucks, or rocks, or what. Even better: give me ideas for good source images and good source-image creation.

Or just play around with it and forget about it. Which is just fine with me, too. :-)

p5p

cogent — 2002-04-01T06:56:15+00:00

So, I was able to make test with bleadperl on Mac OS X with zero errors. This apparently surprised Jarkko, among others, since (I presume) nobody's been able to get DB_File to work. ('Twas super-easy. I installed the most recent version of Berkeley DB, and things Just Worked.)

Schwern told me to tell p5p, so I finally took the plunge and joined the mailing list. This has been the high point of my weekend. :-)

Fun with Unix!

cogent — 2002-03-08T06:15:03+00:00

host -l ru. | grep 'name server' | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l

I'm gonna get arrested. The answer is 107164, tho.

host -l gov. | grep -i 'sucks|porn'

Nothin'. Damn.

host -l mil.

Query refused. Damn again. And now I'm *really* gonna get arrested.