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One sad fact, with the limitations of my education: I always find myself backtracking through the “Eh, what does that mean” ‘ing of things, until eventually I figure it out, or my brains stack overflows; especially a problem, since once I start I often end up exploring further. (I still remember looking up something from the 1800s for school, and ending my quest around the 1960s in Vietnam War…)

In one of my many side steps from topic matter, to trying to make heads or tails of things I see, I finally saw something that made sense:

rewritten as:

I saw something like the above earlier today, and scratched my head. Seeing the decompiled form of it, the really strange thing? I see an iterative loop much like a line of code, haha! I remember seeing a symbol like the one in the center somewhere, in reference to summation; so considering that possibility (and noting to look try and look it up later); the n above and the i=1 below the symbol, it became clear. The ci xi made sense the instant I saw it, I’m not that numb lol; it was the stuff in the center that didn’t fit my comprehension.

So, if the n was the length of vectors c and x, with i so obviously being an index value >0 and < n; i=1 would have to be the first index value to use for iteration over c and x; intended to make it clear what element the slice begins at (helpful to me, since I often count from 0 to n, thank you C lol); and having already written off the funky-E as an operator meaning the find the total value of each element added together. The middle of the image became in my minds eye like some what like this:

for (i=1, n=length(c); i <= n; i++) { do a sum += c[i]; ... }

only, written sideways with lovable horizontal terseness 😉 I am reminded of a something I once read:

Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite different.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

but in this case, you could say a programmer is trying to translate math notation, into concepts he already knows as second nature lol. You know, it really would’ve be nice if school had thought me this stuff.

I think, I could really use a drink…

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I had a shocking thought, stick a nice cigar in my mouth and give me a week in the brush, and I’m starting to look a little to much like Big Boss for my tastes :. I really need to get cleaned up this weekend, and get a close shave…. Really, I’d like to get out of this rats nest for awhile, and have some fun, but I am supposed to be using this time for a little Rest and Relaxation; guess taking a Buddy Love inspired holiday wouldn’t be very restful any way >_<

If it wasn’t for trying to learn something about differential equations (curse smart people for piquing my interest!) and reading a little bit of lisp, this might be a boring, lol.

Now if I could just do something about getting some sleep at night…….

Should reading lisp be considerd hazardous?

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my eyes are starting to see ) and jump back to matching (, then reparse what I just read, jump back to ); like a bloody type writer, lol

(define (factorial n k)
  (= n 0 (lambda (b)
          (if b
              (k 1)
              (- n 1 (lambda (nm1)
                      (factorial nm1 (lambda (f)
                                      (* n f k)))))))))

if I wasn’t hungry, I would think that I was getting dizzy after 30min of this kinda stuff :. I generally don’t mind the parens, but I find assembly easier on the brain sometimes…

Just one o’ them songs

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Heard it enough times on the radio to get sick of it, until it actually starts to sound pretty good….

Just a girl born in Dixie, washed in the blood
And raised on the banks of the Mississippi mud
She always had a thing about fallin’ in love with a bad boy
Yeah they could see it all comin’
But her daddy never dreamed
She’d grow up that fast, you know what I mean
The way a girls gets when she turns seventeen, kinda crazy

She’s a rebel child and a preacher’s daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn’t stop her
She holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh, me and God love her

She kissed her mama good-bye
Said, “I’ll be sure to phone ‘ya”
She called her from a truck stop in Tucson, Arizona
With amazing grace we made California alive
And then my gypsy life started takin’ it’s toll
And the fast lane got empty and out of control
And just like an angel she saved my soul from the devil

She’s a rebel child and a preacher’s daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn’t stop her
She holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh, me and God love her

Now she holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh me and God love her
God love her
Me and God love her

— GOD Love Her, by Toby Keith

I really hate to tell people how to do their job

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I really hate to tell people how to do their job, especially when they are the ones who should be getting paid to do it; but sometimes I can’t help but wonder, if some people have ever heard of the words race condition or predictability, being used in the same sentence as exploit or security vulnerability?

How to fix complex technology

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Russian Cosmonaut: It’s stuck, yes?
American Astronaut: Back off! You don’t know the components!
[Russian guy pushes American gal out of the way; who looks ready to belt him one]
Russian Cosmonaut: Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!
[He beats the crap out of the machinery with a wrench until it works]

Ain’t it just the truth? Does it really matter which country uses it, it’s all more or less from the same place, and none of it works properly ^_^

Camels rock

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Been reading a bit more of Programming perl, I left off at the start of Chap. 7 “Formats” for the night, so I could get to taking care of things before work tomorrow (I haven’t been on the computer all day lol). I enjoyed the later parts of the chapter on regular expressions; although I’ve known regular expressions (hence forth regex) for a long time now, I *loved* getting to read more about how the parser & engine works; it has changed the way I think about the /PATTERN/ (and just how much hard work perl does to deal with greedy people).

I also learned a few new things, namely just how advanced Perls regexes are: I’ve always felt that Perl must be the king & queen of regex implementations…. after seeing all the (?…) stuff that is referenced in the book (the ones I didn’t know yet), I think Perl must be the king, queen, jack, and ace; or as my hanging jaw expressed, “Fucking brilliant!” ;-). The other things, is how in the universe can ‘pos($str) = 1;’ could possibly be legal, rather then just an interesting form of magic; and how functions that skip the dang comma after a block, like the built in ‘map { block } @list’ does, can be defined. Which interestingly, also explains how modules like Error and Exception from CPAN likely do there stuff.

This is getting interesting hehe.

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Hmm, in reading the large message I’ve been writing out, I can’t help but think….. If I don’t edit a few parts out, they are gonna think I’m psychic or knew that the past months worth of ops were coming. I didn’t though, I just figured out they were coming, months ago looool; it’s not like it was that hard to anticipates.

It’s the virtue of old age, you get to spend more time thinking 🙂

But if I don’t keep the sections in place, the recipients might not understand the direction I’m coming from :. What can I say, life is like a chess board.

DTrace entry in /usr/src/UPDATING

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20080826:
DTrace support was merged to STABLE today. In the best
tradition of “the dog ate my homework”, subversion decided
that the commit message was too large and opted not to send
it. It was a stealth commit!

A ‘make buildkernel’ will now default to build the kernel
and modules with both DTrace kernel hooks and CTF data ready
for DTrace.

After you have installed both world and the kernel, and
rebooted, you can ‘kldload dtraceall’ to load all the DTrace
kernel modules and then you’re set to run the ‘dtrace’
client (as root).

For DTrace documentation, refer to:

We are limited to kernel tracing at the moment, so the pid
provider is not available.

For the syscall provider, note that the arguments to the
return probes are the same as for the entry probes.

hehe, gotta love Subversion 🙂

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Oy, not ot far into the book and the lack of sleep finally cought up to me… passed out for a few hours. I set a new shameful record for lack of sleep this week, but the nap was well deserved lol. Felt fairly well without the lack of sleep, but eventually…. as one friend put it:

your body will give you a resounding “NO MORE” and you w ill collapse whn you need sleep

Last night, I meant to read some more of the camel, but dropped stone cold to the pillow; then woke up bright and fresh around 0700 local haha. Decided to read some of the book, but couldn’t focus very well with the brightness of the book light; ut the TV on to help my eyes adjust to the light. Read a few chapters and had some scrambled eggs & toast (I almost never have any breakfast, but then again, I almost never get out of bed at 0730 without leaving for work either!). So far, I’ve only read around 80 pages, so I’m about 50~60pg behind schedule; (but hey, sleep deprivation catches up eventually) hopefully I’ll work my way through the thousand or so remaining pages quite quickly. I know Perl about as well as I know any language well; but ya never know, might actually learn something new lol.