Resume Spam

I received spam from someone in Russia containing their resume. Wtf. Can someone explain this?

Fifteen years of experience with C++ programming, including nine years with
Visual C++ and MFC and 5 years with COM/ATL/WTL/ActiveX and IRC, POP3, SMTP,
MIME, IMAP protocols. One year of experience with C# programming, .net and ATL Server web developing. Developed skills in the utilization of ODBC and OLE DB
to access databases of different types, particularly ORACLE, DB2 and
MS Access. Knowledge of SQL, ActiveX. ...

4! Years

My new age.

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Update

The El Ranchero bar tender told me to "slow down" after I finished shot number two of Petron before receiving the first bowl of chips (initial offset was one bottle of "Liberty Ale"). By the time I switched to Sambuca he learned his lesson and recognized me for the accomplished drinker I appeared to be.

As they were closing, one of the other bartenders broke out with Roxette's "She's got the look" to which I sang along. You'll like this place.

Working for Weekend, Man

I'm low on ideas for getting VSIPL Lite + Integer functions to run any faster. The plan I was investigating was hoped to mitigate the inefficient memory accesses you face when accessing vectors with nonunit stride [i.e. consecutive elements in a vector are not consecutive in memory].

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I'm investigating several parallel programming languages, "paper languages" as they have been called due to their lack of substantial toolchain support and only significant utility being you can write papers about them. They all begin with well-constructed preambles regarding the woeful state of affairs in the parallel programming community in which only a single style of parallelism is well-represented by a particular language or solution. OpenMP, for instance, is really only suitable for data-level parallelism on a shared memory machine. MPI is suitable for task-level parallelism on a cluster. Neither one satisfies both domains well if even at all. The ones I've encountered so far (StreamIt, Brook, Chapel) sound reasonable. But claims of productivity need to be backed up, so we're all going to implement useful things with them and then compare notes.

Here is a fairly comprehensive list of languages that capture the sentiment. Some of them you wouldn't actually want to use in general. Some are domain specific (SystemC being the interesting one of those I think), and others are narrowly-scoped extensions of an existing paradigm (Intel SSE, for example, are SIMD instructions added to x86 - useful, but you'll probably never touch them yourself).

Parallel Languages

I'm going to try to implement FFT using StreamIt, Unified Parallel C (UPC), and perhaps Brook or some other streaming language in the next few days.

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I am now the proud owner of a GeForce 9800 GX2. Help me think of things to do with it besides use it as an alternative to central heating.

TSMC plays fast and loose with process design rules so overclockability may be limited, though I'm still inclined to try. I didn't with the GF8800GTX because I needed an easily-reproduced platform on which to perform benchmarks. One interesting aspect of the GX2 card is that while it has a total of 1GB of video memory, they are partitioned into two address spaces, each accessible by one GPU. Each device can only allocate <512MB buffers, and exchanging data among GPUs is fairly slow [via the SLI]. Nevertheless, task-level parallelism and pipelining ought to perform well.

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Grand purchase will be delayed one more week but no longer. This has strategic goals in mind.

Dry ice bomb, California Loophole

For the purposes of this discussion, a "dry ice" bomb is a sealed bottle containing dry ice and possibly some other fluid to serve as a heat sink. As the dry ice is warmed, it sublimes producing pressure that eventually ruptures the bottle. The rapidly expanding CO2 initiates a suitable "boom!" greatly amusing those around.

It seems as if the legislature of California attempted to prohibit such devices. Section 12301.a.6.

12301. (a) The term "destructive device," as used in this chapter, shall include any of the following weapons:
...
(6) Any sealed device containing dry ice (CO2) or other chemically reactive substances assembled for the purpose of causing an explosion by a chemical reaction.

Yet, I fail to see how this could possibly cover "dry ice bomb" as I've defined it above and as many have practiced it. The mechanical explosion from the ruptured bottle is not due to a chemical reaction of any sort. The CO2 is still CO2, just in a different phase.

Either I'm misreading their intent, or some legislators missed the mark.

Memorial Day

Performed another bike tour through the District. This time, I crossed via the Key bridge, so named for Francis Scott Key whose residence is near the north end of the bridge. The Georgetown area is rather splendid and certainly the place to go to have a good time.

I headed directly for the Jefferson Memorial further south. I was not the only person there, though it was surprisingly vacant. Numerous peddelboats tread the waters of the Tidal Basin over which the Jefferson Memorial looks. I locked up the bike, headed up the steps, and looked around. Four blocks of text, distinct excerpts from his writing, adorn the walls surrounding a large statue of the man. Read them from the Wikipedia article. I'll wait.

After digesting them, I tried to imagine Jefferson meshing with some of the political movements that have taken place since. Several (Prohibition, Drug War, Copyright Gestapo) are irreconcilable. I wonder of modern law makers ever stop to wonder whether their ideas are consonant with the principles of one of the most significant and beneficial philosophical influences this country has ever known. Does it worry them when they are not?

Returned to the mall, did a lap around the Capitol, and passed the Supreme Court. This time I climbed the steps, bike in hands, and walked up to the doors.

I decided that the crowds were sufficiently sparse that I could visit a museum of my choice if I desired. I parked outside Air and Space, concealed my knife in my bike water bottle, and went inside. I made a rather swift tour focusing mainly on spaceflight. The TV camera from Surveyor 3 was on display. Seeing it brought me satisfaction.

Returned, showered, napped, grilled, and watched Andromeda Strain. Those were probably two hours of the most epic death sequences ever televised. The Story of Ricky O has got nothing.

Now, sleep. Work again tomorrow.

Pirates and Firearrrms

Check out this pirate's M-14. He's not messing around.

Also, check out this thread I started on The Box O Truth's Discussion forums a while ago. I won't repost the thread, but the general idea is:

* do you have knowledge of an actual defense system employed on a nonmilitary vessel?
* what would you choose for defenses yourself? [constrained that the weapons ought not cost more than the vessel]

Post in the comments.

PhysX and DirectX

PhysX is officially the thing to use for in-game realtime physics unless you want to duplicate that functionality for fun. I wish the CUDA implementation were available so I could feel comfortable with thousands of objects in one scene. I'll see about compiling this for Windows XP sometime soon.

DC Metro Fiasco

The efficiency and accessibility of the DC Metro to riders with bicycles has been vastly overstated. Friday, I had planned to meet a friend at the National Mall during my extended lunch break. Instead, I spent over five critical minutes trapped in an elevator on the train platform at the Ballston station and missed a train thus delaying me by about thirty minutes. I encountered more broken elevators at Metro Center where I decided to disembark delaying me further. The lack of any other cyclists on the train confirmed what I've already come to believe: that bicycles on the metro are a mistake and you shouldn't attempt it ever. After arriving at the Mall, I biked back to work passing the National Cemetery on my way.

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Work is enjoyable. I've accumulated one gold star so far. I'm eager to get results and finish the VSIPL implementation they want ported. After that, we start investigating methods for application development and, potentially, compiler research though that's typically not the best level of abstraction to perform crucial restructuring for parallelism unless you modify the programming language as well (with CUDA, Cell SPE intrinsics, and Fortran as examples).

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PhysX is pretty straightforward with a sensible class hierarchy and all of the objects you would expect: a generic scene, a generic shape, effectors, linear spring and damper systems, force fields, triggers, convex meshes, ray tests, etc. Coprocessors are supported by encapsulating objects in non-user space and providing explicit means for transferring object state back to user space.

Achieving a fast platform-independent [PC, PS3, Xbox360, GPU soon] implementation is something NVIDIA hasn't published yet, but I'm really interested in seeing about that when the time comes. They may not open source it for a while though.

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Plan for Monday [Visiting Research Assistants are not hourly, and we all have Monday off]: get up at reasonable hour, bike through the district, and have supper at the Quarter Deck, a seafood restaurant near the river. I'm determined to develop tastes in seafood having largely shunned it up to this point.

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I'd rank El Ranchero in my top three Mexican restaurants of all time.

_mm_prefetch

I finally met the roommate who lives downstairs. He's building a UI framework in Javascript for Network Solutions. He reminds me of Sebastian Bach. We drank [gin from the Erlenmeyer flask], played the Wii last night, and carried on.

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Arlington is a splendid little city of a town with a precious business district with its eight-story skyscrapers and sky bridge. This place is relaxed and hardly fast-paced at all. You will like it when you visit, gentle reader. Every commute is a pleasure whether on foot, bike, or car [drove today].

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Josh pointed me toward github. Since git is apparently the new hotness, I suppose I'd better get a move on. That said, a workplace I'm familiar with is moving from CVS to Subversion tomorrow.

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I download NVIDIA's PhysX SDK [binary only right now, still has the styling of a non-NVIDIA SDK] and plan to mess around with it over the weekend. Eventually, they'll finish their CUDA PhysX implementation, and the darling CUDA-enabled GPU in this laptop will takeover the lion's share of processing. The ballpit will live.

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My birthday is a week from Saturday. I think I may make a grand purchase for myself that day.

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Leave comments, tell your friends to update links. Love.

Public Misunderstanding of Mathematics and Pedagogy

Waisting time because I'm stuck.

From Fark: Failure from 0 to 50.

"It's a classic mathematical dilemma: that the students have a six times greater chance of getting an F," says Douglas Reeves.

Dumbass.

His retarded probability estimate defies belief. This isn't how tolerances work.

I can't imagine anyone saying something as stupid if they were talking about parts from an assembly line. For example, if the tolerance of a resistor is +-5% from some factory, claiming "resistors have a nine times greater chance of being discarded [than being shipped] on the basis that 100% - 2*5% = 90%, and 90% / (2*5%) = 9" is utterly asinine. The quantity 90% is meaningless and says nothing about the underlying probability distribution.

Goddamn. This is stupid.

Free academic credit awarded to encourage self-esteem in spite of sucking at school is also a bad idea, but the douchebags mentioned in this article disqualify their own opinions long before we can even approach the topics of psychology and education.

That said, you know what might help students to feel better about themselves? Being able to get right answers on their own.

Second Day

Much of the technical information regarding the project I'm working on is covered by an NDA, so I'll probably be avoiding it as blogtopics go.

Instead, I give you this: biking through the city at a pace that keeps up with cars is kind of dangerous, but it's also kind of fun. There's a lot going on to be aware of, and pumping really hard in top gear from a standing stop so you accelerate with traffic can be exhausting, but the thrill of it all grows with each stroke. It's a great way to start a work day.

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There were several shootings in DC in the last day. None in Arlington. Guns that are in a condition from which they may be fired are illegal in DC, so I suppose the fundamental flaws of gun prohibitions have tragically surfaced again. I'm going to try to be on the Courthouse steps the day the decision of Heller vs DC comes out [if I can].

ISI East: First Day

It's the first day here at ISI East. This office occupies the second floor of a building in downtown Arlington which is so near my home that the commute is hardly even a workout, which is what you want, I suppose. It took me eight minutes from helmet donning to helmet doffing in the deck. I have my own room with two whiteboards, a bookshelf, and line of sight to a partially occluded window in the office across the hall [all things more marvelous than the CRB]. The people here seem friendly, though diving right in has been difficult since all of the technical information is held by people who aren't ready to meet with me yet.

While I wait for a meeting occupying my new supervisors to end, I'm familiarizing myself with Python 3000. All of the old Python cruft has been removed. This wasn't by anyone's recommendation, but my first day at GTRI also began with Python so it's somewhat appropriate. I suppose I'll have to get a new job with the release of each major version of Python (SBIR by Python 3.5??).

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In other news, I shared the magic that is Guinness Beer Stew with one of the roommates. I still haven't met the owner of the Wii I've been playing.

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I like Blogger, incidentally. This may become my official permanent blog, so in the mean time you should direct yourself and any other readers here and update your links.

VSIPL and Beer Stew

On St. Patrick's Day, I made a pot Guiness Beer Stew and ate on it for the next three days or so. The beer stew I'm making now is going to compose lunches and tonight's supper for the next few days. Cooking is only economical if done in large batches, and the ability to consume left-overs is an essential skill. An hour of preparation and $12.00 on day zero yield meals spanning the next three days.

So, I'm adjusting rather well to this area. The environs are aesthetically gratifying, and there's no shortage of human activity to counter the feelings of isolation that set in when the people you know are scattered hundreds of miles away. As advertised, this house has a Wii which will surely result in much time wasted.

GPU VSIPL development on Windows Vista is dramatic. I've kernel-panic-ed my laptop several times so far. The GPU onboard has about 1/10th the theoretical performance of my desktop, but it's still worthwhile. I can do performance benchmarking via SSH-tunneled-VNC to a machine at CCRF.

Work starts tomorrow. I'm very enthused about it and only slightly nervous about starting.

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P.S.

Yesterday's five hour bike tour through DC and Arlington has resulted in soreness in two areas: my elbows, and my crotch. When speeding up and slowing down [good brakes mean you can go faster, it's true], your arms apply nearly all tangent forces to your torso. Any time you brake, your arms bear much of the load. That can be exhausting and intense on the elbows. Your crotch provides all normal forces to your body, and after a few hours begins to complain about it. I wasn't quite expecting my legs to be so comfortable with the workout.

Freedom

The Statue of Freedom atop the US Capitol has a sword in her hand, presumably because liberty is something you must be prepared to take if necessary.

Biking through Washington, Washington

This is my second full day in the new dwelling. I woke up around 10:00am, made coffee and drank it while reading Bike Arlington. Trails lead me from my front door to the Iwo Jima memorial, the Neatherlands carillon, and along Arlington Cemetery to the Memorial Bridge.

After checking tire pressure and filling my water bottle, I set out. In no less than five minutes, I became exceedingly tired just as I was passing my new workplace. I even began to grow light-headed. Feeling a little ridiculous, I pressed on ignoring the pains and eventually all of the symptoms went away. I was reminded by a statement by Churchill: "When going through Hell, keep going." In no time at all, I was keeping up with traffic along level roads and flying down grades as I raced toward the Iwo Jima Memorial.

The memorial consists of a reproduction of Joseph Rosenthal's epic photograph of men struggling to raise the US Flag on a pole atop a hill of rubble. The details of the M1 Garand and M1 Carbines carried by the men were impressive. Several marines stood by answering questions and mingling with onlookers.

I pressed on and made it to the Neatherlands Carillon given to the US in 1960 as a way of paying tribute for our help liberating them during WWII. From that vantage point, I was directly west of the Lincoln Memorial on the Arlington side of the Potomac River. Because Arlington is somewhat elevated, I had a clear view of much of the Washington Mall. I could see the Capitol in the distance and the Jefferson Memorial off in the distance, not likely to receive my company on this day. It was at this point that Brad Neely's "Washington, Washing-ton" video began playing incessantly in my mind. "Six foot twenty fucking killing for fun..." I sped off across the bridge.

Bike Arlington mentions several rules of biking on sidewalks and in the vicinity of pedestrians. When passing, do so on the left and call out your intention to pass with enough time for them to accommodate you. Pass with at least two feet between them and you. These were sensible enough, and I was eager to play by the rules and mesh cleanly and neatly with this strangely inviting bicycle culture. The Arlington people responded nicely to "passing on the left" and instantly reacted by moving to the right. I said thank you each time, and surely no feathers were ruffled.

On the Washington side, things were different. The Arlington Memorial bridge takes you directly from Arlington Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial which today was full of tourists. As I approached their flocks, pedestrians either ignored the announcement "passing to the left" in which case I darted around them, or they froze like possums and then started moving in random directions, many of which made things worse. My patience was beginning to diminish, though my skill with handling the bike in crowds without sacrificing much speed was growing. My confidence in doing so grew as well, and I began to label my tour through DC an act of "pedestrian bowling." At one point, I approached a single white male with plenty of room to clear him, so I decided to play a trick as I passed. "Passing on your left AND your right." He just looked around confused as I zipped by. Quantum Cyclist was amused.

My plan for the day was not to visit museums but simply gather intel regarding the arrangement of various sites of opportunity, test the utility of my bicycle, and to enjoy the weather. It's still rather cool and clear here, and today there was a gentle breeze puffing softly to the East [I would later call the same breeze a raging impenetrable squall as I pressed back home this afternoon].

I passed by the Reflecting Pond lined with scores of onlookers, the Washington Monument, and I entered the National Mall. The Air and Space museum was visible from afar as were several other museums. The expansive US Capitol Building dominates the far end of the Mall, so I resolved to see it. But first, I turned north believing the White House to be nearby. I quickly encountered Pennsylvania Avenue and zipped through the obstruction blocking automobiles from passing by. The sidewalk narrowed, and the White House South Lawn came into view. It was rather pretty, and I attempted a few camera phone photographs. For some strange reason, other people taking photographs did so not from against the fence but from the far side of the sidewalk, so while there was space to pass, doing so interrupted their photographs. It was an odd trend. He saves children but not the British children.

I turned North and passed by the US Treasury building stopping for a photo. Coming around again, I passed along the north face of the White House which is much closer and took another photograph. I finally made it back to the Mall and made a beeline toward the Capitol. As I approached, I noticed an arrangement of chairs and and a voice came over a loudspeaker. Apparently George Washington University was practicing their graduation arrangements. Future be ware; he's coming.

I made it up to the Capitol steps and parked. I overheard someone asking police manning a human barricade whether tourists were allowed inside. "No sir. This is the USSR and citizens are not permitted to observe their government in action. Just kidding, you have to be on a guided tour and you can get tickets [nearby]." I reflected on the notion of an open government, and took a photo pridefully. I called Nic who suggested I visit the Courthouse and gave me directions.

Biking around the Capitol, I got a better sense of how large a building it is. The great size surely is intimidating and impressive to arriving dignitaries. Twelve stories tall made of radiation.

Continuing on, I came upon the US Supreme Court building. Nic had asked if there were protesters, but I could only spot one person in the otherwise relatively vacant space of the Courthouse steps involved in a protest. She was at the foot of the stairs with a piece of red tape over her mouth on which the term "pro life" had been written. She stared plaintively at the courthouse but glanced over to me a few times. I figure dropping a pile of bloody wire coat hangers off at "pro life" protesters feet might send a bit of a message, but no one I know has time to be politically active during the week; we all have jobs.

The rest of this block is devoted to House and Senate offices which I paid suitable attention to. Being the weekend, no one ostensibly important was likely to be coming out of them, so I didn't wait too long. I pedaled around to the south edge of the mall and entertained the possibility of visiting at least one of the Smithsonian Museums. It was pointed out to me earlier and reiterated today that the American History Museum was closed for renovations which is rather disappointing. I arrived at the Air&Space and began casting about for a place to put my bike. In doing so, I noticed the lines of eager visitors and decided that I should probably do that a different day so I started out for home.

As I arrived at the Memorial Bridge, this time on the north edge, I came upon a hillside with stairs facing the river. Airliners on approach were flying directly overhead at perhaps less than 2000 ft and mushing along at high angles of attack, low airspeed, and slipping in a cross wind. I decided to rest and watch them for a while.

Emma called me and gave me reports of her 31st story hotel room in downtown Boston in which she'll spend the remainder of her trip [stirring my envy]. We talked for a bit, and as we did a small sailboat with a single sail came into view. A middle aged couple were out sailing in perfect weather with a constant wind blowing across the river meaning you can go north or south with very little effort. Their novice sailing skills became apparent when the wife lost her hat and they attempted to pull up along side to retrieve it. This maneuver is identical to man-overboard drills, so coming close enough to pick up the floating object on the first pass without hitting it with the boat is an important thing for any sailor to be able to do. They made three passes, accidentally gybed a few times [with the consequences on a larger boat that someone might get hit in the head by a fast-moving boom having the force of the wind behind it], and moved under the bridge and out of my view without having retrieved their target. They were having fun though.

I resolved at that point to somehow go sailing in the Potomac at least once, preferably more. This may require buying [or building] a boat if I can't rent one. Hmm. He threw a knife into Heaven and could kill with his stare.

I finally crossed the bridge with the wind in my face, up the hills that I had so effortlessly glided down, and eventually made it back to Fairfax drive and then to my house in Fields Park. It was a delightful day.

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This said, I highly recommend biking through Washington. The city is friendly toward bikes, and if you can handle pedestrians and other cyclists you can get around rather quickly without spending a lot of energy doing so. It's also a lot of fun. A bike rack at Emma's capable of carrying three full-size bikes is available to anyone wanting to come visit.

Here I am exhausted after a rather good day. I'll try to get the camera phone photos up soon.