Insignificant Bits

As of last Thursday, I’m no longer a land owner, so you guys are on your own with that whole voting thing.

Now that I’ve relearned Booth’s algorithm, I now understand this particular silliness. Are there still any machines where this is fast?

I’ve been going over a lot of old textbooks while studying for my upcoming CS GRE. I forgot how good the Hennessy and Patterson books are. Also I’ve read the dragon book cover-to-cover for the first time (the new edition with the lame CGI dragon on the cover), various parts of TAOCP, and Sedgewick’s Graph Algorithms in C. Time will tell whether I’ve digested any of that.

When I was in the bookstore the other day, I saw Petzold’s The Annotated Turing. I still blame Petzold for the worst book in my computing library, Programming Windows 95. But I needed to fill in some gaps on formal logic and it was 30% off so I thought I’d give it a go. One nice thing is that it presents in full the paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” with corrections inline. I found a number of the annotations on the machines themselves to be superfluous to the original, while the background on Cantor sets and formal logic were absolutely worthwhile. The main problem is that the book sometimes cites large sections of material from another work, which just makes me wish I had read the other work instead. Conspicuously absent from citation but appearing in the bibliography is the mind-altering but lengthy Gödel, Escher, Bach, which in my opinion better tackles the philosophical angles. I give The Annotated Turing a B: nice explanation of the paper but Chuck loses a letter grade for citing his own book twice and for having a Windows tattoo.

If you’ve always wanted to own a piece of history, now’s your chance. Since I’m just over two weeks away from having to vacate my house for good, I’m selling all my crap. Oh, it’s wonderful crap, such as my couch, beds, bookshelves, small kitchen appliances, propane tanks, lawn mowers, chainsaws[1], and various electronics. Actually, assuming I get it all in order in the next day or two, you can drop by my house on Saturday to paw through the meaningful effects of a great living legend[2].

[1] Only one lawn mower, propane tank, and chainsaw. Two broken leaf blowers though.
[2] Great and legend not guaranteed. Living hoped for.

Anyone in the interweb know why my LJ now has an ad sidebar, when I’ve explicitly opted out of the ad-supported-for-useless-goodies account? May it be time to move/shutter this thing?

Update:
Oh. :(

Ange & I are back from our brief tour of the Carribean. PR was nice: wonderful weather and warm ocean water. We somehow lucked out and missed all three hurricanes that went through the area during our stay. The local cuisine left a lot to be desired, and the area just outside of the resorts was pretty sketch, but otherwise it’s a decent little island.

I did find time during the traveling downtime to complete my Gstreamer FS. I’m rather proud of the fruits of that two-day hack, though I’ve yet to see if it works well enough to trick iTunes.