Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 26 February 2002

# 10:30 PM

I have a new video card, which can drive this monitor at 1600x1200x24. Now I can have two full columns of text side by side, and 78 rows deep. The only downside is that Powermanga is now unplayably slow. Oh well, time to find a new game. Maybe I'll go back to Nethack.

Sent in a patch to kill off support for pre-standard C in GCC. Let's see how many people scream.

Off to grab some munchies, then to San Francisco to see Jeana dance.

# 6:30 PM

Seth was kind enough to try his hand at designing a algorithm I need for my flip viewer. I shall describe the problem briefly. Suppose that each column of this table represents a version of a text file.

a a * * * % % @
b * c c a * * #
c c d d c a 0 *
d d   e d c d 0
        e d e d
          e   e

The challenge is to slide the columns up and down and insert gaps so that each (notional) individual line has its own row. It comes out looking something like this:

          % % @
a a           #
b * * * * * * *
        a a 0 0
c c c c c c    
d d d d d d d d
      e e e e e

Unfortunately, Seth's algorithm has cubic time complexity, which makes it useless for anything much bigger than the above example, and I don't see an easy way to get it down. Another nail in the coffin of the hoped-for working prototype by Thursday. It is definitely time to use the Wizard of Oz technique.

In the department of things that are obvious once you've thought of them, I realized today that the way to get a coating of wax off a spoon is to pour boiling water over it.

# 5 PM

Had fun at Amira's - great dancing, so-so food, but I wasn't really paying attention to the food. Jeana stole the show.

Come home and discover that the build I kicked off just before leaving had died 11 minutes in due to an unrelated buggy patch that someone else committed. Grrr.