Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 22 January 2002

# 7:45 PM

I'd just like to say that wget kicks ass. That is all.

# 2:30 PM

No dreams last night. Instead, I got to wake up at something like 3 AM and see my clock blinking 12:00 at me. There must've been a power cut, or I kicked the plug in my sleep (it's right next to the bed). I spent the rest of the night waking up periodically and wondering what time it actually was and how I'd know it was time to get up and go to class.

Of course, when I did get up—awakened by the sound of the downstairsnik running her shower—I found that it was only 7 AM, and that the earliest class I have today is at 11 AM (not 9:30 as I'd thought).

classes

These are what I'm considering:

CS 264: Implementation of Programming Languages

Compiler construction. Lexical analysis, syntax analysis. Semantic analysis code generation and optimization. Storage management. Run-time organization.

CS 260: User-Interfaces to Computer Systems

Design and implementation of user-interfaces to computer systems. Software and hardware architectures for personal workstations. Object-oriented programming systems. Form-based user-interfaces. Window and display management abstractions. Case studies of naive- and expert-user interfaces.

I'm only going to take one, but I'll sit in on the first couple meetings of each. Unless 264 is amazingly exciting, or 260 amazingly dull, I expect I'll end up taking 260.

# 12 AM

I'm actually writing this entry at the same time as the one for 9:30 tomorrow. Is it cheating to backdate diary entries? I certainly meant to write this entry at 7PM yesterday, but I was too tired.

Anyway... Today I took the bus to work. That was fun. The bus doesn't go all the way to work, but all the buses in this town have bike racks bolted to their front bumpers, so I could load my bike on there, get off about half a mile from work, and pedal the rest of the way. (I have to wonder what it's like driving the bus with a bike rack jutting three feet out in front of it. The drivers don't seem to mind, though.) There were lots of interesting people on the bus with me. One little girl, must've been about four, was running all over the bus ignoring her mother... then this elderly woman got on the bus and managed to get her to calm down in seconds.

It rained in the middle of the day and I thought I was going to regret the decision, but then it stopped. And, not having to drive around for ages when I get home, looking for parking, is definitely worth it.

The current bug I'm working on is rather intractable. It's a case of incorrect initial code generation. The initial code GCC generates, before any optimizers get their hands on it, is remarkably bad. Bad to the point where it interferes with human comprehension. I printed out a thirteen-page debugging dump of the function being miscompiled, taped it to my door, and drew all over it in red and blue ink to try to trace the control flow. Having done this, I still didn't know what was wrong.

If I can get my hands on a digital camera, I'll take a picture of the mess and post it here for your amusement.

One of the managers came by as I was drawing on the door and cracked up—I thought he was laughing at the extremes I was going to, but it turned out he just liked the joke bumper sticker I'd taped under my name plate on the wall. It says goddamned internet in big white letters on black. There's also some website pointer, but I don't remember what it was and google can't find it. According to the manager, this is a M*A*S*H reference. That show was long before my time, of course; I just picked the sticker up from Sumana's junk pile, thinking it was funny in its own right.