Choice Overload

I found an interesting blog post over at Intel's research blog titled Parallel programming environments: less is more.
It talks about how offering users too many choices that individually have little or no benefit over the others might cause users to walk away instead of diving in to the sea och choice and working something out.

My comment to the article was as follows

I would say that this applies to more areas of programming than just parallel programming. I think that Sun made the correct decision when it delivered not only a programming language for java but an incredibly complete API to go with it.
If you compare to C/C++, which is similar in performance and use today (people will argue about that I guess, but there are many studies both confirming and denying what I just said, anyway...), you get a similar language with similar language constructs, but you have a horde or APIs to choose from for virtually anything you could possibly want to program. Everything from string handling to sockets to threads.
Much the same way with linux distributions and software in general.
Consolidate choices to make fewer and better products. (This only works to some exten[t] though, much like uniting countries in unions (us & eu, for instance))

This is a topic that often comes up in conversation for me. Not with regards to parallel programming, but rather in connection with the things I stated above, software in general and countries or organizations. I realize that someone may have a unique vision and decides to create a product based on it, and this is fine. The problem is when everybody does it, instead of picking one of the already existing products and helping to make it better.
I believe that choice is good, choice benefits the consumer if there is a surmountable amount of it. There is always a breaking point, where uniting too many things will reduce the entire effort to a rubble with too many creative minds wanting to go in different directions, but I firmly believe that, taking the world of linux distributions for an example, it would be possible to create something like 3-4 distributions with heaving intellectual and professional backing, rather than the around 350 virtually identical distributions we have today.
Much like Microsoft went overboard with (I think) 7 different versions of vista. Microsoft has succeeded so far for many reasons, but one of them have been by limiting the choice the users have. Getting everybody to rally behind one cause inevitably makes that cause better than having a single cause for every participant.

Diversity is good, but having too much of it hampers development.

(I realize that I've been using the Swedish spelling of parallell (with the double Ls at the end) all over the internet, including in the Intel blog comment. I'll try to keep the languages apart from now on.)

UPDATE: Apparently Intel is very selective about what comments it allows in its posts. I should have realized that I was not the first to comment on a 1-day old story that figured on slashdot, Intel just isn't showing any comments...

New Features in Google Maps

Google maps has some new added features that will absolutely blow your mind.
The primary one is drag-n-drop re-routing, but also traffic information (I can assume that this is only available in selected cities), and all sorts of other new GUI features.
As seeing is believing, I will refer you to this other blog post with a lovely video of the entire thing in action.

You have got to check this out, absolutely amazing.

Sentencing

When I first discovered lifehacker, I assumed that it would contain tips on how to, well, hack my life, so to speak. What I didn't expect, but what I am thrilled to have found, is that it also links to pages about writing. This recent link offers five tips about proper punctuation. Even if I was pretty much at home with about 3½ of those rules, I really enjoyed reading it. I now know where to put a semicolon, and what they are actually used for. Of course, for tips on punctuation, penny arcade is always helpful. (There is a third one, but I can't seem to locate it.)

Linked from the page about punctuation; I also found this. I haven't had time to read it yet though.

I have read several articles linked from lifehacker about writing, and they've almost all been good. I seem to have misplaced (read deleted) the links to them, otherwise I'd share them with you. Lifehacker uses tags though, so you should be able to find them quickly if you need to.

EDITED TO ADD: This is also very good. I find myself making some of the mistakes explained in here, but not many. I do, however, see them made by others on a daily basis. Number 5 and 7 are very important, as they aren't going to, as the author says, "[do] a little wiggle dance on the screen and then [reach] out to grab the reader by the throat".

"If it's not what you love, don't do it"

True words spoken by Mr Jeremy Allison of Samba fame. Currently employed by Google, he tells us about talking to his new office mate, what he does, and what he would have like to have been told when he was fresh out of college. If you are in Computer Science or any related area, you should really read this. Even if you're not, there are some points that are applicable to any job you'll ever do.

EDIT: I had a link here to what I thought was Jeremy's blog, but it was a collective kind of thing. Without it the comment below seems taken out of context, but imagine a link to a blog here.

Come to think of it, many big names in software blog on a more or less regular basis, and I don't read many of their posts unless they show up on other outlets linked by someone. Maybe I should make a habit of reading what these people deem worthy to say. They are, after all, where I want to be down the line. (i.e. working their dream job, doing what they love to do.)

Rediscovery

The things I find when I try to avoid studying.
I've seen this before, and I thinks it's pretty cool. Granted, Christmas lights moving to the tune of orchestral rock isn't everyones cup of tea, but I'm posting it none the less. (It's around 3 minutes, with no actual punchline)

Real Interview with Fake Steve Jobs

Hilarious. More fun if you've seen Pirates of Silicon Valley or at least know some Apple History.

(used up)^3 Revisited

Some of you might remember how I could not get my brand new monitor to work at the rated resolution and refresh rate? (Ok, it seems that I didn't blog about that, or that I couldn't find the post, but anyway, it didn't quite want to play). Any way, this new graphics card that I have (which works perfectly, by the way) allows me to come closer to that, running at 2048x1536 in 75 of the 85 possible Hz announced.

In other news, I came across this on lifehacker today, and it goes against something I have been taught fundamentally (on both Discovery Channel and by Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon), namely that you're supposed to shave against the grade. What the hell? That does terrible things to your face. Sure, it's a closer shave, but at the cost of fucking your skin up badly.

Maybe I'll try it though. Who knows I could have been wrong all these years.

Also, as you have probably seen over these last couple of posts, I absolutely love using back references to stuff that I've written myself. Someone has to be proud over my earlier musings. It might as well be me.

ACM ICPC Revisted

For some reason, blogger has decided to stop emailing me about my comments, so I recently discovered an insightful comment from anonymous about my ACM ICPC Post. He says that competing is much easier than you might think, provided that you are of course eligible. He also, kindly, provided me with a link to the Eligibility Decision Tree. I make it through the basic requirements, but then things like being too old or having spent way too many years in school catch up with me. It turns out I seized being eligible when I graduated with my BSc.

I guess not being allowed to compete anymore takes the load off my mind of never having competed, and now I could never rectify that, even if I wanted to. It would have been cool to have competed once, but now that I know that I can't for other reasons than skill, I will put it behind me.

Helplessness

Some things on monkeysforhelping are just too good to not re-post here.

Blast from the Internet Past

Here's something that I haven't watched in a long time.
It just popped up in my head when I was over at my friend's house, and it's absolutely hilarious.
If you're in to that kind of thing...

http://badgerbadgerbadger.com/

Awesomeness

And now for something completely different: A dog and a monkey

Also, booting from power on to GUI in 8 seconds is quite remarkable. Now if someone could make my windows machine behave the same way. The LinuxBIOS project is a very cool idea, I must say.

I just added Drivl.com to my list of links in the sidebar. I thought I should mention it, just in case you missed it. Their tagline is "Your Daily Dose of Awesome", and I must say that I agree.
I think that next time I want to rant about something that's not related to my eroding civil liberties, I'll probably submit it to drivl first.
This is the post that got me to drivl in the first place, "What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)". A normal drivl post gets 10 comments, a good one gets 20-40 maybe, this one got 180. If you're a geek and you like movies, you really need to start with that link. For the rest of you, Drivl is just pure awesome in a can.

Passing Laws

The US pass laws that are disgusting violations of our civil liberties, the UK does the same, but on a smaller scale.
France, not to be outdone by the other supporters of the Iraq war, passes insane laws.
"But Why?" you ask.
"Because we are French!" or "Because we can!", you take your pick, they'd probably be equally applicable.
Leave it to the french to take the circus-insane in to politics...

Only in America

Teens beating homeless people (to death) for sport.

Claiming anything other than stupidity as a reason for random violence is a fucking lie. Sure, a lot of violence is triggered by a disagreement of some sort (money, drugs, sleeping with your friend's wife, you name it), but random acts of violence like these can't possibly be fueled by anything else than pure, unadulterated stupidity.

As I've claimed for so long, someone should make stupidity more painful, but I guess in this case being the victim of stupidity is what was painful. (Ok, being the victim of stupidity, yours or others, is usually painful too, but often not to this extent).
Sure, doing 15-to-life in a house of corrections might earn you a rogering or two, but you definitely earned that...

Cool Stuff

Build your own amusement part ride in your back yard. Could quite possibly be lethal if executed poorly.
The DIY Human Slingshot.

and of course the user interface of the future in

reactable: visual, interactive synth.
You need to watch some of the videos here to get the full effect of this interface.
For things like word processing, this would apparently suck, but for real-time input like when creating music, this is incredible.

My fingers are cold, this is all the text you're getting...

Hash

A couple of months ago, I took a class called "Introduction to Computer Security". For this class, we were asked to, in pairs, write a small small paper on any topic in computer security. It wasn't a research paper, but rather we were supposed to write something about someone else's research, or a topic that we found interesting. The best of these papers were to be presented at a mini "conference" at the end of the class.

Me and a friend wrote a paper called "Hash Collisions - Impact on Modern Cryptography".
Not surprisingly it deals with the problems we face should the widely used hashing algorithms be broken. Since we were limited to 6 pages, the paper is extremely condensed, but in the end concludes that, because of recent breakthroughs in cryptanalysis, algorithms like MD5 and SHA1 shouldn't be used any more, and more secure alternatives should be found.
Now, I don't claim that we came up with this conclusion, smarter people did, and we agreed, but now it seems like someone is actually doing something about it.

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has initiated a contest for candidates for what will probably become the worlds new hashing function. Bruce Schneier has written an excellent article about the competition in Wired, and he has also previously reached the same conclusions as we did. I feel like I'm in the company of greater minds whenever this happens, even though it's all re-iteration of what other people have said, to a large degree.

Even if you don't read the paper, I suggest you read the article.

(No, we didn't get one of the spots at the mini conference, but I still like our subject)

Informatie Beheer Groep

Today is a day of joy. The lord Jesus our god appeared before me and he told me that...
Well, no, he didn't. I'm lying. But what did happen felt something like like the second coming of christ for a student like myself on a rather tight budget. The dutch government is going to refund me part of my tuition fee, and all I had to do was to be from an EU country (and fill out a form or two). The system works, and I get money, yay socialism!
Ehumm, no, wait, not yay socialism, that's wrong, but yay me getting some extra money!
It will go towards me eating everyday and other little things that bring joy into my life.

Also, due to meeting someone in wow named "millford cubicle", I re-discovered salad fingers. If you haven't watched, you should.

Naxxramas: The Movie

I found this today over at Ming's site. It's a movie made by a French guild about the various boss encounters and wings in the Naxxramas instance in World of Warcraft.
Like he says, much like the BWL movie of about a year ago, this is more of an artistic vision of the encounters in Naxxramas, than a "look at my interface and my big crits"-kind of thing. It is, dare I say, the best WoW movie I have ever seen. The BWL movie was pretty damn awesome, but the quality and production value of this is just so much better. Also, the stuff pictured in this looks much more interesting. If you're a WoW-fan and you like good movies, then check this out. A full, high-quality download is recommended, this movie has earned it!

Edit: You can find the rest of Jack's movies here.

Back to Life

So, I guess school starts again tomorrow. Granted, I don't have class on Mondays, but it's officially on again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we will later see) I've been too busy playing World Of Warcraft these past weeks to a) do something productive and b) write new posts.
The good thing about playing wow is that I've grown tired of it again, so now my only hope is that TBC (not tuberculosis) will bring some new joy into the game. If not, then I'm screwed.
It's especially good that this happens now, as I have exam weeks coming up, and I don't want to be preoccupied with slaying foul demons and whatnot.

Three of my roommates arrived home yesterday with eerie timing. I was expecting only one of them, but they all arrived within one hour of each other, so now the house is full of joy and merriment again! It was really great to have the house to myself for these last two weeks, but I can't say that I haven't missed having them around. The remaining two are due sometime this week, and sometime next week. One of which has been to the eternal darkness or Norway for two weeks. It's going to be interesting to hear what she has to say.

I also got a link from my brother yesterday about a new blog I should check out. It's at http://indexed.blogspot.com, and it's full of truths and laughs.

Other than that, very little has happened. I've become very tuned in to CNN, as it's what I watch for breakfast, lunch and dinner when I'm downstairs, so I now know in detail what's going on around the world. Not that I didn't before, but my knowledge isn't normally accompanied by moving pictures.

Me and one of my roommates spent an inordinate amount of time on youtube today. We started watching some SNL skit, which quickly got followed by some nudity (of course, it's what the internet is for, is it not?), a bit of Chad Vader (hilarious stuff), and then I showed him the wonder that is LonelyGirl15. He had not seen this before, and was not familiar with the concept of vlogging (terrible word for video blogging, I know).

All in all a good, fun, and completely useless day.
Now we're all having a delicious dinner together. Fried chicken, potatoes and vegetables. Gotta run!

Reposting

Ohh, and I know I shouldn't repost things. Especially not things I link to (if you're not reading the stuff that I've linked to in the side bar, you're missing out). But this is just too good to pass up.

Here also, linked from wired.com, via lifehacker.com, is something for you (I want to say "us", but I'd be lying) fitness freaks.

Some links

A List of Heroes (Top 20 Hackers in Film History)

The Seven Phases of Owning an iPod (almost entirely true!)

I think I've found two new blogs to add to my daily list.

http://www.drivl.com/ (EDIT: This site is awesome, I love it!)

and

http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com/

Bringing you much happiness in the way, yay! \^_^/