25
Jan
ryanair
We flew Ryanair from Marrakesh to Seville. It was a singular experience. As in, I’m not going to do that again.
05
Jan
email habits over time
I was curious if my sleeping/waking habits had really changed over the years – I definitely don’t feel I work as late now as when I was 22, but it’s hard to tell. To test this, I looked over all of the timestamps of mail I’ve sent in the past few years and tried to make a pretty graph.
I’m not sure how meaningful it is, but thanks to ggplot, it is pretty, at least.
02
Jan
note to self
Before wasting a week or 2 on a dead-end endeavor, think for 10 minutes.
15
Dec
Old DFW article
Lovingly resurrected by my friend Evan:
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
A deep and sobering take on modern writers.
15
Dec
SiteBlock extension
I installed the SiteBlock extension for Chrome.
Now I’m visiting my favorite time-wasting sites a lot less, but I’m still not any more productive.
I suppose that’s step 2.
07
Dec
multi-processor cache simulator
Does anyone know of a simple cache simulator for multi-processors? I’m curious what the performance of various applications would be like if you had hardware level DSM across a low-latency interconnect like Infiniband.
Would handling the cache-line coherency issues in hardware be a big difference over a software DSM?
13
Nov
mycloud
Do you have a few computers lying around the house or lab that you want to make use of for your Python computing? Too lazy to setup a real MapReduce system like Hadoop? Well, this could be your solution! (It probably won’t be, but, hey, you never know).
mycloud allows you to make use of your spare cycles, all from within Python – all you need to have available is the SSH connection that you’re already using to manage your systems. Here’s an example:
Starting your cluster:
# list each machine and the number of cores to use
cluster = mycloud.Cluster([('machine1', 4),
('machine2', 4)],
fs_prefix='/path/to/store/results')
Invoke a function over a list of inputs:
result = cluster.map(my_expensive_function, range(1000))
Use the MapReduce interface to easily handle processing of larger datasets:
from mycloud.resource import CSV
input_desc = [CSV('my_input_%d.csv' % i for i in range(100)]
output_desc = [CSV('my_output_file.csv']
def map_identity(k, v):
yield (k, int(v[0]))
def reduce_sum(k, values):
yield (k, sum(values))
mr = mycloud.mapreduce.MapReduce(cluster,
map_identity,
reduce_sum,
input_desc,
output_desc)
result = mr.run()
for k, v in result[0].reader():
print k, v
The code is mostly not-documented, but please contribute documentation and/or complaints as you see fit! 
You can access the source code here: https://bitbucket.org/rjpower/mycloud
Or you can access the code with pip via pypi:
pip install mycloud
07
Oct
autocite
I’ve had this idea poking around in my head for a long time, but had never gotten around to actually implementing it. Finally this weekend, I did.
Finding citations for a paper is a useful but onerous process. You have to track down all of the work in the past that touched on similar ideas as your own, which amounts to spending hours searching through old journals looking for examples where your work has been done before. (In computer science, there are no new papers, just recyclings of ideas from the 60′s and 70′s).
In any case, this problem is no longer! With autocite, you can let the computer find the citations for you, or at least the most promising set of them. Here’s an example list of papers found based on inputting the abstract for my paper,
Piccolo:
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/91-14.pdf
- http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Research/MCS/SDL/safire_compatibility_table.pdf
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/92-02.pdf
- http://cs.mst.edu/documents/technical_reports/92-24.pdf
- http://staffweb.psdschools.org/wleggett/unitplan2/weblessonplan.pdf
- http://cr.yp.to/bib/1991/ecma-48.pdf
- http://www.lfcs.inf.ed.ac.uk/research/database/publications/vldb04_ranking.pdf
- http://sziami.cs.bme.hu/%7Eildi/seminar/2010_01/kapolnai_abs.pdf
- http://www.hpdc.org/2009/PDF/hursey.pdf
- http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/dkl/students.pdf
Okay, maybe it won’t solve all of your citation problems, but it’s somewhat entertaining to play with anyway. Try it out here:
If you’re curious, the code is available here, though it’s a bit of a mess.
05
Oct
date night
Jenna and I got dressed up for no particular reason; I think we looked pretty good!
28
Sep
jack hammers
They are tearing up the street out on Broadway, what must be the 50th time since I started working here 2 years ago.
My only question is, why, once you’ve dug a big hole in the street, do you insist on filling it up with cement? Don’t you realize that you might have to go and fill it up again? Can’t you cover it up with a grating or something slightly more accessible? Or do you just enjoy DRIVING ME INSANE?
That is all.