A few things seem to have gone wrong with the Wordpress 2.6 upgrade. They are,

• Permalinks broke completely, still haven’t fixed this. For now, just using an ID call (static links to articles are nonfunctioning right now).
• RSS feed also seems to have gone down the drain. This is due to the same bug in 2.6 that caused the permalinks problem. I haven’t yet been able to fix it.
• Note that for you authors the login page has moved from ‘admin’ to ‘wp-admin’. This was a quick fix to another bug in 2.6 which I have decided to leave unresolved for the time being. Expect this change to be permanent.

Sorry about all this. The permalinks and RSS feed issues will either be fixed by me if I find the time/motivation or they’ll be fixed in the 2.6.1 release whenever that comes out.

Cheers.

This weekend I went to the University of Michigan Biological Station outside of Pellston, MI (near Mackinaw City, Petoskey). I got in a few firsts there: climbing a sampling tower, going to the UP. And for the most part (aside from seeing Batman in Mackinaw City) I was completely unplugged. It was amazing. I need to do that more often.

More to the point, I put up some pictures. You can check them out here.

Cheers.

A short post, but I have to post it. ‘The Complexity of Songs’ is a short communication Don Knuth wrote back in the 70s which is really quite interesting. It’s also a pretty funny joke.

The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to evolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

[...]

“…our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain” to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one’s memory.

[...]

Finally, progress during the twentieth century—stimulated by the fact that “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory”—leads to the ultimate improvement: Arbitrarily long songs with space complexity O(1), e.g. for a song to be defined by the recurrence relation.

We’ve really taken the concept to heart in modern popular music haven’t we? See here for explanation and here for the original paper.

Cheers.

I know vdov doesn’t usually go for the “hey look at this cool thing on the internet” type of posts but, hey look at this cool thing on the internet. It is clearly the greatest music video that has ever existed. It also dominates the field of “zombie Stalin” videos as well. It’s by a Russian metal band called ANJ [their myspace page].

I’m used to writing in C (and Matlab, unfortunately), though I’m not particularly proficient in either. But lately I’ve taken on C++ and holy hell what a huge language. Still, it has a lot of nice features that are going to be important to me in the next year of my graduate work and I’m gonna stick with it. Yay OO, ugh.

For all its size, one of the areas where I have been left completely unsatisfied is in support for threads. Yes, of course POSIX threads are there and I’ve had some success implementing them in some of my older, now completely obsolete C code which I never want to look at again. It’s baffling to me that there is nothing in the STL which develops some nice thread classes. I know there are at least 2 (if not more) very experienced C++ programmers who read vdov.net, and I’m looking for advice. Have you looked at some developed thread classes and if so what have you thought? Recommendations? I would really rather not have to write my own thread classes from scratch (especially since accessing the C pthread library would be a nightmare here), as this is both utterly useless for my research and, well, I’d probably screw it up with near-fledgling knowledge of the language.

Cheers.

I hate advertisements and, more specifically, advertisements on my clothing. This is one of the reasons why I wear GoodWill t-shirts: I don’t want to be a walking, talking billboard. This choice has brought me rather frequent social t-rauma (see exhibit 1) and I haven’t suffered alone. A recent news headline was A man was threatened with arrest for wearing a Transformers t-shirt. A couple of weeks ago my “Central Ohio Senior Olympics 1997” shirt caused me t-rauma, albeit far less public.

A man approached me while I stood in line at the Subway on the University of Chicago campus. He said, looking at my shirt, “Really? You think so?” I stared at him blankly. He continued “Are you from the area (central Ohio)?” Realizing he was talking about my t-shirt, I said “Yes”. The man replied “Well, welcome to intellectual heaven!” and walked away smiling. Still standing in line, I started to stew about this brief exchange:

Subway is intellectual heaven!? Is being from central Ohio or wearing a central Ohio t-shirt a sufficient qualification for admittance into intellectual heaven? Very unlikely.

Was I just welcomed by an (the) intellectual god? If yes, then I met an (the) intellectual god, a “sandwich artist,” and “ate fresh” in intellectual heaven after what must have been my untimely intellectual death.

What caused my intellectual death? I’d guess being constantly bombarded with advertisements and repeated t-rauma from my choice of t-shirts.

But wait! Where is intellectual hell? How can I be trying to answer such deep questions while reading mind-numbing advertisements for Doritos (taking snacking to a higher level), Mountain Dew (the new dew is up to you), Subway (eat fresh live green)? Am I really in intellectual hell?

[Update]: Is my hatred of advertisements legal in Canada?

The storm season in Indiana has been particularly active this spring/early summer. A couple weeks ago we had one hell of a storm come through north-central Indiana, hitting northern West Lafayette the hardest. It remains the only storm I have ever been through (and I’m including living in Florida for 9 years) which has actually scared me/caused significant damage.

This was a nice storm: decent MCS and individual supercell formation leading to a squall line. Loving thunderstorms and the study of weather as I do (thanks Meyers!), I was pretty busy taking pictures/watching/looking at weather data when I saw a swirling cloud of debris headed straight for the back of the house. I figured it couldn’t be that big of a deal so I just sat there and watched. Then the 100 mph winds hit the house and I hit the deck (and subsequently an interior room). While the damage to our house was moderate (shingles, aluminum siding and gutters missing, thrown AC unit, etc.), some other people right down the street didn’t fare so well.

Pictures of the storm and of some of the damage are available here.

Cheers.

I put up some (long overdue) pictures, some of my favorites, on the web for people to check out. It was one of the best times of my life. We spent the majority of our time on Molokai, some place I really want to go back to some day. The wedding was absolutely perfect, right on a completely deserted beach on the west side of the island at sunset. We even saw some humpback whales as the ceremony concluded.

Other notable events: crazy single engine Cessna ride to the island, touring the Leper colony after having hiked down (and subsequently hiked up) the tallest sea cliffs in the world. If you recognize those, it’s because Jurassic Park 2 & 3 were filmed there. And of course the cover of my first boy band album.

Congrats Mica & Jason! It was amazing, I was so happy to be there!

Cheers.

My love for South Park is well know. As such, while I was at this year’s ASMS conference in Denver, Lucas, Lindsey and I took a trip down Colfax avenue to go to Casa Bonita! It was amazing. Pretty much everything from the South Park episode (which, if you haven’t watched it is easily in my top 10) was there. Most importantly this includes the cliff divers (yes, they really dive) and Black Bart’s hideout. I put some pictures up online. You can find them here.

Cheers.

PS: The Colfax avenue bus is quite an experience.