Month: September 2007

the dark underside of computing

Tim Bray has been experimenting with some new darling of a language — Erlang — and finds it wanting. In the same sense of the “Hello World” application every language offers, he has taken a sample problem of parsing, sorting, and tabulating and for all Ruby’s slowness, it crushes Erlang.

WF III: Lessons:

There’ve been comments and blogs along the lines of “WTF, trying to shake down Erlang using what amounts to a degenerate Awk script!!? This isn’t what Erlang is for! It’s all just I/O! Lines of text are so 1980’s!”

Nope; the further this goes, the more I think it’s a valid line of research. You know all those kazillions of Sun servers out there? Let me tell you, they’re not all running state-of-the-art Java-on-the-net apps. A huge proportion of all those cycles goes into Perl scripts and COBOL batches and C++ meat-grinders and FORTRAN number-crunching. Furthermore, if you look at the numbers from running my Perl and Ruby scripts, it’s obvious that they’re pegging both the CPU and I/O needles; so they’re nicely multidimensional in a simple way.

This is the kind of nasty unglamorous job that a lot of our customers run all the time to pay their rents, and this whole business is making a big bet on many-core computers, and it’s just not on to tell all those people that those are the wrong kind of jobs for the new iron.

As anyone going into professional computing should be aware, you don’t start with a blank slate or new hardware very often. More likely, you’ll be adding a feature or hunting a bug in someone else’s code, probably in a language you hate, with no comments, a raft of opaquely named variables and routines, and trying to work around production jobs on over-allocated hardware.

Deal with it. A lot of these new languages about saving programmer time with all kinds of tricks. Programmer time gets used and paid for once, while execution time on the system might be daily, hourly, maybe constant. That’s where the efficiencies are, for many.

even in the PNW, you can harvest solar power?!

Pacific NW 09/23/2007 | Richard Thompson | The sun king of Tacoma has power to spare | Seattle Times Newspaper:

The city of Tacoma paid “Solar Richard” Thompson $273.24 for electricity he sent back to them last year. When it comes to generating power, he has been “totally self-sufficient since 2000.”

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Because he makes more energy than he uses, his electric meter actually runs backwards.

Q: What’s that big panel next to your home?

A: “It’s a 10-foot-by-11-foot solar panel, actually 18 panels, generating 2 million watt-hours per year — and it’s all made in America.”

No mention of what it cost. I’d love to do this. He says it even works by the light of the moon.

do we add “soldiering” to the list of jobs Americans won’t do?

Undocumented workers may become the newest recruitment pool for the war(s) in the Middle East. The irony of immigrants, especially the undocumented, being willing to fight in a war zone to gain access to American citizenship while those born into it decline, is hard to miss.

A military route to citizenship:

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented-immigrant youths could become eligible to join the military to offset shortages of qualified recruits under a bill pending in Congress.

Intense public opposition forced the Senate in June to abandon an immigration bill that included a path to citizenship for undocumented youths.

The proposal still has a strong chance of passing if backers in Congress are successful in attaching it to the annual defense-authorization bill this fall.

The rhetoric surrounding undocumented workers is that they are often willing to do jobs that Americans won’t, from construction jobs to hospitality and healthcare work. It pains me to think that fighting on the Global War on Terror has become a job akin to swabbing toilets or changing bed linens as far as America’s eligible youth are concerned.

The story notes further:

Using immigrants to boost the ranks of the military is not new.

With the demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States began offering legal immigrants a chance to expedite citizenship applications for themselves and relatives if they enlisted.

The Wall Street Journal states it even more plainly with it’s headline — Bill Offers U.S. Citizenship for Military Service. After all, that’s what the Romans did.

Backers of legislation that could help hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants become citizens are trying to overcome political opposition by emphasizing the bill’s potential to help the U.S. military meet war-time personnel needs.

The military has seemed receptive, but some Hispanic groups have expressed concern that the bill is a ploy to pull young Latin Americans into combat situations for which they wouldn’t otherwise have volunteered.

Some will argue that undocumented workers have no place in the American economy, but the free market says otherwise. If the jobs they currently do were not available, they would not risk their lives crossing the desert for them.

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Bury My Heart At Wounded Feelings

can’t add a thing:

Since 9/11, when MoveOn.org deeply offended the supporters of General David Petraeus, the following soldiers have died in Iraq:

Staff Sgt. Terry D. Wagoner, 28, of Piedmont, S.C.
Spc. Todd A. Motley, 23, of Clare, Mich.
Spc. Jonathan Rivadeneira, 22, of Jackson Heights, N.Y.
Pvt. Christopher M. McCloud, 24, of Malakoff, Texas
Sgt. John Mele, 25, of Bunnell, Fla.
Pfc. Brandon T. Thorsen, 22, of Trenton, Fla.
Cpl. Terrence P. Allen, 21, of Pennsauken, N.J.
Staff Sgt. Michael L. Townes, 29, of Las Vegas
Spc. Joseph N. Landry III, 23, of Pensacola, Fla.
Spc. Nicholas P. Olson, 22, of Novato, Calif.
Spc. Donald E. Valentine III, 21, of Orange Park, Fla.
Spc. Aaron J. Walker, 23, of Harker Heights, Texas
Sgt. Edmund J. Jeffers, 23, of Daleville, Ala.
Pfc. Christian M. Neff, 19, of Lima, Ohio
Cpl. Graham M. McMahon, 22, of Corvallis, Ore.
Pfc. Luigi Marciante Jr., 25, of Elizabeth, N.J.
Capt. (Dr.) Roselle M. Hoffmaster, 32, of Cleveland, Ohio
Spc. John J. Young, 24, of Savannah, Ga.
and A Task Force Lightning Soldier died in a vehicle accident in Diyala province on Saturday 9/22.

The oldest soldier, a woman and a doctor, was 32 years old.

He’s not General Betrayus. He’s General Outlivedus.

Continue reading “Bury My Heart At Wounded Feelings”

links for 2007-09-23

Please remain seated for landing [pic]

The picture of the pilot is just unreal. Like something out of a cartoon.

IT WAS like a scene out of a movie. A small cargo plane, flying over a busy highway, began losing steam and doing cartwheels in the sky over Florida.

Then it struck a warehouse, clipping its right wing, and crashed into a grassy swale on the side of the road — just metres from oncoming traffic.

I was reminded of when a Super Constellation crash-landed in a field, not far from where I lived. I should be able to map it: my guess is it would be a much worse disaster now. If memory serves, it crossed University Drive from the west and skidded across what was then an undeveloped plot of land. I can’t quite recall how far south it was but I’m thinking it was between Southgate and McNab. We drove out to see it, I think, or were perhaps passing by and pulled over to gape.


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I added the ability to vote on stuff here with digg. Perhaps it will encourage me to write better stuff. Not really clear how the various plugins allow you to digg a piece, though it’s easy to vote for one, once someone else (like the proprietor) has done so. Ideally, the plugin would generate a “digg this” button if no one had done so and display the vote tally thereafter.