It’s 2am in Singapore, the first stop off on my way to Italy, and I’m making use of the free internet facilities at the airport. That was the longest leg of the flight, the next two portions are each half an hour shorter. There’s sooo much to watch on the plane, but nothing can keep my attention, am going to try and sleep some more this leg.

Having bought a DSLR a month ago, I’ve been struggling to get out and enjoy taking pictures. It’s time to sit down and work out why I want to, and rediscover some motivation.

I’ve also changed the layout of my site. Hopefully only temporary (hah), and just a stock theme, but at least not THE stock theme.

Low and behold, recent versions of K3b actually allow this, it was only a few months ago that I was foiled.

It’s nice when things (finally) just work!

I’m back home now, after my two month summer climbing holiday taking in the best Australia has to offer. Starting out in the Blue Mountains in a house with QUT Cliffhangers, then continuing on camping at numerous places before ending up at Arapiles. Australia’s climbing ‘Mecca’.

It’s actually been a week and a half since I’ve been home, not a lot to report.

Instead I’ll sit here enjoying my pasta lunch listening to the tuneful melodies of The Shin’s latest album.

The main problem affecting me occurs with Australian/UK and US formats, there is often no way to tell which is which. Most well designs APIs avoid them both, and sensibly order elements year-month-day, but many people decide dates are simple and reimplement it themselves, fools. The PHP date functions expect things to be ordered in the American way, and blindly produce errors for the unwary programmer.

Java solved the problem by adding layers of confusion. If you want to use dates in Java in a particular format, you need to learn about dates, and then date formaters, and then locales, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Beware the evil dates!

Before:

damo@omad:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
/dev/hdc:  Timing buffered disk reads:   86 MB in  3.07 seconds =  28.05 MB/sec
/dev/hdd:  Timing buffered disk reads:   86 MB in  3.06 seconds =  28.14 MB/sec

After:

damo@omad:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
/dev/hdc: Timing buffered disk reads:  172 MB in  3.01 seconds =  57.15 MB/sec
/dev/hdd: Timing buffered disk reads:  170 MB in  3.02 seconds =  56.23 MB/sec

Now my media drives are running approximately twice as fast. I should have done it months ago!

For those who’ve never heard of it, Top Coder is an online competition for computer programmers. There’s several different categories to compete in with the most interesting to me being Algorithms.

Each week thousands of coders from around the world enter, and are given 3 programming challenges, with limited amount of time to compete them. Points are awarded for correct solutions, based on the difficulty of the problem, and the amount of time spent working on them.

I heard about Top Coder from an online interview with a Google employee, who attributes his success in obtaining a much coveted position there largely to his high standings in the competition. He also highly recommended it for anyone wishing to practice their programming skills.
The problems are hard, it’s a bit of fun, and provides good motivation to improve.