Dave Kellam

Like I said, the light outside was beautiful. Here are some photos, but they don’t really do it justice.

Bear witness to the return of the sun. The light looks fantastic outside, I must go photograph it. I don’t know why I’m still awake. I was out late working with Dave, Andrew and Eilis, on Dave’s final film project. We were doing some filming inside a bar after it closed. I ended up with some cool photos that I’ll probably get around to posting. There’s a little assignment due in a couple hours that I have to finish off. Figured I may as well just stay up for my morning classes and go to bed in the afternoon. Side note: I watched a couple episodes of Six Feet Under tonight. I loved it; it’s an awesome show. The ability to make life in the funeral business funny is astounding. It’s deffinitely worth checking out. On to the outside world to take some pictures.

The weather was complete shit yesterday and nobody felt like doing much of anything. We grabbed a copy of Training Day from the video store and stayed in. The performances of both Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington were stellar. The movie was pretty good, but wouldn’t have been pulled off so well without them. If you pick up the dvd, it’s worth watching the alternate ending — not that it’s any better, it just shows how the ending that’s chosen can totally change a movie.

There was a discussion on slashdot yesterday about algorithms, what ones people like and so forth. Here’s a whitepaper on skiplists, probably my favourite algorithm that I’ve learned so far this year.

For some reason, I forgot to put in the code to allow the comments window to pop-up. In theory, the comments should work now. In theory, the last couple days of post should be visible on the front page, but they’re not.

Does anyone know much about prolog programming? One of the questions we’ve been given is define a predicate eval_polish/2 that evaluates reverse polish notation expressions. I can’t figure it out at all. Bah.

At some point while I was dreaming last night, I decided that today would be the day I caught up on my sleep. Hence, not waking up until 2:30 and having to field a telephone call from my mother five minutes later. She didn’t believe me when I said that I’m normally up by noon on the weekend. At any rate, I should probably try to accomplish some school related tasks in what remains of the afternoon; on to my readings.

Fear of love. Fear of commitment. You want to reach out and take them in your arms. It would less challenging to ignore or to forget but that would make it too easy. Wouldn’t it? Yeah, right… the sleep thing.

I just got back from a By Divine Right show. It was awesome; they rock hard and put on a great performance. So much energy, so much. You can’t avoid jumping around and going nuts while they’re on stage. Try to find a copy of 5 bucks, it’s a great song. And now it’s the wee hours of Saturday and I should really get some sleep.

It sure would be nice if computer programs wrote themselves. You see someone walk up to a computer and say, “Hey, I need something to do such and such, make it.” And a couple minutes later the program spits out another program, which isn’t so much having the program write itself as having another program write it. At any rate, it’s not really possible; having a program that could write any other program would in essence solve the halting problem. Although some would claim it is solveable, that’s geeky computer/math humour for you.

I’ve just spent a bit of time reading google’s initial proposal. I’ve found it pretty interesting because we’ve just finished up a bunch of string theory stuff in my data structures course. One of my favourite bits:

[A] PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation.

They have a nice little linear time algorithm that they’re using. Those kind of statistics are pretty impressive considering that this paper was published a couple of years ago.

It was yet another uneventful morning; didn’t make my 8:30 class, but I did make it to the other two. Looks like we’re heading into graph theory in my data structures class, it looks like some pretty crazy shit. For our last assingment, we’re going to be given a data set representing a map of the London Underground and asked to write some functions to calculate the shortest route from point a to point b. They’re probably thinking, these kids keep asking for real-world examples, maybe if we give them one they’ll shut up and not bother asking us again. We’re doing graph theory in my logic class too, so it’s nice to start getting some overlap/correlation between courses.