BlaBlubbBlog

It is amazing what can be done with bitwise operations, just recall the value swapping without using a temporary storage: a^=b, b^=a, a^=b. I was looking for a neater way to compute the log base 2 of an integer than by doing it brute force using log(). And I found a very cool page enumerating a bunch of things, appropriately called Bit Twiddling Hacks. Some possible ways of finding the log base 2 are shown there, but in the end I decided against using any of them: I only have to do that once – okay, maybe two or three times – in the code and hence for clarity I'll stick to log().

The stuff nightmares are made of. Yeah, I know. It is old. Nonetheless funny. And since Clippy now is officially dead (full story starts here), it seemed a good time to bring that up again. A spectre of the past?

While increasing the caffeine level I was reading in a CERN newsletter lying on the table in the coffee room and found in there an interesting small article about the Singapore Biennale 2006, or, more specifically, an installation named 'Tom Na H-iu' by Mariko Mori (see pictures here, here and a video here). Its shape resembles the ancient Celtic megaliths, or standing stones, but is made of half transparent glass and illuminated from the inside by LEDs. Those are controlled by a <strangelovevoice> computer </strangelovevoice> hooked up to a detector at the Super-Kamiokande. Detected neutrinos – among them are some which belong to distant supernovae – are hence used to create, in a broader sense, new light. The name 'Tom Na H-iu' refers to the place where, according to Celtic lore, souls are waiting to pass into a new life. So, of course this is symbolic (death, rebirth, yaddayadda) but with the direct link to realtime data it actually becomes quite profound. Nice idea, indeed.

The thing is 3 metres tall, would actually fit in my room (height-wise), hmmm...

So, my first posting on this blog was exactly (to the minute, I used the timed publication for this post) one year ago. Wooohooo! And even though I agree that it is a bit cheesy: Happy Birthday, BlaBlubbBlog! I am somewhat surprised that I managed to more or less regularly post over the course of the year.

A few statistics: 115 articles (7 by Oleg, 108 by me) make 0.32 articles per day (that is 2.21 articles per week or 9.78 articles per month), 43 comments make 0.37 comments per article, 305800 written characters make 2659.13 character per article. The update to s9y 1.1 did something nasty to the visit counter, so I don't have any number on this, but this is anyway mostly search bots (Hi there!).

So, with a big Thanks to Mela for hosting the site (yes, I will buy the Geek Kochbuch! ^_^), Oleg for contributing a couple of articles+comments and everyone for reading and sometimes commenting, I'll venture in the next year. May there be a second birthday!

I have been using last.fm for a couple of months now – okay, a bit more than two – time to review what for – and if at all – it is useful. Mainly this thing is logging what I am listening to; only when I switched on the logging though, so not every little bit is actually archived there. But I passed by a few 'milestones', song 3000 was Alanis Morissette - Heart of the House, as number 4000 I listened to Ayreon - Day Twelve: Trauma and song 5000 then was JT Bruce - Plunge Into Hyperreality – thanks to a great as usual Progcast I found out about JT Bruce and the two free albums of fine progressive music you can download there.

So since the main thing is gathering listening data, lets take a look at my overall artist chart (as of approximately tonight, it is a bit difficult to know how old the data is from which the charts are produced):

I just found a – rather common – typo in my C program: sizeog(long double) instead of sizeof(long double). Okay, that is something the compiler would have found, too. But over in #Wagenrad, Oleg had the idea that it would be a nice compiler easter-egg, if it would have functions (defines) for commonly mistyped things. So I suggested something in the terms of #define sizeog(a) (sizeof((a)) + 34), hidden somewhere deep in stdio.h or so – more an easter-egg of the libc, though. Evil evil. Maybe something like this is implemented in var'aq? More suggestions for.. ehm.. features like this?

One good thing, maybe the only good thing, about flying is the option to go to duty-frees. Or at least close approximations thereof in terms of bottle sizes. Normally a bottle of whisky bought in a shop contains 700ml of the juice. The bottles in the duty-frees contain 1000ml. Clear advantage. So I paid 36,99£ for 1000ml of the Caol Ila (18yrs), which is roughly 56€ according to xe.com. The 0.7l bottle costs 53€ at Scoma, that equals 75€ per liter litre^a. I actually just checked that for the purpose of the posting and am now surprised that I saved that much, cool, wasn't expecting that. But okay, that propitiates me even more than just having a nice whisky with the hassle of flying: arguing for an exit seat – more space for the legs, or I should say, barely enough space compared to not enough space – security checks every two metres, popping ears... And of course the whisky helps relaxing after a long day of programming. Lets see if the bottle will last till the end of my stay.

^a: British spelling, since I am in the UK...