The Boston Diaries

Thursday, August 08, 2019

Unfortunately, my blog on Gopher is a second class citizen

I will be the first to admit that my blog on gopher is a second-class citizen. When I wrote the gopher server I took the quickest and easiest way to adapt my blog to a (close enough) text-only medium by feeding requests through Lynx. Note I didn't say “well done” (of course not! I said it was a “medium!” Ba-dum-bump! I'll be here all week! Don't forget to tip the wait staff!) or even pretty.

For instance, this entry looks like this via gopher:

Extreme contradiction, Brevard edition

So Bunny and I came across this lovely bit of signage in downtown
[1]Brevard:

[“The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.
There is no stopping in the red zone.” / “The red zone is for immediate
loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white
zone.” / “No, the white zone is for loading of passengers and there is no
stopping in a RED zone.” / “The red zone has always been for loading and
unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a white zone.” / “Don't
you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping!”]

So which is it? Loading, or parking? Or loading of wheelchairs for parking?
Or parking for wheelchairs to be loaded? I'm so confused!

References

1. https://www.cityofbrevard.com/

First off, there's no indication that there's a photo on that page, unless you realize I'm using a very old web convention of describing the image contents by placing said description inside of square brackets.

Secondly, there is no actual link to the picture on the converted entry.

Third, on most (all?) graphical browsers, just holding the mouse over the images will pop up the text above (I don't think many people know about this).

And fourth, the text is a reference to the movie “Airplane!” which does fit the subject of the picture on that page, which is of two traffic signs giving conflicting parking directions (this really doesn't have anything to do with the second-class status of the post on gopher—just more of an FYI type of thing).

I used Lynx because I didn't want to bother writing code to convert HTML to plain text—especially when I had access to a tool that can do it for me. It's just that it doesn't really do a great job because I expect the HTML to do the formatting for me. And I really do need to write a description of the photo in addition to the caption I include for each picture. Ideally, it would look something like:

Extreme contradiction, Brevard edition

So Bunny and I came across this lovely bit of signage in downtown
Brevard [1]:

[Image of two traffic signs one above the other. The upper one says
“NO PARKING, LOADING ZONE” and the lower one saying “RESERVED PARKING
for the HANDICAPPED”—“The white zone is for immediate loading and
unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.” /
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.
There is no stopping in the white zone.” / “No, the white zone is for
loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a RED zone.” / “The
red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's
never stopping in a white zone.” / “Don't you tell me which zone is for
loading, and which zone is for stopping!”] [2]

So which is it? Loading, or parking? Or loading of wheelchairs for parking?
Or parking for wheelchairs to be loaded? I'm so confused!

References

[1] https://www.cityofbrevard.com/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2019/06/13/Confusion.jpg

And then reality sets in and I'm just not up to writing an HTML-to-text translator right now.

Sigh.

Sorry, gopherspace.

The “Tonya Harding Solution” to computer benchmarks

… we knew we had to do more to truly earn those extra credit points. Luckily, I had one final optimization idea:

The Tonya Harding Solution: The benchmark program works by calling the optimized function, calling the naive function, and comparing the two times. And this gave me a truly devilish idea. I added some code to calc_depth_optimized that created a child process. That child process would wait for calc_depth_naive to start running, then send a SIGUSR1 signal to the benchmark process. That signal would interrupt calc_depth_naive and jump to a special signal handler function I'd installed:
void our_handler(int signal) {
    // if you can't win the race, shoot your opponent in the legs
    sleep(image_size * 4 / 10000);
}
So while we did implement a number of features that made our program faster, we achieved our final high score by making the naive version a whole lot slower. If only that 4 had been a 5 …

CS 61C Performance Competition

I'll have to hand it to Carter Sande for literally beating the competition in benchmarking.

(Although it wasn't Tonya Harding who did the attack, but Shane Stant, hired by Harding's ex-husband Jeff Gillooly who attacked Nancy Kerrigan with a police baton and not a gun. Harding herself claims she had nothing to do with the attack.)

Who knew ice cream could be so hard?

We have an ice cream maker. I like chocolate ice cream, the darker, the better. And the instruction manual for the ice cream maker lists a recipe for a “decadent chocolate ice cream” which not only calls for Dutch processed cocoa, but 8 ounces (230g) of bittersweet chocolate. I opted for a really dark chocolate, like on the order of 90% cocoa dark chocolate.

Yeah, I like my chocolate dark.

I'm also trying to cut sugar out of my diet as much as possible, so I decided to use a bit less surgar than what the receipe calls for, so this stuff isn't going to be overly sweet.

I get the ice cream base churned, into a plastic bowl and in the freezer, and I wait for several hours, eagerly awaiting some deep, dark, decadent chocolate ice cream.

I end up with a deep, dark, decadent ice chocolate rock.

This isn't hard ice cream. This isn't even ice cream. It's an ice rock is what it is. I try dropping the bowl a few inches onto the kitchen counter to show Bunny how rock-like it is, and the bowl hits the counter, bounces off and shatters onto the floor.

I mentioned it was in a plastic bowl, right?

There are shards of plastic across the kitchen.

The deep, dark, chocolate ice rock is in one piece.

I think the ice cream base was too dense for much, if any, air to get whipped in while churning. Bunny thinks the low surgar content contributed to the rock-like consistency. Both are probably to blame for this. I do recall that the last time I made the “decadent chocolate ice cream, but with all the surgar,” it did tend towards the harder side of ice cream. So I think the next time I should try the basic vanilla recipe with less surgar and see what happens. If that turns out fine, then try the basic chocolate recipe.

Thursday, August 08, 2019

Unfortunately, my blog on Gopher is a second class citizen

The “Tonya Harding Solution” to computer benchmarks

Who knew ice cream could be so hard?

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