After my last day of work at GeoEye, I went to get my haircut at a nearby salon. I asked for it a little shorter. Between the time I gave this brief instruction, and the time she lifted her hands to my head, a seismic, cosmic, interrupting event took place that transformed my words into: “Kindly shave my head, I have no need of hair. Please don’t ask for confirmation.”

At least, that’s what I assume happened. Before I could say anything, an electric razor had taken quite a bit off the top. It wasn’t to the skin–thank goodness. But I was on my way to a whole new look.

It was too late to fix it, so I went with it.

The next day we flew out to Seattle to look for housing with our new realtor. I had to excuse myself for looking like a skinhead.

Of course, the next Monday I started at Microsoft and had my badge picture taken. That one will be alive for a while…

And my drivers license…

And all the pictures of my wife and I in a new location…

1. Wear my Google t-shirt.
2. Set my homepage to www.google.com
3. Continually ask, “Have you met BillG? Where’s BillG? When can I see BillG?”
4. Show off my bright blue iPod Nano
5. “Upgrade” my workstation to Windows XP
6. Then just format it and install Ubuntu
7. Randomly shout “Yahoo!” as I walk through the halls
8. Add my gmail address to my e-mail sig
9. Start an open-source project for Google Android
10. Default browser: Firefox Safari

(I kid, I kid…)

In one of our pieces of software we have a process that looks like this:

void MyThread()

{

    while (true)

    {

        DoFunctionA();

        DoFunctionB();

        SleepFor10Seconds();

    }

}

While FunctionA and FunctionB are conceptually similar, they interact with completely different systems.

We had a problem with FunctionA the other day–it was taking 120 seconds to do its thing instead of the normal 10 (or less) because a remote server was down. This caused problems for FunctionB because it wasn’t running as often as it should have so things were getting backed up in the system. Oops.

Now, the solution is to split these two functions into two independent threads so they don’t interfere with each other, and I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, so that’s what I proposed.

Response back: “That’s a good idea, but before we do something complicated like that, can we just put FunctionB first?“

Um, no.

The time we want to minimize is the time between running FunctionB, which is Time_Sleep + Time_A. Putting FunctionB first makes it Time_A + Time_Sleep. Last I checked, those were actually equivalent.

One issue I didn’t really see addressed in the comments on the post is the overall issue of mail safety. People need to consider the seriousness of stealing mail. There’s a reason the fines for it are so severe. A reliable and trusted mail system is the foundation of a good portion of our society and its communications mechanisms.

Having lived overseas, and having had many family members live all over the world, I can personally testify to the need for a secure mail system. There are countries I would not mail a package to–it would just be a waste of money. The security of our system *HAS* to be enforced harshly or people will lose faith in it and it becomes a system of corruption and scamming. This kid got off lucky. If he were older or there were stronger evidence he were stealing more valuable items, or he were being less discriminating in what he stole, I think he could have gotten a far worse punishment.

2. Write tic-tac-toe in Brainf*&$

3. What is 2¹²⁸ in decimal?

4. Solve traveling salesman in constant  time (O(1))

5. How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara (at a given instant, assuming constant, well-defined boundaries)?

6. Implement quicksort on a spherically linked list.

Technorati Tags: nerds,humor

With the talks in Annapolis this week between Middle East governments, peace is on a lot of people’s minds. A meeting like this, while it won’t solve anything immediately, does illustrate the point that you can’t reasonably talk and fight at the same time. With that in mind, I have a permanent solution.

How do you avoid getting things done at your job? You have meetings. You have meetings to plan your work. You have meetings to plan the meetings to plan your work. You have meetings about why the last meeting failed. You have meetings to decide to continue the meetings.

So let’s schedule everybody for a meeting once or twice a year for the next 500 years. Send them all a recurring Outlook appointment.

Of course, you’d have to make the punishment for not showing up pretty severe (like getting fired). Maybe just create an elite international team of kidnappers that will retrieve a missing president. (By the way, it wouldn’t do for the presidents to send delegations–they all have to come in person).

But what to do at these meetings? After a hundred years or so, they will have discussed everything in detail, so I suggest moving on to games. We’ll start with something formal and proper, like chess. After a few hundred years of international presidential chess (televised live, of course), they’ll begin to loosen up and we can move on to more interesting things, like Twister or water polo. Anybody who starts a war that year gets picked last.

Listen to this recording he made.

Ok, it’s a long shot, but I think it’s hilarious. If it works, he can take himself off the Do Not Call Registry!

Technorati Tags: telemarketing , phone message

SPUtility.HideTaiwan

Proof!

Technorati Tags: Taiwan, Microsoft, API, Windows, SharePoint, humor, geopolitics

Simpsonize Me – upload a photo of yourself and it will analyze it and generate a Simpson-ish lookalike. Very cool, and a big time waster.

Update: here’s mine. Should have put it up earlier…

Cameron Diaz takes a big swig of soda and shows the world that she can belch!

Nice.

To rectify this, I present some new truth.

First, an example in real life, which really happened. For context, Leticia is my wife, has beautiful, olive skin, with dark brown eyes, and hair with various colors of brown, and the little girl in discussion was as white as can be.

Leticia: Look at that little girl–she’s so beautiful! Do you think we’ll ever have a girl who looks like her?

Me: No.

L: So you think our daughter will be ugly!

M: Uhhh……no. I don’t think she’ll be white.

Transforming this little conversation into boolean logic:

A: This little girl is beautiful

B: Our future daughter will look like this girl

C: Our future daughter will be beautiful

So my wife says that AB–>C, and that if I say !B, then !B–>!C. I always knew that, but what I didn’t know is that the other options I thought existed aren’t actually valid! (i.e., that !B–>C is also true, or in other words, that C can be true regardless of the value of B) Who knew! So I present below corrected truth tables. Wikipedia, take note.

So you see that the correct form of implication when dealing with this logic is the same as equality.

Now you know, beware.

Maybe it does…

“Don’t worry, it isn’t infectious.”

(He has a temporary skin condition)

Thanks, you *****, for not responding to my Prim’s e-mail, and may you be cursed with the worst of success in Computer Science.

Sincerely,

Michael

Every once in a while I get requests from people asking me for completed code. The purpose of my articles (and this blog) is to aid understanding, not provide wholesale code. My job keeps me plenty busy, I receive a LOT of e-mails every day, and I probably don’t have the fully-functional, runnable code that people are looking for anyway, when they can probably find it on the Internet.

That said, I have received numerous comments, specific questions, disagreements, kudos, and suggestions that I have warmly responded to.

My question is: what’s the word for the fear of writing “Love, ” (Like you would maybe automatically do to your spouse) at the end of an e-mail to your boss?

I’m not the only one who’s worried about this–a few weeks ago a coworker expressed the same fear.

But I’ve found someone new–someone who will give me the movies I want to see, the movies I can’t find in any of your stores–good movies. New movies, old movies, classics, thrillers, TV shows–anything I’ve ever wanted to see, but couldn’t fit in a store.

I’ve moved to NetFlix and I won’t look back. With nearly 80 movies in the queue and counting I’m looking forward to a good year or more of movies I haven’t seen.