Name meme

Ganked from sineala, the "If you call me _________, you are ________" meme.

( LJ-cut because this might get long )

Fixing broken stuff

Today I am writing from the oh-so-very-exciting town of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where I did not expect to be spending the first day of my spring break, but am anyway.

Loads of things have been falling apart lately, among them CryptoGeekBoi's lungs. He's contracted viral pneumonia, and as I consider it a Very Bad Idea for people with high fevers to be left alone and his parents are in Minneapolis this week, I decided the better part of valor was to crash here last night. I would have gone to work, but also on the list of Things Which Have Fallen Apart Lately is the hard drive of my office Linux box ... with all, and I do mean all, of the code I have written recently on it. (The partition table appears to have collapsed, as it was a dual-boot RH9.1/Win2K box, and now there are Windows files appearing in lost+found.) As IDT is not much of a Linux shop, we didn't have a CVS set up (at least, not one which supported Linux), and while I should have either insisted we set one up on another box or simply stored tarballs on some other machine, I did not, and now I am paying for it. On the other hand, I suspect if the sysadmin can't recover the data here, it would be cheaper for them to pay me loads of overtime to work 12-hour days over spring break than it would be for them to send the drive to a recovery site. My boss has intimated as such. I will not complain.

Of course, I was sort of planning to finish marking my students' projects over spring break, but I suppose that only means I can't be quite as nasty and critical toward them as I usually am, so their grades will be better for it.

I meant to spend today doing absolutely nothing productive, but in the back of my head I'm already putting together how I'm going to improve the codebase as I rewrite it. Funny how that works.

The Six Million Dollar Code

I can rebuild it. I have the technology. CHARUN will be that code. Better than it was before. Better ... stronger ... faster.

As near as anyone can tell, the hard drive is dead. (Long live the hard drive.) The plan was, if Todd-the-sysadmin couldn't find a way to extract the code by the end of today, then Andy would decide between paying me overtime to rewrite it all over spring break and shipping it out somewhere to get the data recovered. Todd had vanished by the end of the day, and there was no sign of my code. So Andy made the call: I get the overtime.

So, no vacation, but holy shit this is going to be an interesting week.

I already know how I'm going to streamline the process and make the rebuilding go more quickly -- anything that gets used more than once goes into a server-side include or a library, the database is turning into PostgreSQL rather than mySQL, and k-nearest-neighbour gets hardcoded as a procedure rather than piped out to Weka. (mySQL doesn't handle stored procedures.) I've done this once. I can do it again. I have five days to do it in, because I have other plans on Thursday and Friday (and fuck, am I ever going to need that psychiatrist's appointment on Friday morning).

Five days. Sixty hours. CodeRace 2004 begins ...

... tomorrow morning, because tonight I am having people over to watch movies and getting drunk as fuck. I sure won't have the chance over spring break.

For those who can't do the math

I have been seeing oo-look-at-the-pretty-numbers remarks claiming that there were 911 days between the 9/11 attacks and the 3/11 Madrid bombings.

Just for the record, this would only have been the case if 2004 were not a leap year.

9/11/2001 - 9/11/2002: 365 days.
9/11/2002 - 9/11/2003: 365 days (total: 730)
9/11/2003 - 10/11/2003: 30 days (total: 760)
10/11/2003 - 11/11/2003: 31 days (total: 791)
11/11/2003 - 12/11/2003: 30 days (total: 821)
12/11/2003 - 1/11/2004: 31 days (total: 852)
1/11/2004 - 2/11/2004: 31 days (total: 883)
2/11/2004 - 3/11/2004: 29 days (total: 912)

So now you know. (And knowing is half the battle.)