Though it’s just a memory, some memories last forever…

I never had a good memory… Never.  Ever.  But I do remember what I was doing on January 15th 2008 at 7:14 PM : watching my Mom die…

 

Snow Dog is victorious

What do all those items have in common ?

• My glasses
• A mattress
• A sofa
• A cell phone
• A chair
• Tons of pens
• Tons of rocks
• A few Barbies
• 2 blankets
• The basement cement floor

Yes, the “Devil” all ate those…  Picture of our little tornado below:

Jack, our Jack Russell

P.S.  Did you know the Devil’s name is Jack ?!? 

 

Take off to the Great White North

I don’t understand what’s stirring so much ideas and passion about it (besides the fact that I just love winter, snow & cold weather) but these days, I keep thinking about the craziest trips to some of the most remote (and cold) regions of Canada…

Tuktoyaktuk, Fermont, Fort Nelson, Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Watson Lake, Kangiqcliniq, Ivujivik, Iqaluit, Quaqtaq, Salluit, Pine Point, Snowdrift and Reliance, you will probably be part of my dreams tonite… and tomorrow… and the day after…  Well, there’s only one cure to my mental disorder : do and live the trip!

 

Know your place in life is where you want to be.

Resolutions for 2009…

1. Have an almost (if not complete) “ready-to-hit-the-market” baseball game before June;
2. Of all the stuff I haven’t read from the “top 100 novels” list ( I must admit that I completed my list recently and now I’ve got more than 200 books on it!), read everything I haven’t read (okay, it’ll take more than one year to do!);
3. Appreciate silence and music again;
4. Appreciate playing chess again even though I am sooooooooo far away from that kid who played chess tournaments at 15;
5. Why dream about being a novelist?  It’s about time I start writing… I have dreamed long enough about doing it, now I have to do it…  One page at a time, that’s the key;
6. A few road trips to plan (or do!)…  Tuktoyaktuk, Old Orchard Beach (in the winter of course!), Fermont and any other destination that one of my friends can suggest and that sounds like a sooooooooo stupid idea (all I need is an excuse as in : baseball, rock concert, “why not”, lots of snow, etc);
7. Stop by Cleveland…  More than 24 hours.  Progressive rocks and I miss you guys;
8. Gauss and Riemann were just so ahead of their time!  Read all I can read about them and keep that secret (I know I’m a geek… sometimes!);
9. Play snooker and poker a little bit more often;
10. See friends I haven’t seen for a too-long-period-and-that-is-my-own-fault;
11. Take care of the one I love and our three princesses.

 

Our Great Computers Fill the Hallowed Halls.

I’ve always had an interest in space exploration.  Now mix this with my interest for computers, it was obvious I would passionately read this rather long and detailed paper on how one guy, John Pultorak, recreated from scratch the Block I Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).

It took him 4 years!  Mostly because NASA lost track of some of the original specs, documentation and memos.  The guy even had to interview some of the engineers that worked on that computer system (the AGC) in the 60’s to complete this unique puzzle !  This article is not only the long and detailed story of such a complex project but also gives you insight on how a group of very smart and clever people solved computing and algorithmic problems in a unique way with processing power that is, by today’s standards, ridicule and pathetic!  The flasher unit on your car probably has more CPU power and memory than what those guys used to land on the moon, almost 40 years ago !  And for the fanatics of the Apollo program, you’ll discover why a stupid bug might have caused the Eagle module to crash on the moon during the final landing phase when the computer went postal with a myriad of 1201 alarms (44Mb, audio of landing communications here).

I’ve always been fascinated by those mythical machines from the past.   It started with my interest in chess programming.  All those big and powerful mainframes running those (then) strong chess programs… The MANIAC, IBM 704, IBM 7090, DEC PDP-6, DEC PDP-11, CDC 6400, ICL 4/70, Cray X-MP, Honeywell 6050, CDC Cyber 175, the myriad of Sun machines, Amdahl 470, Nova 3, the Connection Machine and all the weird and custom-built ones. Extraordinary machines built for the sole purpose of playing chess!  They could do miracles with a 256 byte stack!

Unfortunately, I ‘m from the generation that does not count bytes and cycles anymore.  Different era, different problems.

The closest I have been to a mainframe was at university, for only one semester.  I clearly remember thinking about how many nodes/second the famous (at the time) chess program ZZZZZZ could reach if I’d remotely fork the search engine on all 65 RS/6000 machines and the HP/735 server in the Unix lab…  So I tried it, one late Saturday night…  Only to get caught by the furious sysadmin on duty that night in the Unix lab asking me (he probably noticed a slightly higher CPU load than a typical Saturday night) “what the f*** are you doing ?”.  I don’t remember how many nodes per second I was able to reach but I do remember I was really impressed, really impressed by the numbers displayed on the console!

 

We Only Stop for the Best…

The Post-it era is dead.  If you’re like me and you’re curious about everything and have a bookmark file that contains too-many-URLs-to-browse-in-a-lifetime-but-you-gotta-go-back-and-read-that-page-but-you-do-not-have-the-time or you’re just googling for something and found the info you were looking for but you can’t properly organize all those notes in a decent way, well, there’s something for you!  No more notes spread across Post-it, notebooks, text files and pieces of paper…

Evernote, that’s what it’s called.  From what I read on the website the first time, it seemed too good to be true.  In fact, my initial thought was “this thing is soooo exagerated that it can’t be, can’t even be called vaporware cause it can’t just be possible”.  Well, it just works as advertised!

Really, really, really worth a look!  And it’s free if you use it locally (you have the option to save your data on the web so it’s accessible from anywhere).  Grabbing stuff, almost any kind of data, from your web browser or from elsewhere is so easy now…  And did I mention, it can handle written notes and recognize text found in a picture…  You can also store audio notes!  It can handle text, html, PDF, jpeg, gif, png, wav and even mp3 files!  Works on multiple platforms, mobiles, the web, etc.  Well, read and experiment it by yourself!  Just take the tour and be amazed!

Next coolest thing I am playing with these days is Pharo, a Squeak fork.  The team behind this project is pushing fixes and updates at an incredible rate.  These guys are really serious about making Pharo a serious choice for an open source and professional Smalltalk development solution.  As an extra, Pharo made me stop whining about Squeak look and feel…  Cause it looks professional (read with a nice look & feel), right out of the box.  And finally, Morphic is undergoing a major cleanup, as are all base classes.  Lean and clean they say.  Well, with the number of fixes going into the image every week, you can be sure they’ll reach their goal really quick!

Next, after a short break, I came back to Icebergradio.com again.  Totally free and has lots of channels.  A necessity if you’re like me and can’t code without music!

Finally, for die-hard Rush fans like me, you MUST connect to RushRadio.net. Free and… only Rush all day!

 

100101 (or zero the hero)

Short post.  Suggestions for reading… for geeks first!

In a very “mathematical” mood recently.  I guess I will never be able to “kill the mathematician beast” inside of me!  Two excellent books if you love math!  I’ll spare you a summary of what those 2 books are all about, Amazon.com does a better job at that than I could possibly do!  Follow the links and enjoy!

• The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Santoy
• Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

In my reading queue, a biography of René Lévesque,  a pornographic novel, a sci-fi novel, Le planétarium, Un petit pas pour l’homme, a bloody and violent thriller and finally a how-could-I-possibly-describe-this kinda book.

But first and foremost, I have been waiting for so long for some new poems from my very-talented-I-am-so-jealous girlfriend…  I guess she’s like many other writers : you gotta be sad and lonely to be prolific…  Unfortunately, she’s happy and she’s with me!     Just hoping she’ll write something, anything!

P.S. If you love math and love Smalltalk, I highly recommend Object-Oriented Implementation of Numerical Methods: An Introduction with Java & Smalltalk by Didier H. Besset.  A must for every Smalltalker doing statistics and serious math stuff !

In the meantime, still coding in Smalltalk, from home, with our dog Jack as my sole companion !  And enjoying doing some MySQL for my baseball project…

Life could be worse…  Oh, wait, yeah!  We’ve had a quadrillion elections in Canada in the last 6 years…  Do I really have to vote to tell the politicians the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ?

YOU WILL NOT GET A MAJORITY, don’t you get it???

 

X

Generation X, X-box, X-Ray, X-Men, X this, x that…

When “X” is more than just the 24th letter of the alphabet…  Even though it shows up in a lot of plural forms in French and it’s silent, don’t let your “X be silent!

Put your “X” at the right place on November 4th…  Please!  Put it at the right place, this time!

Let’s make one step forward and let’s get passed W and envision something better!

A citizen of the World.

 

Didacts and Narpets

What’s new you might ask?  Well, besides my fabulous-wonderful-exciting new job, lots of stuff!

First, just like the Phoenix, Dolphin Smalltalk came back from the dead!  This is good news, exciting news in fact!  You can read about it here!  I haven’t bought that professional license for nothing finally!

Lots of action in the Smalltalk world.  Squeak’s popularity grows exponentially (Seaside helps let’s say!) and more and more people are coming to the Squeak IRC channel, day after day!  There’s also a new Squeak fork called Pharo and looking at who’s on the Pharo team, you can be sure this thing will succeed (sans l’ombre d’un doute monsieur Ducasse)!

Yep, still working on that baseball project of mine and doing lots of MySQL and benchmarking various stuff (I’ve been working on some rather heavy and complex ORDER BY optimizations lately, so much that I think I could write an article about it… This is on the could-be-possible list).  My hard disk is busy 24/7 these days!  While I’m on the database subject, those of you needing some funky SQL stuff might want to buy the excellent book, SQL Hacks.  I’d also recommend Baseball Hacks: Tips & Tools for Analyzing and Winning with Statistics to all serious baseball fanatics.

On the pleasant surprise side, I recently came across an excellent DB2 podcast.  Even though it primarily targets DB/2 for z/OS, this stuff is excellent, funny, entertaining, really informative and those two experts know their DB/2 stuff inside out.  The 2 series of podcasts focus on real solutions to real problems for real-life applications!  Emphasis is on performance and it’s really educative!  Really!  A must-hear !

In the musical department, for some reason unknown to myself and to my brain, I keep switching from Death Magnetic (Metallica) to Hard Candy (Madonna).  Don’t know if that helps coding by it keeps me happy all day long!  And let’s be honest, anything that is not Hannah Montana related would keep me happy…  Three little girls listening to the same songs over and over ain’t something you can tolerate for too long, especially when they decide to sing the songs they listen to!  On the serious side of music (I’m a HUGE Rush fan!), I can’t wait for the DVD of the Snakes & Arrows tour!

Finally, looking at some mathematical stuff for… fun.  I have been looking at the  “Resta” integer sequence lately and I’m thinking about ways to expand the sequence and discover new terms and how I’d do it algorithm-wise.

On a final note, Trailer Park Boys rules! 

P.S.  Yes, we do have an election in Canada coming but ours is sooooooooooo boring that we follow the US campaign with a lot more interest!  Eh!?!  Can we vote?!?!

 

Did I have a dream? Or did the dream have me?

Work from home?  In two different flavors of Smalltalk?  Throw in some Oracle and SQL Server?  Some OO-RDBMS mapping tool, a complex object model?  In a totally new domain?

That’s my new job and I just LOVE it!