Older blog entries for fejj (starting at number 173)

fzort: Ah, thank you for the explanation :)

I was just about to note that expanding on my previous estimation, a slightly better one would be:

r = (x >> 1) - (x >> 2) - (x >> 3) + (x >> 6)

And then of course I could perhaps expand on the (x >> 6) in a similar fashion to get an even more accurate result.

Anyways... kind of an interesting problem.

Interesting interview questions:

Q: What's a fast way to divide an integer by 7 using the bit shift operator? (apparently asked by an EA Sports interviewer)
A: I thought about this for a bit and came up with the following estimation:

r = (x >> 2) - (x >> 3) + (x >> 6);

I mostly mention this because I had my own interview today where I felt... well, less than adequate. Suffice it to say, my ability to figure out the Big-O notation for algorithms was less than stellar. I was also unable to come up with a solution for his webcrawler scenario, which was along the lines of "if you've got some huge number of pages to crawl, how could you prevent the crawler from scanning the same page multiple times?" to which I had to admit to him, I hadn't the slightest idea how to go about it (the prelude to this question had been "the simplest way to do such a thing if memory was not an issue" to which I replied I'd use a hash table, using the page urls as the key).

Been listening to Drivin' Too Fast lately, really has a nice groove to it.

Amazing what a break from looking at code can do to help you fix a bug.

Back in 2004, I had been writing articles explaining different sorting algorithms, how they worked, and how to implement them in C (and in most cases, how to implement them more efficiently than the "standard textbook way"). Well, I had gotten distracted around the time I had been working on an article for Quick Sort and never got around to finishing it. I remember having a bug in my QuickSort routine somewhere that I wasn't able to find after a few nights of looking at it and having had more pressing things to attend to, set it aside for later (but not before documenting a few test cases that failed and how they failed).

Well, yesterday, after coming across that code, I opened it up in my trusty Emacs editor and in just a few minutes had a solution... it was basically a simple one-off bug.

Not long after, I got a call from someone at Google who had seen my resume and repeatedly told me they found it "interesting". I have no idea what that means, exactly, but I take it that it's a Good Thing(tm) :)

Thanks to Ross's blog for informing me about Dave Cridland's Push-IMAP projects (Polymer, Telomer) and the Lemonaide specs. This was quite an interesting read... I've been wanting something like this for years, it's really exciting stuff.

Despite what pvanhoof claims in his own response to this news, offline functionality is not the hardest part of implementing an IMAP client.

I find it hillarious that the only argument against what I've posted comes down to:

"No really, Bush is a Bad Man because I say so."

Very convincing argument, I must say.

bi: You claim that my arguments are unfalsifiable and somehow conclude that this means that Iraq did not have possession of WMDs? Huh? I simply cannot follow your logic. I agree that the claim that Iraq had WMDs is unfalsifiable, which is exactly my point - all of the people claiming that Iraq never had WMDs are simply mindlessly regurgitating what the news media is feeding them in order to manipulate the masses to be against the Bush Administration; a brainwashing if you will.

bi: you still fail to offer any evidence to the contrary. Is it safe to conclude, then, that you have none and that there is the possibility that what I have stated is truth?

Also, there were other compelling reasons to go to war with Iraq than simply the question of whether they had WMDs, as I pointed out in my last post which you failed to bother to even acknowledge (you focused only on one small portion of what I wrote to critique).

As to the issue of the Iraqi people being worse now than they were because of the mortality rate?

I present to you the following statistics in rebuttal (from markhumphrys.com ):

Opinion Polls in Iraq

Johann Hari on opinion polls after the war: "So what we now know is that on the day of the anti-war rally, with all the caveats ... a majority of Iraqis were saying: "Better this invasion than what we faced otherwise." They would not have been marching with you. They would have been marching for the invasion."

July 2003

Post-liberation, the majority of Iraqis in Iraq support the war! (also here and here and here and here)

Sept 2003

What Iraqis Really Think, September 10, 2003 (also here)

• The majority oppose an Islamic state.
• When asked what country they would want Iraq to be like - Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt or the US - the US was the no.1 answer.
• The majority want to punish the Baath Party rather than forgive their crimes.
• The majority want America to stay longer.

Mar 2004

Survey

• The majority who expressed an opinion supported the US invasion.
• The majority think things are better now than before the war.
• The majority oppose an Islamic state.
• 80 percent oppose the fascist "resistance".
• The majority want America to stay longer.

Who knows better: the Iraqi people or Spain's new PM? - discussion of the above survey by Janet Daley. Why does the ignorant socialist government of Spain listen to Al Qaeda on Iraq, instead of to the Iraqi people? Why do they do Al Qaeda's bidding on Iraq, instead of the bidding of the people of Iraq?

May 2004

Survey

• 84 percent of Iraqis say Saddam is guilty of murdering their countrymen.
• 83 percent say he was a torturer.
• 61 percent say he deserves the death penalty.

June 2004

Survey

• 76 per cent of Iraqis feel freer to express their political views in public today than under Saddam.
• More than 80 per cent feel freer to exercise their religious beliefs.
• 76 per cent do not believe their lives were made worse by the Coalition.
• 85 per cent feel safer with CPA in place.

Dec 2004 - Jan 2005

Survey

Do you support military action against the so-called resistance? 88 percent said "Yes".

Dec 2005

Survey (see here)

• 57 percent want democracy, 26 percent want a dictator, 14 percent want an Islamic state. Zarqawi is fighting for something that nobody wants. His stupid men are dying for something that nobody wants.
• When should the allies leave Iraq? 26 percent say leave now. 66 percent say stay longer.
• 80 percent of Kurds say the US was right to invade Iraq.
• 58 percent of Shiites say the US was right to invade Iraq.

Jan 2006

Survey

"Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US-Britain invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?"

• 77 percent of Iraqis think it was worth it.
• The Sunnis regret the end of apartheid, but if we exclude them, 91 percent of Kurds say it was worth it, and 98 percent of Shias say it was worth it.

So, despite a higher mortality rate, the Iraqi people seem to prefer life post-Saddam as compared to under Saddam.

zanee: and therein lies the misunderstanding of so many people that are anti-Bush... they focus on WMDs meaning nuclear weapon capability, when in fact WMDs can mean any weapon capable of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear, or ballistic missiles).

You also say that there is evidence from the intelligence community that points to the "fact" that WMDs did not exist in Iraq. I will refute you with the following:

• intelligence is never black and white. some sources may lead to the conclusion that something is true, others might lead to false. You have to analyse what is presented to you and reach a conclusion based on all pieces and the value of each piece (was this source biased? is that source really saying that it's true? or only that he believes it to be true? who/what are this source's sources? etc). You can't just point to one intelligence source and reach a conclusion (which is exactly what you are trying to do).
• Iraq collaborated with and was harboring known terrorists, some of whom lived in the al-Jazair neighborhood of Baghdad.
• There is/was only one way to find out for sure if Iraq had WMDs - invade (as you say, there have been, to my knowledge, no found WMDs of nuclear nature inside the boarders of Iraq, that we know of - but that doesn't mean they don't exist, hidden somewhere; similarly it doesn't mean that they do. But that was my previous point).
• There exists intelligence (backed also by British and Isreali intelligence sources) that there existed joint Iraq-Egyptian WMD (nuclear and ballistic missile) programs in neighboring Arab nations such as Lybia for the purpose of "plausable deniability".
• In September of 2002, Iraq is known to have moved chemical weapon components to Syria for storage.
• In 2002, Saddam moved troops into position to make a preemptive attack on Isreal (with the help from other Arab nations, the Palestinians as well as Al-Qaeda) before the United States was able to make its offensive on Iraq, knowing that the United States would have to launch their attack from Isreal. Saddam's plan was to use ballistic missiles launched at Isreali targets to cripple Isreal and America as much as he could, but, only after the planned attacks started from terrorist groups who would start the fighting. The reasoning was that he knew Isreal would have to retalliate against the terrorist attacks, thus giving him the excuse to attack Isreal back saying that he was simply coming to the aid of the Palestinians. He hoped that this would also have the effect of rallying the rest of the Arab nations behind him.
• It has been confirmed also that Iraq was preparing to provide biological weapons to the Palestinians.

Even if we remove all evidence of Iraq having (or having access to) any type of WMD, the fact that they were going to launch an offensive on Isreal is justification enough to attack Iraq, nevermind that they harbored and collaborated with terrorist organisations. Saddam was unstable - a threat to the people of Iraq and his neighbors and had been for decades, it was time this threat was eliminated for the safety of millions.

Zanee says that anyone studying the region at the time knew it was impossible for Iraq to have them. I ask, why? They had WMDs as early as the 1920's, how is it impossible for them to have had them as late as 2002? Did they suddenly become incapable of weilding anything more destructive than a caveman's club? You offer no evidence to the contrary, and in fact I can find numerous books by recognised experts on the region that make claims to the opposite.

Where's your proof?

As a followup to the accusations that the Bush Administration was the source of the claim that Iraq had WMDs, the following article on CanadaFreePress.com has more evidence to the contrary.

bi: I was more rebutting the common misconception that the Bush Administration was the original source of the claim that Iraq had WMDs more than I was responding directly to the particular Slashdot poster's false claims.

It's interesting that you bring up Hans Blix. As has been noted by every director of the UNSCOM (including Blix himself), Iraq has had a history of being uncooperative with the weapons inspectors. Suddenly this changed in 2003.

It could be argued that it was because Iraq had finally finished getting rid of / dismantling their WMDs/programs and no longer had anything to hide, and I think this argument is plausable.

haruspex says "Gosh, just maybe they cooperated because they didn't want their country destroyed?"

I think that's another very good theory - I'm sure Iraq was confidant that the United States would likely invade by that point.

Anyways, back to bi's assessment that Bush had other motives for invading Iraq other than the WMDs, I am inclined to agree.