Morals, Ethics, and Religion
Thunk of the day: “While it is useful for religion to inform our morals, it is a slippery slope for it to inform a society’s ethics (and by effect, laws).”
Not profound, but relevant in a society that is vigorously debating gay marriage.
Syndicated 2012-10-15 19:06:42 from Smart (sort of) Pointers
Programming Editors (also some customer service kudos)
I’m a particular individual; a creature of habit. Especially in matters of computers, cooking, and my home, I can get a bit snippy when things do not work reliably and predictably. For the last couple years, I’ve been developing software professionally at Microsoft. The culmination of my efforts (and many others’) will be released on October 26th, 2012 to the general public as “Windows 8″, the most significant change to the flagship Microsoft product since Windows 95.
During those two and a half years, I’ve jumped around from editor to editor, trying to find one that suited my needs. I started with Emacs which I became a fan of during college as an intern at Google. After time, that wore on me as pinky cramp set in and my own inability to convince myself to learn e-lisp. Then I tried Visual Studio for a while but it has its own set of challenges with respect to developing for Windows. Additionally, I’ve never enjoyed using an IDE (as opposed to an editor) to develop C++. I find languages like C++ which were designed before the modern concept of an IDE existed tend to integrate poorly with an IDE anyway. Sublime Text 2 offered a good compromise where folders represent “projects” which worked well with the build system I am accustomed to. Unfortunately, lack of any contextual tagging (Intellisense) proved to be a hindrance as I had to continually use grep and a code indexing service to search for context and follow code flow.
The editors I iterated over earlier were just the ones I used for longer than a trial period. I also played with several commercial editors in the process but was put off by their high price. The short list of these was Lugaru Epsilon (proprietary Emacs clone), Source Insight, UltraEdit, and finally Visual SlickEdit. Most of these editors run at least $100, with SlickEdit being on the higher end at $300. Of the proprietary solutions I tried, it seemed the most promising and powerful. It was clearly designed with scale in mind but at a great cost. It is Visual SlickEdit which is the actual point of the title of this post.
As we finished up Windows 8, I decided it was time to re-evaluate my tool choice again. In reflection, I recall spending a lot of time trying to understand how various code bases worked and navigating around in a web browser to follow references was tedious. Source Insight was able to handle the huge code base that I work in, building the proper contextual tagging I needed, but received such limited updating that it was no longer able to properly cope with heavily templatized C++ code. Given this realization, I could pony up and pay for a more robust editor or continue struggling with my half-assed solution where my editor has zero contextual information about the file I’m editing.
I reinstalled SlickEdit 2012 two weeks ago, and went to work on a couple bugs. After getting it setup properly with the code base and delving into the inner workings of the OLE Clipboard code base, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was for me to navigate around. The first time I tried out SlickEdit, I was not working in such gnarly code and was unable to fully appreciate the depth of its power. I setup a few custom key strokes to streamline my workflow and left the remaining key commands in their default CUA-style layout.
Two weeks with the editor passed quickly, with myself feeling like I had accomplished a great deal more with it than I would have in my former workflow. SlickEdit had sold me with their trial. After receiving the courtesy reminder email from Sean (the customer service rep assigned to me), I thought briefly about it and determined that SlickEdit was worth $300. I emailed Sean, asking for a quote with a discount since I was using a competing product to theirs (Source Insight). He promptly emailed back a discounted price and offered to give me a call to settle the final details. During this exchange over roughly 18 hours, my trial license expired before the licensing department at SlickEdit had finished getting my license sorted out. Sean was kind enough to email me a trial extension license to allow me to continue working. All in all, very impressed.
The thing that really got me with SlickEdit was…
In traditional ebaynese review language: A++++++++++++++++++++++++ service. Fast shipping, would buy again!!!!!!!!!!
Syndicated 2012-10-15 03:35:13 from Smart (sort of) Pointers
MacBook
So, in my infinite wisdom and grace managed to slap a cup of water onto my 6-month old ThinkPad last Thursday. To say this was a bother, is well… an understatement. I did all the necessary precautionary things like shutting it down, pulling out the battery, dismantling it and generally just trying to take care of it.
However, I did need some files off of it so I let it dry out for a few hours, booted it up (was kinda surprsed it did), then proceeded to copy off those files I needed. In the mean time, I was stuck sharing a laptop with the girlfriend which was not really a good setup as I tend to customize everything to my liking.
All the while, I had been secretly wishing that I had a Mac of some sort. I’ve started to get into more development that would be made easier by using Mac, I was tired of fighting with Linux for a half-assed *nix solution on a laptop, and the Windows CLI just isn’t good enough.
Which brings us to Friday night, when I bought a MacBook. Basic White model, the new one though with 802.11 a/b/g/n and the Nvidia 9400m graphics chipset. I’m loving it. Its an excellent computer. Its nice to have a decent command line interface and now that I’ve got it configured the way I like it, I’m not sure I’ll willingly use any other hardware for laptops at least.
Hopefully though, my ThinkPad will recover and then I can give it to my dad to use. That would be nice. Hopefully 
Genend Update
The server that I was running the computations hard locked sometime during the winter break. Apparently it ran out of disk space while another user was running simulations on it. Wasn’t able to access the machine till I returned to Miami.
Since I had no access to machine with large amounts of memory, I spent some time trying to figure out what was wrong with the training software. Still wasn’t able to find the problem, must be missing something simple.
Upon return to Miami, did the following:
Next things to do:
Ruby…
In the past I’ve vehemently argued against using Ruby. My encounters with it had shown a shoddy VM, decent libraries but my greatest grievance was the lack of any clear standard. It was really just whatever Matz felt like, or at least that was my understanding. Others may correct me if I’m wrong.
Despite my distaste for Ruby I always sensed that at some point I would pick it up when it became clear that the language was stabilizing, the VM was ready for the big leagues and when I actually had some time to make sure my past encounters weren’t just issues of my own ignorance (which I’m prone to as much as anyone else).
That said, I am picking up some Ruby now and am enjoying it. Unlike most these days, my primary interest wasn’t in Rails/Merb or I guess what is now “Rails 3″ but rather _why’s Shoes framework. I have long been irritated by GUI programming. In almost every language it feels incredibly… unwieldy (I think thats the word I want to use). It seemed as though no matter the language and how graceful it generally is to work with, there were always things that made its GUI toolkit interfaces ugly to work with.
Shoes on the other hand has been quite enjoyable. Its minimal and still has a ways to go but in a couple days I was able to learn enough Ruby and enough of how the Shoes framework works to write a pretty simple application to solve a long-standing issue that my mother has had with trying to copy her music to her MP3 player. She’s not well suited to navigating multiple Windows Explorer windows and copy/pasting her way to victory. With that, I wrote a really simple Shoes app that basically shows two panes, the “all the music you have” pane and the “music thats on your MP3 player” pane. It only shows files not already on her MP3 player so you just click the file you want and it will “move” the file in the window to the other pane as well as actually copying the file.
If anyone is interested in this brain dead app, I’ll post it later once I’ve attached all the license information for it, etc.
Vista Media Streaming
I recently built a new media center PC. I’ve wanted one for a while along with also wanting a computer that would be capable of playing the “Latest and Greatest” computer games. The specs looks something like this:
Obviously not the best computer on the market but it can play Fallout 3 on Ultra High settings and I can’t seem to really slow it down. I anticipate an upgrade this summer whenever the novelty of the Phenom II chip comes down a bit. This new computer fits both niches nicely though I did find an interesting caveat with streaming my recorded TV to other computers in the house.
I don’t always like to be in the study watching TV, partly because my Dad works in there as well so unless its fairly late at night I can’t watch things I’ve recorded. In these cases I head to my room with my laptop. My laptop has Vista Enterprise on it and it immediately picked up the media sharing of my desktop/htpc.
However whenever I tried to play an episode of Southpark I found I was only getting audio, no video output whatsoever. My first suspicion was that the files were to big to be transferring over wireless at a rate that would transfer video but after thinking about that a moment I realized that was idiotic as it would have shown the video in some choppy fashion.
After some cryptic searching on Google I found that I was missing the DScaler MPEG Filter for Windows Media Player. After installing this codec, I was getting video playback fine. It seems odd to me that with all this media sharing between the different computers that Vista does so well that it doesn’t include the codecs to playback the PVR files recorded by Vista Ultimate or Home Premium.
So with that, I make a humble request to the group in charge of Media Center or the Media Codecs (in fact the team I’ll be on next summer as an Intern):
Dear Future Employer:
Will you please include this codec on all versions of the operating system in the future. It would make life a lot nicer for those of us not using the same version of Windows on all our computers. Kthxbai.
With love,
Your humble (future) minion
To Do for December 2008 - Revisited
This is my brief todo list for December 2008 revisited, also known as the first vacation I’ve had since I started college.
There are probably other things that should be on here… like my senior project work. I suspect I’ll start that Tuesday as tomorrow is my birthday and I will be eating and drinking merrily.
To Do for December 2008
This is my brief todo list for December 2008, also known as the first vacation I’ve had since I started college.
Archaea Classification Continued
After having thoroughly examined the code for a couple days and tried the code with replacement of fragments, I’ve convinced myself that the code is correct. After thinking about it, it occured to me that the relative k-mer distribution profiles for larger k-mers (7,8,9) might be skewed by even very small sampling without replacement.
I went ahead and took the difference between the relative distributions for Pyrobaculum calidifontis for 4 different cases:
Genend Update 2.33421
Still having problems loading full data sets into memory for Bacteria + Archaea genomes. Need to come up with a good way to do this with the 67/80/90% runs. Right now, I can only do it with Archaea.
The results for the run strike me as being somewhat odd. You’ll see below…
Despite having gone over the algorithm repeatedly I’ve been unable to find a fault in it. As near as I can tell its doing exactly what I thought it should be. I thought it was odd that the results for 3-6mers are about the same despite training more or less (training 50% showed almost identical results as well). The oddest thing is that the results drop off after peaking at either 6-mer or 7-mer. Thats the part that makes no sense to me. I’m not sure what to make of it.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious. I’ll switch to something else for a bit and come back to it.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
