Monthly Archives: October 2008

Whittling a knife

Debra and I spent last weekend with our friends at their property near Ranger, TX.  We spent two days just kicking back and relaxing:  reading, talking, and playing with the camp fire.  I took my sharpening stone and three different … Continue reading

Posted in Carving | 1 Comment

Optimizing the wrong thing

Today I was building a custom hash table implementation and needed a function that, given a number X, would find the next prime number that is equal to or greater than X.  Since X could be pretty large—on order of … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | 1 Comment

Copying large files on Windows

Warning:  copying very large files (larger than available memory) on Windows will bring your computer to a screeching halt. Let’s say you have a 60 gigabyte file on Computer A that you wish to copy to Computer B.  Both Computer … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Idiocy | 5 Comments

Hardware Problems

I’ve mentioned before that we use removable drives to transfer data between the data center and the office. Some of those files are very large—50 gigabytes or larger. The other day we discovered an error in one of the files … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment

Bailout, Again

Congress never ceases to amaze me.  Following the unexpected defeat of the measure on Monday, the Senate decided to take a crack at writing something that could pass.  The Senate’s technique was nothing short of brilliant.  Rather than debating the … Continue reading

Posted in Finance | 1 Comment

What is the problem?

Since Paulson, Bernanke, and Company aren’t forthcoming with layman’s explanations , I thought I’d take a little closer look at the problem to see if I could understand what’s happening here. What I found is that the problem is very … Continue reading

Posted in Finance | Comments Off