Whittling a knife

By Jim, on October 29th, 2008%

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 knives that I’d been neglecting for too long.

After putting an edge on my old . . . → Read More: Whittling a knife

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Carving

Optimizing the wrong thing

By Jim, on October 16th, 2008%

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 one trillion—I knew that done in a naive way, it could take a long time . . . → Read More: Optimizing the wrong thing

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Programming

Copying large files on Windows

By Jim, on October 14th, 2008%

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 A and Computer B have 16 gigabytes of memory.  Assuming that you have the network . . . → Read More: Copying large files on Windows

5 comments - (Comments are closed)   Computers, Idiocy

Hardware Problems

By Jim, on October 6th, 2008%

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 that we had here at the office. The original copy at the data center was . . . → Read More: Hardware Problems

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Computers

Bailout, Again

By Jim, on October 2nd, 2008%

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 need for the measure and perhaps rewriting provisions to make it more palatable, they did . . . → Read More: Bailout, Again

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Finance

What is the problem?

By Jim, on October 1st, 2008%

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 large—potentially catastrophic. I’m also astounded by the hubris that got us into this mess, but . . . → Read More: What is the problem?

Comments are closed   Finance