Fortune is Fated — a short story
Once a long time ago (2003) I took an English course to satisfy UCLA’s bureaucratic notions that I should have a ‘well-rounded’ education. As part of this course we read short stories, and were required to write a mini-essay each…
Godel and Atheism
I was going through a saved home directory from a HD that died a couple years back, and found this piece, which deserves to be saved. The file it came from is dated Mar 8 2004. (if it looks like…
The Designer’s Task
I usually really enjoy having to design a computer application. Lately I’ve been trying to design a multithreaded server that’ll process image frames from a video. Right, that’s MPI, Network and video decoding all rolled into one. Decoding video into…
The Importance of Good Documentation
This entire past week I’ve been reading about the MPEG-2 specs. I’ve got some video files that have KLV data stored in the user_data extension of the MPEG stream. So, right off the bat, I tried using ffmpeg‘s avcodec library….
Do it Yourself!
The phrase “Do it yourself!” can either be a dismissive command that indicates the speaker doesn’t wish to be bothered, or an empowering personal philosophy. All the great geniuses of history were avid proponents of personal independence in thought, word…
Printed Circuits
My laptop broke, so I took it apart to see what was wrong (a personality trait developed in early childhood). All signs point to a hardware problem, one that I’m incapable of fixing. This situation is absolutely galling. Like most…
Scope Resolution
I purchased myself a really nice Christmas present: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming. So far it has been a really nice read. Though I’m not familiar with the Mozart/Oz system that’s used (and conceptually developed) throughout the book,…