_6502_

Ok... let's go

2009-04-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

The final beta test phase of the online chess playing site I developed just started and, thanx to some incredible work of word spreading, we've 100+ players that registered for this phase.
The site is www.area64.it and it has been implemented in Python (server side and tools) and haXe with flash 8 code generation for the interface.
It supports playing, analysis rooms, voice chat, 2d or 3d board, custom colors, personal infos with picture uploading and more...

So far the response has been quite good, bugs are not that many and who entered got a very good impression. Also all of the ones I've been talking to agree with me that playing with someone with a certified identity is WAY better than playing an anonymous nickname.
My hope is that the certified identity will help people behave more socially and also will allow me to ban for good who for example can't avoid insulting the opponent.

We'll see...

Ugly hacks, nice hacks

2009-03-01T01:40:00.001-08:00

I'm translating a small python module that supports some chess intelligence generation into C++ because the speed is becoming a problem (when interfacing a digital board I need to do some search to guess what is the move that has been played and this includes looking one or two moves ahead and one move behind - that is moves that could have been played instead of the last move played).

The translation went fine so far with an almost 1-1 lines of code ratio between the two languages (not a surprise, given the problem) but I got a couple of surprises...

The bug

To check if a position cannot be win by either player I had to check whether two remaining bishops on the board were covering the same squares or not (that is if they were both light-square bishops or both dark-squares bishops or if they were covering the whole board).

This is needed because if there are two opposite-square-colors bishops on the board then a checkmate is still possible.

The code looked like this


if bc == 2 and nc == 0:
bp = [i for i, x in enumerate(pz) if x == BISHOP]
if (bp[1] - bp[0]) % 2 == 0:
    # Just two bishops both dark squares or both light squares
    return "material"

nc and bc are the number of knights and bishops on the board (pawns, rooks and queens are already known to be absent at this point). The board is represented using an array of 120 elements (12x10 representation) but it would be the same using an 8x8 approach... the bug is that just using the index "i" to check odd-even property is not correct, and "i//10 + i" should have been used instead. This shined apparent to me just by reading the code... however this code passed the tests because the test cases were all having the bishops on ranks with an even distance.
Now that I'm writing this post I also realize that there's even another bug at an higher logical level... it doesn't matter how many bishops are there: if they're all covering the same squares the checkmate is trivially impossible. It's not a 100% genuine bug because if the function returns a non-empty string then the position is impossible to win, but the converse is not true and it would be quite hard to fulfill such a contract.

Morale ? If it works is just because you didn't look closely enough.

The hack

In the same code I couldn't resist changing the handling of en-passant from


if x1 == self.epsq:
 if np == WHITE+PAWN:
     # White en-passant capture
     self.board[x1+10] = EMPTY
 elif np == BLACK+PAWN:
     # Black en-passant capture
     self.board[x1-10] = EMPTY
if np == WHITE+PAWN and x1 - x0 == -20:
 # White double push
 self.epsq = x0 - 10
elif np == BLACK+PAWN and x1 - x0 == 20:
 # Black double push
 self.epsq = x0 + 10
else:
 self.epsq = -1


if ((np & PIECE) == PAWN)
{
 if (x1 == epsq)
     // En-passant capture
     board[x1 - (((x1-x0)>>4)*20+10)] = EMPTY;
 if (abs(x1-x0) == 20)
     // Double push
     epsq = x0 + (x1-x0)/2;
 else
     epsq = -1;
}

The C++ version is much more compact, but in the first part relies on a "trick" that for sure would look quite obscure for who reads the code... what the hell is "(((x1-x0)>>4)*20+10)" ?
The trick is that I know that the move was legal, so if a pawn goes to the en-passant square it must have been an en-passant capture and so the delta (x1 - x0) was either -9, -11, +9 or +11 depending on the color of the player. Then "(x1 - x0)>>4" is just the -1 if delta is negative or 0 otherwise; with "*20+10" and "x1 -" gets to the square where the captured double-pushed pawn was sitting.
Why do I think this trick is nice ? That's a good question...

I'll add a comment as a partial excuse to the poor future reader (which will probably be myself) :-)

Back to running

2009-02-22T03:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a wonderful sunny day I was able to defeat my laziness to go out for a nice run. It was long I wasn't running outdoor and I've also been skipping quite a few times the treadmill downstairs where I was supposed to run half an hour at least three times a week (ok ... quite a bit more than a few times...).

So I've been a coward and took it easy by not running the usual one-hour path but stopping instead short of that to turn back toward home. Everything was fine except a bit of ankle pain on the left foot near the end of the run.

Surprisingly enough I met only three other runners and a guy on a bicycle... I would have expected to meet much more than that given the nice sunny Sunday (I think my record is meeting about 20 or so people down that path).

Apparently sometimes nothing is better than something

2009-02-19T03:31:00.000-08:00

Phew!

The turney is over and I'm getting back to my normal routine. On 13-14-15 February we organized the first International Chess Tournament of Vigevano, with 120 players from all over the world including 8 GMs.
The turney itself was ok, except for the usual delay at the first round everything went smoothly and as an arbiter I had to tell something just in a few occasions...

From a software point of view instead most worked ok, including a few patches I made in the few minutes I found. Unfortunately the first round - because of the delay - started when I wasn't ready yet so I had to start the DGT boards when the games were already started, so I decided to just show on the big screens the positions and not the moves; for the other rounds instead the play zone screens were showing both the positions, moves and clocks.

We also found one of the DGT clocks to be defective (it wasn't sensing the clock button that players are required to press at every move) so the 5th board was shown without players remaining time.

A the tournament I was also asked if what was visible on the screens could have been published also on the web. I wasn't expecting this and hacking it at the moment has been a bad decision for a few reasons

What was shown on the big screens was indeed an HTML page but I tested it only on FireFox and actually I even used a few images for figurine notation that were rescaled exactly so they could look right at the resolution/magnification I was using on the big screens. I didn't try it at all with any other browser or any other resolution.
Of course it turns out that a self-refreshing HTML page is absolutely terrible on IE because of flashing and because it loses the scroll position (ok... IE - no matter if 5 6 or 7 - is a total crap as a browser for a jillion reasons, but still a lot of internet users for some strange reason stick to it, so anthing published on the internet - unfortunately - should be made to work also with that thing). Also someone using XP was still unable to see the small PNG i used for the figurine notation and was instead seeing just black squares (!).
I simply added an "os.system('pscp postion.html ....');" line to put the updated file on a web server, but I was directly replacing the file being served by apache. The file was rather "big" (35k) so the upload was not instantaneous and what happened is that who was observing the game from the internet could get an incomplete HTML file. An even bigger problem was that the if file was not even complete to the "http-equiv refresh" line then the partial - totally blank - file would stuck on the browser of the observer forever.
I fixed this only the second day by uploading with pscp to another location and then calling a cgi script to move the file to the correct position.
The program I wrote was for showing the first 4 games in the playing area, not for publishing it on the internet, so a few "features" like figurines instead of letters were indeed "anti-features" for who was observing from a PC (with letters you could copy-n-paste in a chess program). Also the game shown was not complete for layout reasons and there was no provision for downloading the PGN of the game. Moreover it wasn't possible to go back and forth on the moves or to see just one board instead of all five of them.

All these things were nonsense for showing in the playing zone (in the room there was no reload problem ... the local file was correctly written and moved in place; and there's no mouse for who is looking at the screen so no interactive feature makes any sense at all) but made the experience for who was accessing that from the internet quite less than optimal.

What I realized only later after reading some comments was that it would have been better not showing anything at all on the internet...

So apparently sometimes nothing is better than something...

Now I'm working on a better flash-based interface for publishing the games online and hopefully I should be able to provide a better experience for viewers of the Bergamo tournament next month.

Learning LISP

2009-02-08T00:19:00.000-08:00

I'm halfway reading Practical Common Lisp and I'm now beginning to understand a few points about LISP that were not that clear. First of all what are those famous macros and why they're so powerful. I always had the gut feeling that C++ template machinery was not good, it is a different language with a lot of limitations and even doing things like loops or ifs is not impossible but very very hard; not only template debugging is difficult but even reports about syntax errors are so bad that they look like a joke.
LISP macros can do the same as C++ templates (and more), however the language is LISP itself (if, loops, opening files... you can do whatever you need to do "compile time").
I am experimenting with a macro "defentity" that given for example


(defentity simple-point point
  (coords point))

(defentity circle line
  (center point)
  (radius float))

defines two classes, the classes "simple-point" and "circle". The center of a circle entity is a reference to a point entity and this generates a dipendence. When I change the coordinates of a point I want that all the geometry of dependent entities (for example circles that are referencing that point as center) to be invalidated.

I'm still working on it but I already got something working. The defined classes are regular CLOS classes with added "dirty" fields for invalidated geometry, cached results and accessors that do the required recursive "touching" of dependent entities on write operations. Changing referred entities, destruction and link removal is implemented (so when destroying a point all entities depending on it will be notified and given the possibility to remove the link instead of being also destroyed).

Making the same using templates with C++ would be IMO just impossible. Making the same with python would be easy (we did) but keeping much of the logic at runtime. Moving it at compile time with python would be possible but IMO a lot harder (and without much gain indeed).
With C++ a reasonable solution would be using a code generator (written e.g. in PERL) that generates the C++ code needed.

I'm trying the LISP way and so far looks promising...

Python dropped the clear distinction of compile-time and run-time as class and function definition are indeed executable statements; LISP moved further by dropping also the parse-time separation because thanks to macros even the parsing of the source is more or less an executable statement.

Amazing this thing is still working

2009-02-08T00:03:00.001-08:00

I haven't touched this blog in three years but still this thing is apparently working ok. Quite long time ago i decided to give up with my internet presence because spare time is so scarce and I had to choose what to drop and what to keep. I decided for keeping piano playing, exercising, learning, chess playing and of course coding and a minimum quantity of the so-called "real life" as it's mandated by current society.

A lot of things changed in last three years and I really don't want to bother to list them all (who would care anyway ? :-) ).

Simply I'll try to get back at this blog because ... oh well ... just because.

something new

2006-01-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking for quite a while about where to invest some time studying new stuff (new for me, at least). The reason is that in my opinion a programmer cannot afford to stop learning new things, because our world is changing too quickly. Of course I'm not saying that one should run after every single buzzword, but keeping the habit of learning is IMO very important in general, and vital for a programmer.
I was just about to buy an iMac with dual intel core, for both experimenting programming for a true multiprocessor and for looking at OSX; I stopped mainly for a quite stupid reason... apparently there's no way to get the video output of my Windows XP into the iMac screen, so my choices were either to find space for the iMac in addition to what's already on my desk (impossible) or to work on XP just using VNC (that's no life). Oh... and 1700 euros were sort of a stopper too :-)
So I went for a cheaper solution... I'll invest time on linux, and I mean on linux as my only desktop system at home. I installed a Debian distribution and so far I'm quite happy with it; I got my NVidia card working with hw acceleration under X, a nice desktop (KDE), all peripherals working (including the video capture) and even win32 quasi-emulation (I compiled a win32 app I'm working on using bcc55/wine!). CVS/SVN and dvd playing, r/w access to my XP partition, firefox, thunderbird, VLC... everything is ok or almost ok. I had to pay basically nothing (just the work of freeing my very old 16gb HD with win98, and the risk of seeing what happens when XP boots from a secondary IDE HD). Now I've just to look for a replacement of the few applications I use (e.g. chess software, ms works). I'll need of course to use XP every now and then, and the solution is now changing the boot device in the bios.
One keyboard, one screen, two worlds.

i want email back

2006-01-10T23:10:00.000-08:00

The situation is getting absurd. I had been reported about this problem at work a couple of times but there the email traffic is huge, and some mistake every now and then may be should be expected. But my email traffic is ridiculous, and yet last night I got once again two private email bounced because of antispam and for reasons that make no sense.
Why does the world allow to idiots like (just for example) hotmail sys admins to throw away legitimate mail ? Why are idiots like them destroying the usefulness of the email service and no one is doing anything to try to save it ?
This makes me think that to make real progress IT is going to need to abandon the barbarian state that currently it lives in, to enter a social state. A condition where if you do a mistake you pay.
If a plumber even *unintentionally* does a mess with your bath tub and you get your carpet wet you can sue him to get a refund; but if an idiot but self-declared IT expert destroys your email *intentionally* the only thing you can do is moving to another provider so *may be* you'll be able from there to get your email through.
Freedom is something different.

new year, new color; but why ?

2006-01-01T08:55:00.000-08:00

Here we go. I decided to start 2006 with a brand new color for my homepage. I also added a specific section with my piano recordings (including a fake one!).

I always had a problem in finishing the musical pieces I start to study; for long I thought the reason was me losing interest once I saw that I could do it. However there is a very big difference between starting something and actually finishing it; but it's hard to push back the stupid question "why doing it" that keeps popping out all the time. "Why" is a question that has no answer; wasting time asking "why" is stupid as to any answer you can add another "ok, but why ?" in an endless sequence that takes nowhere. The key intelligent question is "How ?". That question doesn't rise an infinite chain of stupid questions because at a certain point you just do it.
How to do 3d graphics ? How to do video compression ? How to do text compression ? How to solve a quintic ? Those are meaningful questions.

So why I keep asking myself stupid questions ? :-)

ahhhhh... so I was right!

2005-12-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

I always had this strange gut feeling that pure drawinism wasn't going to be an acceptable explanation for our world. I agree that in theory it could work, but I was never able to believe that the results we observe in nature could be justified from a numeric point of view only by natural selection. With this I mean that in my opinion natural selection simply couldn't have enough strength to make the human body (just for example) such an impressive machine.
Recently when my mother had a thrombosis problem I discovered things about how our blood works that I didn't know. Just the explanation of how our body reacts to an injury trying to prevent the losing of too much blood is impressive. Just that little bit is incredibly sophisticated and requires a very precise equilibrium... too much of a value and your blood is going to coagulate when there's no injury, and you die; a value too low and your body will not be able to stop losing blood from a little cut and you also die. Thinking that such a perfection comes by mere natural section doesn't seem to me reasonable.
Yesterday I stumbled in a page that explained that exactly the machinery required to coagulate our blood when needed is a part that is hardly justifiable by natural selection. It's a chain reaction of activations of proteins where no mistake and no misregulation is allowed, and so it's hard to justify how such a system could have been evolving one step after another because in that system you can't change just one variable, you have to change several at the same time to keep the balance. In other words the idea that the system has been reached by casual mutations that produced a sequence of organisms every one better than the previous one simply doesn't work; the intermediate ones would have been not better, and so they've no reason to survive. I don't know if I like the position of Intelligent Design (even if admittedly would make things a lot easier to explain; especially if you don't make the big jump of assuming the existence of a god but just that of someone - necessarily non-human, but not necessarily super-human - that is directing or has been directing the evolution) but I'm happy to see that at least to someone else the pure theory of evolution doesn't seem plausible.
Another doubt I always had since I was a kid is about glacial periods, I wonder if indeed even that area is seriously under discussion.

where is the common sense ?

2005-12-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Today I downloaded a program that allows you to design reports with data extracted from an SQL database. About 600MBytes. Then the received file was indeed just self-extracting itself in a setup directory of roughly another 600MBytes. Then from this second directory you can install the program that it takes around 600 MBytes.
Oh... and just after downloading the file (only minutes later) you may want to download the service pack 1... about 140Mb.
I'm the only one that finds this just outrageous ?
Why downloading a program that then unzips in a bunch of files that then can be used for setup? Is this passage really needed ? Why asking your users to download a big outdated program from the site and then asking them to download another big chunk of corrections ? wouldn't be better to have just the version patched on the first download ? And the size itself of the program is IMO an offense to the art of programming.

Bah.

dad's back to the hospital

2005-10-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life sucks. My dad has been following the diet almost perfectly and indeed the diabet last year looked under much better control. But apparently he had another serious problem and now he's back to the hospital with blood pockets attached to his body. Be nice and do your part, and you'll be run over by a truck anyway.
There must be a reason if they said that the most important thing is being healthy.

i know who i won't vote for

2005-10-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not really into politics; but the last day I almost involuntarily listened to Romano Prodi talking on TV. First of all it was, or it was supposed to be, a popular protest against the financing law and the electoral law but was indeed just a showcase for red flags and an electoral spot for Prodi; almost nothing was said in the specific about the two issues that were supposed to be the reason for the protest.
What it was really shocking for me was however that only one message was clear... they hate Berlusconi and every single thing the current government made: the situation is dramatic and is getting worse every single minute and it's all a fault of the current government. Nothing, literally nothing, was proposed as an alternative. They never said what they would have done if being in charge... Prodi just stopped to the much easier position of "they did it wrong". Is such a pathetic non-program enough to win ? I hope not... I think not.

But this is Italy...

i hate mondays

2005-10-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

... or, actually, I think Mondays hate me

my idea was to start the week with a positive mindset but even from the very moment I woke up I knew everything wasn't going to be perfect. It was raining like hell, and it was also damn cold in my house. Ok... it happens. While having breakfast the TV forecast said the bad weather will last until next weekend. Yay! My sneezing made me realize I'm not going to be 100% operative. My original plan was to subscribe to the swimming pool this week, but it would mean just waste a week... so I decided to postpone the subscription.
Then, with still some residual positive mindset, I went down to the box to pick up the car. I was just a bit late, as usual, not something I like but I think that counting how late I stay at work no one will even think about. Flat tire. Double Yay!. It wasn't even the same tire that gave me problems in the past... So I replaced the tire with the emergency one (getting dirty has as one can get) and drove to the tire shop. There I told them what happened and also about the other tire that slowly deflates continuously (it was used to take around 8/10 days to get to the point of being visibly deflated). That, and the current situations of the tires, made me decide to change them all. 220 euros. Triple yay!
I got to work one hour and half late on my usual late schedule, and it wasn't a really wonderful workday (but not that bad either). When coming home I burnt the topping for my pasta (and I burnt it after removing it from the fire just because I left it in the pan and took care of the cat that decided it was a nice moment to go to its bathroom - hint, if you've a persian long hair cat then try to avoid feeding it with food that implies almost liquid feces). Yay... overcooked pasta with just olive oil as topping.
When driving back to work I was kind of in a hurry... and I saw a flash on my rear mirror. It was raining as hell, of course, so *may be* it was just a lightning at distance... but I wouldn't be surprised to discover I got yesterday the first autovelox ticket in my life: I've heard it's becoming more and more common to use those devices in town and not only on extratown streets. I'm really looking forward in the mailbox for the ticket.

I hate mondays, and I'm going to spend on mondays roughly 1/7 of my life...

music time

2005-09-18T02:18:00.000-07:00

I decided to refresh a bit the who-am-I section in my homepage and even added a first recording from my piano to it. The recording is supposed to be Chopin waltz op 64/2, and excluding a few evident absences it should have almost all notes in it and the extra ones shouldn't be that many.
Once the notes are ok I'll try to work on the playing :-))

the world is not so bad

2005-09-18T01:53:00.000-07:00

When coming back from my vacation I lost my wallet on the train; I'm not sure if it fell in the crowded aisle of the train or if I indeed forgot it on the seat (I'd say the former, but being me I can't exclude the latter). Anyway I had everything in it, my credit card, a couple of cash cards, my driving license, ID, other cards and a somewhat big amount of cash (about 400 euros).

When, at home, I realized I didn't have it I immediately blocked the cards as I thought that someone stolen it in that aisle... well... it turned out that someone that didn't even leave enough information to be reached gave it to the police at the central station in Milan and so the very next day I was able to get back all my stuff, including all the cash!

Also given that it took me more than an hour to get it back from the police I suppose that even for just giving it to them that person had to spend some time providing explanations for the official record. Add to this that the train I was in was also half an hour late on the schedule and that the evening was approaching (the train arrived in the central station after 8pm; as you probably understand the central station in Milan is really not the best place to stay in the evening) and you'll probably agree that I've certainly to say a *big* thankyou to who gave me back my stuff.

This world is not so bad after all...

vacation time!

2005-08-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for my yearly week vacation at the chess tourney of Imperia. Last year I prepared a lot for the tourney and (with some luck) won my division; it was also the first time I won a tourney. This year I did basically nothing... so it's gonna to be a quite terrible performance :-D
I actually don't care much... it's more just sleeping a bit more, going around in a nice place near the sea and getting very good even is somewhat excessive food for a week. I also decided I won't go running every morning this year; I'll just chill out a bit more.

I finally finished Chopin waltz op 64/2 and I just started looking at nocturne op 9/1. It actually looks much harder than I thought by hearing the piece: the dreamy out of time part for the right hand is accompanied by left hand broken chords I can barely take; I've no idea if with exercise I'll be able to get them easy enough to forget about them and have them playing themselves... we'll see.
Also I didn't notice hearing the piece the acciaccatura with a two octave and half interval. I actually wonder what that really means; for what I know I'd say that such a thing is impossible to play for a human being...

you lose!

2005-08-22T01:22:00.000-07:00

Whoops... in the second competition on TopCoder I slipped badly and fell on my back. I only "solved" the two easy problems but the first solution had a off-by-one error ('<' instead of '<=') and in the second I was way too slow.
Actually it was shocking to see how many failed the first problem and not by off-by-one errors like I did but with true broken logic (missing cases) or doing redundant illogical tests (that didn't harm, however... melius abundare quam deficere has never been my view in programming, but apparently it pays off).
It was anyway fun... I want more of those :-). There's also an italian that performed extremely well (about the time taken to complete the "easy" tests... even if it's one of the many cases of pointless checks).
On the second problem I was lucky to have it actually correct. I implemented a working solution, but slowly and an horrible one compared to a few cooler ones I saw. Do this kind of sloppy reasoning in a more complex problem and the 2-secs limit on running time will look like as unsormountable barrier.

It's a pity the online competitions happen at those strange times, but this is what we pay for not living all in the same place. Many italians I know wouldn't be able to compete just because of that problem and the schedule is a problem for me too even if I work close to where I live.

I hope Pisky (the only surviving italian in TCO05) can make it further... he won also $75. From now he'll have a thougher path, including the need to put an alarm at 2.30am to compete (!).

The kind of round that we faced however is exactly what I wouldn't like about real programming. Easy problems and you've to code them in a hurry; and even if the solution is ugly from all points of views, if it works then it's ok. Exactly favoring "do it badly but do it now"; what I think is an horrible philosophy.

There was also an interesting hard problem... i wasn't able to complete it on time and it was probably even more complex than I thought as only 11 of about 650 partecipants were able to provide a working solution.

fight!

2005-08-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mines introduced me to the world of pure programming competitions on TopCoder. I'm not really the fight-at-all-costs type, but I've to say that I like the idea. I tend most often to see the battle (in chess, or in karate, or now in programming) as a fight against imperfection more than as fight against someone else, but I regretfully discovered that looking at standings to see where I ended up is an important part.
May be indeed that in addition to a fight against imperfection there is a component that is the fight against all others, a fight for distinction (but never a fight against someone specific; even in chess I don't see my opponent as an enemy, and this is probably one of the reasons for which I'm not that good).
Anyway I found myself much weaker than I would have expected ... I need to get better at coding (deep inside I know I'm #1 hehehe).
There are parts of TopCoder that I don't like but still it looks to me a wonderful system and a pretty cool way to exercise. It's not like real coding, of course, but I think it's good. A lot of the emphasis is on the speed, but write incorrect code and you are simply out, as you should deserve.
Also it's funny the challenge part where you are allowed to kick out opponents by proving their solution is incorrect (I don't think this happens often, the submitted code will go through a more serious test anyway so there's just no point in submitting a wrong solution - unless you happen to have a fake account and kick it out from a real account to gain points).
I don't like there's no premium for readability and hence the top solutions are sometimes snippets that would get your ass fired being me the one in charge of quality control, but it would be difficult to place an objective measure for readability (readability depends on the reader, probably it's just that I'm too dumb to understand those programs).
Oh... I would have loved to be surprised on another aspect, but it didn't happen. As one could probably guess there is almost no girl even there. It's because of the fight or because of programming ?

better than real ?

2005-08-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

Recently we got a tapis roulant (treadmill) for my mother as the doc told her she should walk at least 3Km per day and she doesn't like the idea of going around like a drone for no reason (except at home I mean).
Of course I ended up giving it a try and I've the impression that running on it is harder than running on the street. I did a 10Km run at 10Km/h and I was really almost dead when finishing (no kidding I was counting the last minutes one by one and telling myself "you can do it.... c'mon! don't give up!").
Actually I'm used to run quite longer at about that speed so this puzzles me... I've no idea if it's the missing of the fresh air flowing in the front of you or if it's being *forced* to keep a constant speed. Anyway I like not having to worry about bad streets any I felt my shoulder and back ok even if I noticed my left knee "feeling" the run a bit at the end anyway.
What was also shocking was the price we paid for it. In the company I work for I think that we wouldn't be able to get such a thing out on the market for five times the price we paid to have it delivered to hour house. Ok the huge numbers they produce in China, ok for the really low labor cost over there... but still there is something that looks wrong to me in that price.

my school is dead :(

2005-08-02T23:33:00.000-07:00

While doing some research for increasing the force of our software department I contacted a few local schools, including the one I got my high school diploma from. At the time that school was very famous and students were coming from distant. I for example was coming from more than 100Km, but there were people coming even from further. In my opinion was a very nice school, with good teachers (oh, well, many of them were good, I mean ;-) ) and good labs; the location is also very nice.
From the lists I got however looks like that in last ten years it lost all of his special qualities, or at least lost all of the students, as the only (few) ones are from very near locations. Probably that is the consequence of the opening of a lot of other schools and of the decision of the parents that traveling shorter is much more important than getting good teachers and good labs.

where are the programmers ?

2005-07-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been asked to find someone to expand our software department, and this turned out to be quite a difficult task. We'd be happy to find someone from our local area (we're looking for someone to become part of our team "forever", the focus has always been on people more than on processes) but apparently programmers are basically non-existent today at least around here. When I say programmers I'm talking about real code... of course it's easy to find someone that self-defines him/herself as a programmer, but for which the only "programming language" is HTML.
I find this quite disappointing, but even worse is the impression I get when looking at the projects made in high school; I keep bouncing in stupid "multimedia projects" that are just HTML and may be some form (wow!). The suspect then becomes that the problem is not that the good ones actually flew away from this place, but that they indeed never existed.

I keep seeing people doing their final thesis at university that in newsgroups about C / C++ ask questions or show code snippets that are by themselves a crystal clear proof they suck *horribly* at writing code. And when they get out of university way too many think that the key is to be able to draw an UML diagram, the rest are boring details for the bozos.

But seems to me that in this picture there's something wrong, high school guys will do the nice websites, and university guys will draw nice powerpoint slides about wonderful projects. But where's the meat ? Who is going to actually write the code ?

huh.... looks like i got older

2005-07-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden I feel very old deep inside. I have all those little pains, I can't sleep well, I forget things. I can't see anything clear without my glasses.
May be this is how one should feel when turning 39 :-). Bah. Sometimes it sucks getting older, but the alternative doesn't look that interesting either.
I started wondering if I'll ever run the New York marathon or not; now I always feel a pain on the side of my left knee after running a few miles.
But something that really made me feeling older was chat I had with a friend. It all started with a discussion about the new electronic piano I bought (an entry-level one, for about 1000 euros; I'm still terrible at the piano and I probably forever will, a 7000 euros piano wouldn't change that) and on how crappy it is (like how crappy is my computer, my graphic card, my shoes, my chair, Chopin and basically my whole life) and right after that I happened to get a chat message that wasn't meant for me... followed by a rather shocking "whoops... oh well, take a look you too... it could help".
The mistyped message was a link to someone that makes strange noises and burns CDs to sell them. I suppose that's meant to be music but I cannot avoid to compare what Chopin (forced to use more or less just twelve frequencies on a percussion instrument) was able to do compared to what that guy can do now with the total exact control of the waveform. The total control in those hands just produced crap. Stinking distilled crap. *THAT* made me feeling older. I'm sure that "music" will be forgot at the speed of light even from the relatives of the author.

Probably what my grandpa thought about rock.

I also felt offended. Really truly offended. Offended only like a very old person can get. I'm not going to get over it without excuses. I'd say this is also a sign I'm old... but indeed I used to get offended easily even when I was a youngster.

ssssssst... keep quiet please...

2005-06-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

I decided to start studying piano again; so the first move was finding the time (my plan is to find one hour per day) and the second move was to get an instrument that would allow me to survive to the anger of neighbors. I already have an acoustic piano, but I'm normally home only at weird hours when playing it would be annoying for the others. One thousand euros for a digital piano with a decent GH keyboard and reasonable piano synthesis. So far I'm happy of it...

May be I'll try to put some recording on the webpage when they'll be good enough to not have people running away screaming in deep disgust :-D

PERL ? what's that ?

2005-05-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

It really surprised me, but I forgot almost all about PERL. After just a few months hacking with Python I do not even remember basic syntax (and I've used PERL for long... even writing non trivial web-based applications that in retrospect do not fit in what I think is PERL target). I was able to get the job done but I had to resort to documentation (and it was a really trivial script to convert a text file with some hex data into a format suitable for importing in excel). I'm just getting old, I suppose.

and i want it NOW

2005-05-03T23:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I watched on history channel the a documentary about the match Kasparov/Deep Blue, and I was impressed by an intermezzo that was added between that show and the next one (that was a biography of Bobby Fischer).
It was a collection of small news of the "Week of Incom" ... something dated 1943 that was sort of a TV news when there was no television yet here in Italy. The week of incom was added before movies and there were newsreports about the war, but also about other aspects like exhibitions, fashion, sport.
I stopped wondering why it's so important for the news to be fresh... even more... for them to be instantaneous. The TV channels are always fighting for who delivers something FIRST, not who delivers the better report. They even get to the absurd level of talking about something they don't have yet the faintest idea... something that may be it won't even deserve a place in the news... even just to be able to say "we'll report about this next in next edition".
Why is this really important ? For some news it's of course important being timely, but I would say not for most of them, especially if you're reporting news from other parts of the world.
May be it's the usual problem of the time resource... time looks so important to every single individual while it's probably the only resource we're not going to run out as a collectivity. Our society gives big prizes to who does it first, not to who does it better. Even if there's a common saying here in italy that goes more or less "well and quickly don't go together" few are the ones that can take their time.

law of committees

2005-04-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

What is the cumulative intelligence of a committee ? I've read somewhere that you can compute a good approximation of it starting from the lowest IQ among the participants and subtracting a 10% for each of them.
Recently in the news I've heard that an european commission forbidden to use wood ovens for cooking and I started believing that 1) the EU commission on this must be huge, 2) that there is at least a not very bright person in it, 3) that the 10% of the law should probably be increased.
Luckily enough on the internet I found that to be an "euromyth", so only the law describing the intelligence of news reporters is playing a role here. Of course in the internet you can find everything, both real and fake, hence I can't tell for sure who is lying and who is telling the truth (I'm way too lazy to investigate further and I can't use common sense to see where the truth is especially because of others real regulations that came out of EU commissions: may be that the regulation outlawing good pizza ovens is not real, but for sure it could have been ... and this is the problem).
Probably a good solution would be to have those journalists talk only about the european commissions, and those EU commissions regulating just journalists; we would end up with a better world.

i got infected

2005-04-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

Yeah, no kidding. And I'm not talking about my computers (they're safe)... I'm talking about my physical body! Recently I've started going to the swimming pool and I kinda like it; after the very early days in which I could barely get to the other side of the pool now I've reached the point in which I can swim for almost as long as I like (not really... but I can do 40 times the swimming pool without stopping, and that is what I normally do in a session).
I'm not a fast swimmer but I also have problems when swimming too slow so I prefer going when the pool isn't too crowded: being like in a traffic jam when swimming is something I really hate. While swimming I think a lot (like when running), but the net result here is that often I forget to count how many times I did the pool and I've to start again.

What I didn't know about swimming pools is this horrible thing of fungus. I've noticed a part of my skin just below my shoulder that changed and that wasn't back to normal after a couple of weeks (so I excluded a temporary irritation). Today I checked the doctor and I've got the bad news. Now I'll have to use a cream for one month to get rid of that uninvited guest.

lovely windows API

2005-04-12T15:12:00.001-07:00

Here we go... after winning a bit of laziness I implemented a windows' version of my mandelbrot zoomer. It's 20K (about 30 times bigger than then DOS version) and does more or less the same thing.... ok... I'm a bit unfair to windows; this new version has a better palette and a better image quality and also it was written in a C/asm mix because I'm way too lazy to write under windows in pure assembler.

NEWS: I've to eat my words about how fat windows executables must be; it turned out that it's the standard C initialization code inserted by default by VC++ that is fat. Removing that initialization code the program size went down to a 16Kb that UPX is able to shrink into less than 5Kb.

two days in the wind of internet

2005-04-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not kidding. The home PC of my boss that I reinstalled from scratch last week is probably already compromised (just my suspect from a few reported symptoms). May be this will cost me the job... but I'm going to refuse to reinstall it again, when it's too much it's too much.

Why can't people sue Microsoft for damages due to design errors (especially when they don't get corrected) ?

Is it really that difficult to make a browser that doesn't give your computer, your money and your daughter to pirates just because you view "malicious" pages ? Can this really be just the consequence of stupidity ?
I've always been on the non-paranoid side... thinking to stupidity instead of a plot; but after reading a few security bulletins I'm starting having doubts. In retrospect is absolutely crystal clear to me that allowing a web page to add a bookmark or change what is the home page of the browser is not something that can happen by mistake of a programmer. It requires work, and a damn stupid deliberate decision.

lovely fractals

2005-04-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I get back on doing very stupid things for no reasons at all. The two last weekends it was trying to code an animated mandelbrot zoomer in assembler using no more than 256 bytes (failing miserably, so far I'm around 600 bytes and I want still to add something). Do I have useful and interesting stuff to do instead of just exercising on pointless code snippets ? Plenty indeed ... but somehow I need to waste time on something completely different.

Probably it's because of all the bad stinking strings attached to the nice stuff I'm asked to do for a living.

Last Friday it was like hell ... guys from the marketing running demos with important customers without trying the machine first. Net result was everyone running around in circles screaming about why things were not working nicely (and, of course, it was something absolutely stupid). Meanwhile the Novell server disk got full right in the middle of some accounting operation... we got corrupted indices and the like so I had to recover from the nightly backup. And as the last Friday drop was the a switch in our LAN that at around 7 pm decided to stop working... which one ? the one in the servers room, of course, so I was forced to replace it immediately because otherwise it was going to be a problem for the night backup jobs.

I've still a couple of hours... may be I'll add antialiasing to my mandelbrot zoomer...

looking for a tunnel

2005-03-26T05:58:00.000-08:00

It's sad to see someone in real big trouble... and it's even worse when you can't think anything that could help. I saw the owner of an local small industry related to shoe production that was terribly afraid of current situation. China is biting big chews on market shares with prices that are just impossible to match; even if someone babbles that quality is not very good that would be anyway just a temporary mitigating factor: I can't think they're all stupid and will not be able to catch on if they're really behind. And even if now there's clearly a form of dumping (you can see here prices that are absolutely unreal even considering their tiny monthly salaries) IMO this is isn't the key issue because their "real" prices would be just as impossible to match even without the currency tricks that are apparently being played by their government.
Also I don't think that having laws for protecting our market is a viable option. To me all this means there's no light at the end of the tunnel for a shoemaker here ... ours shoemakers are all closing because this is the Right Thing for the world. Better looking for another tunnel... this one goes nowhere.

in medio stat virtus

2005-03-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

I recently started playing chess also on www.gameknot.com and I normally play games with time limit of three days per move. I must say that I sort like this kind of chess variation because sometimes I really need a lot of thinking to find a reasonable move and may be I even need a rest before continuing analyzing the same position. Of course I didn't give up playing the other variation of chess I like a lot... bullet chess (i.e. one minute for the whole game with no increment) on ICC.

May be this is the one of the reasons for which I'm basically a chess no-one :-) if in medio stat virtus probably in extrema stand idiots like me ...

money isn't that important, probably

2005-03-17T12:58:00.000-08:00

I've made a mistake complaining about yesterday; because (as often happens) today it was worse. What is the thing I hate most ? Re-installing windows (in any flavour) for people that are unable to do that but that are able to get the system trashed with viruses, useless bad-written software and you say what. It's true I get paid anyway ... but this sucks.
I wonder if the problem is that my hourly cost is too low ... I would say not, but apparently my boss values money less than I do.

reclassification

2005-03-16T14:45:00.000-08:00

Ok ... it's official, today has been reclassified as a Monday

I got disturbed to implement urgent stupid fixes that there's no time to test, I've discovered that something I've to do and that is apparently trivial is indeed a rather hard problem (and that's not good for how you're seen by management) and last, but not least, of our five servers the newest one that is also the one less stressed decided to crash with data CRC errors on the hard disk so tomorrow morning will be devoted to re-installing the machine from scratch.

Sometimes I hate Mondays...

we're doomed

2005-03-13T05:57:00.000-08:00

While looking for old HTML experiments I made to try to change a bit the template of this blog I stumpled in a document I dowloaded a few years ago from an italian university; they're the notes for computer programming courses for students of engineering.
Re-reading it I couldn't avoid to feel deep disgust for all the errors and uglyness of those notes; it would be funny if those notes were a joke and not the actual material used to destroy the minds of newcomers in the IT world.
I can only cry for the situation in which sits our fourth-world nation from an information technology point of view. We're going to die (from an information technology point of view), and we deserve it.

We're doomed.

there are many ways to skin a Python

2005-03-13T03:04:00.000-08:00

I keep being undecided about what to use for writing Python extensions for those (few) parts where this very nice language happens to be too slow. I tried the handmade C way, C++ with sip, and now Pyrex.
For now seems to me that Pyrex should be the winner, but I've yet to give a try to boost::python that I was told is quite interesting (the scary part is that boost is huge and I'm using a compiler that's probably considered out ... VC++6).

to blog or not to blog ?

2005-03-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

I saw this site because a friend of mines happens to use it. Lately I was thinking to reinvent my homepage (www.gripho.it) because it became obscenely outdated... so i was thininkg to dropping the double language (in favor of just english) and about a huge simplification (from a tree to a mere sequence). It seems that with blogger is even better... I'd need to just put content and everything else is already done in the form I was about to use.

Will I be able to keep on ? No way. It will probably last a month or so.
But let's give it a try :-)

Andrea "6502" Griffini