That’s fun to say and all, but I’m sure that there would be people who would like to have some proof of this: see below.

My method, shown above, tends to perform slightly better at the task using the test parameter. So, I figured, why not do some more vigorous verification on it?

After setting up the system to run at multiple data points, I found something peculiar, yet interesting:

Hand-rolled (at 10^3):
Difference in time: 0.000569
mathn (at 10^3):
Difference in time: 0.001286
Hand-rolled (at 10^4):
Difference in time: 0.008029
mathn (at 10^4):
Difference in time: 0.014407
Hand-rolled (at 10^5):
Difference in time: 0.14803
mathn (at 10^5):
Difference in time: 0.165025
Hand-rolled (at 10^6):
Difference in time: 2.823072
mathn (at 10^6):
Difference in time: 2.687332
Hand-rolled (at 10^7):
Difference in time: 62.096438
mathn (at 10^7):
Difference in time: 64.990647


For powers of ten, it seems as though my process is faster. 10⁶ doesn’t quite follow the pattern, though.

I then ran the same test on different data points:
Hand-rolled (at 2^14):
Difference in time: 0.014882
mathn (at 2^14):
Difference in time: 0.009224
Hand-rolled (at 2^15):
Difference in time: 0.036732
mathn (at 2^15):
Difference in time: 0.022161
Hand-rolled (at 2^16):
Difference in time: 0.085459
mathn (at 2^16):
Difference in time: 0.044076
Hand-rolled (at 2^17):
Difference in time: 0.208553
mathn (at 2^17):
Difference in time: 0.076775
Hand-rolled (at 2^18):
Difference in time: 0.498292
mathn (at 2^18):
Difference in time: 0.151843

Running everything as powers of two show a reversal of position for the results; the standard lib does better. This gives me some insight as to why the above 10⁶ test is reversed; the value for 10⁶ is very close to a power of two (2²⁰), and so the optimizations that are in the ruby library to handle near 2ⁿ are in effect at that point. Logically, I would see something similar for 10⁹, but I’m not going to let my computer sit for a day to crunch that out.

I’ve been looking for work in new locations.  I am happy with my current job, in the fact that the people I work with are very skilled at what they do, and their attitude towards things is wonderful. Unfortunately, the actual work I am slated to do has put me in a lower tier than my peers: as an implementations role, I don’t end up writing as much code as I would like.

If anyone has any suggestions as this thing gets more used, I would like to hear them.  My current markets I am looking towards are in Seattle, WA, and the surrounding area; Boston, MA and the surrounding area; and the research triangle of VA/NC. Those locations seem to have a much better sense of what is being sought after for developers, and seems to have a greater market for the types of positions that I would like to have.

I guess I need to get myself sold to the world more, and maybe the world would in turn be more open to buying me.

Until today. Well, technically yesterday night. Whatever.

Yesterday, I had the wonderful experience of meeting a fantastic group of gentlemen called MadRailers.  These are not angry train workers, but a Madion, WI based group of software developers with an interest in the Ruby on Rails framework.

Through their discussions (dubbed “lightning talks”, based on the nature of the size of the presentations), I was able to pick up on some valuable pieces of the rails environment: some things I had already heard about, but got to see them in use, some things were new to me, and made things easier, which is every developers dream.

A discussion on proper testing techniques with Cucumber spawned a rigorous discussion on the correct use of the tool, and how the tests should be best written. One side had that the tests should test one logical piece of the feature, while the other side believed that the tests should be written in a way to show the full flow of the feature, from beginning to end. I would tend to agree with the first argument; if your tests aren’t clearly defining something to test, then they aren’t going to be very helpful if they break, and you’ll spend your time hunting down the error that caused all your tests to fail, instead of having one test tell you the error, and fixing the problem.

Another discussion was from a newer member to the community (relatively – as it was my first meeting, everyone had been there longer than I had) about why he found rails, and what he enjoyed most about it. These types of presentations can be more helpful than they set out to be: I found out about RVM, which is supposedly an indispensable tool (I’ll have to look into picking it up), and based off of a discussion generated from the presentation, I was able to see Haml in action. I had heard of Haml previously, but hadn’t had the chance to use it; now I really want to.

One of the later discussions focused on a rails plugin called active_scaffold, and a javascript library called Top Up. These were both new to me, active_scaffold greatly simplifies the amount of work needed to get a fast, decent looking data presentation available to make sure that all of your information works together correctly, and Top Up allows you to create modal windows as a container for virtually anything: text, html, swf, and even avi.

Overall, I think my greatest gain from the night isn’t a technical one, it is one of attitude.  From the level of organization that was provided, to the way that the conversation easily flowed between presenter and audience, and to the level of interest shown in the technologies presented, it showed to me that there really are more people like me. Living in Dubuque has some benefits, but the drawbacks are present as well; I never would have had the chance to do something like I did last night in Madison around home.  Some people were surprised at the fact that I would drive over an hour to come to a program like this; I think it was completely worth the trip (even through the weather, which was somewhat less than cooperative). Things that I’ve striven for and missed at work, like automated testing, simplification, and comfort with a product are things that these guys have at their disposal; it shows that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s something to aim for.  After talking with some of the members, it looks as though they had been in similar situations before, so it looks like there is hope for me yet.

If they end up reading this, thanks for a wonderful evening, guys.

The previous statement isn’t much of a surprise in this day in age, but I think I should qualify what I mean.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the software internals of my new phone.

The Motorola Droid has been quite the versatile little device.  I’ve thrown nearly all I can think of at the thing, and it handles it smoothly and without issue.  In the past 4 weeks, I’ve rooted, flashed, reflashed (I’m indecisive), cleared, recovered, flashed again, and customized to my heart’s content. Currently, it looks like this:

That’s right… Shiny.

There’s a fantastic community of people who create and contribute to these modifications over at alldroid.org, particularly in the forums.  I’ve met some good people out there, who really know what they’re doing.

I recently dual-booted my desktop, so I could get back in and do some fun playing around.  Unfortunately, I chose a 64-bit operating system, and they’re not supported for the android source tree and utilities. (A poor excuse, I want to see what I can do to fix that.) So I’ve been debating the past couple days, whether or not to clear my new install, and put on Ubuntu 32-bit edition when it comes out, so that I can tear into the source and help contribute to the site.  Most likely I’ll wait until 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) comes out; I’ve loved what I’ve seen and played around with so far, so it’ll be good to get in there and play around with my phone’s internals.

One of the big requests on the alldroid forums is the ability to hot-swap phone ROMS without the need for a full reboot.  I think I have an idea on how to accomplish that.  In the same way that the Xen environment handles virtualization, we need to create a custom kernel that handles virtual ROM running. There would obviously be a performance hit, but with people overclocking their droids to 800MHz up to 1.3 GHz, I don’t think there would be much complaining.  Basically, we need to let the ROM handle hardware switching from one ROM to the next, and let the internals provide the rom connection.

Just having ideas.  Others include a complete revamp of the Web, and a new OS.  I’ll get to those at another time.

Other phone screenshots:

I put my resume up for availability as I’m not quite certain how much longer I can stay at my current job.  I’ll be looking around for things to work on in the Dubuque area, so if anyone knows of any open positions, please let me know.

The resume itself can be found here, or just use the link at the top of the page.

“The more screwed up the process, the longer you have a job.”

How does that make you feel? Does it bother or amuse you? Would you feel uncomfortable hearing it from a coworker? A boss? When does the statement cross the line, if ever? As a programmer, you strive to produce the best product possible. When is there a “good enough” point? If something is broken, but acceptable, is that ethically capable of being released? Is a project that has no (unit, acceptance, ui, etc.) testing capable of release?

Let me know in the comments.

(PS: wrote this post from my Motorola Droid, which I’m having an absolute blast with)

Basically, as described on the link above, the idea is that you keep a daily calendar of all the specific goals you want to accomplish.  Every time you do something related to a goal,  mark off the day on the calendar.  Once you have a few days consecutively, that is a chain.  The object of this motivational strategy: Don’t Break the Chain. Seems like a simple enough thing.

In the spirit of bringing in new ideas in order to make things work, I’m going to use a modified schedule, but the chain still takes effect.  Different days for me will be devoted to different goals/tasks.  Mondays and Thursdays I tackle some Ruby code, so I can stay fresh and learn about some of the newer developments that I’ve missed, having been out of the Ruby loop for a while.  Tuesdays and Saturdays are devoted to Corner of Seven.  That’s right, you might actually see more blog posts. In addition, I’m looking at building new and experimental pieces onto the domain, including rails and Java webapps, and playing around with php and python, so I can apply these to the blog, and keep the site as a form of digital portfolio.  All of my things will be up here, so it makes it more centralized.

Motorola Droid

Finally, the big hurdle in my calendar, and what is to be the biggest chain – Android.  I’ve been looking at the mobile phone operating system for a while now, but haven’t had the drive to fully enter in and create things for it.  That is, until I saw (and afterwards, held) one of these.So, starting today, once a day I will try to do something new in terms of Android development, in an effort to increase my skill and knowledge in the mobile OS.  Hopefully we’ll get to see some neat little apps come out of this “Don’t break the chain” mentality.  Hope you’re along for the ride – I guess we’ll see come every Tuesday and Sunday.

Cheers for now.