I am (sometimes)

I was going to title this "Party Time," but "Hammer Time" is much more awesome.

So, I finally went to a good party. I know, it's amazing. It's been a loooong time. I went to one last quarter which wasn't horrible, but wasn't particularly enjoyable. That reminded me why I avoided them so much. So, for those of you who don't know, I don't get invited to many parties, and when I do, I usually turn them down. However, considering that this I was invited to this one by one of the guys who founded an objectivist group on facebook, I wasn't immediately turned off. The party was for his Libertarian club, and the guy (Morgan) had seemed pretty cool the first time I met him. We had chatted on im a while last week, so he invited me to this party. And, just as I had hoped, libertarians like getting drunk and debatting the proper role of government. Frakin' awesome. I ended up talking to this guy Sam, who co-founded the facebook group with Morgan, and Jessica, who interestingly enough, worked with Laura in the library, and almost moved in with me. Anyway, Sam was really cool. He was like Chad, but he smoked a lot. Everyone there smoked a lot - maybe because they were drinking, but still. Sigh. Anyway, it was pretty cool, I'll definately have to make sure I can make it to more of those.

"He knew that man must live by his own rational perception of reality, that he cannot act against it or escape it or find a substitute for it -- and that there is no other way for him to live." - Atlas Shrugged (557)

I must take this moment to say how cool Bill Nye is. Back when he had his Science Guy show, I was at that age where it wasn't cool to watch, but it was still good. Well, now he's done it again. Bill Nye has a new show, which, while scientifically sparse (hasn't said anything I didn't know in the past two epsiodes except some legal things), is good and fun to watch. He opened his new show ranting about what a small speck he is on the universe's scale. He shouts "Speck!" for about three minutes.
They also had a sketch with an old-school teacher and two students. The teacher asks Tommy "What is required for life as we know it?" Tommy replies "wood." Teacher shakes head and asks the girl, who replies "liquid water." He then asks "So what should we look for in the universe if we want to find life?" The girl's about to answer when the teacher stops her, "wait, let's see what answer Tommy can give me which will get me laughs in the teacher's lounge." When Tommy answers "water," the teacher is surprised, and goes to pat Tommy's head in approval. Tommy runs away in fear of the raised hand.
One of the producers is named "Lisa Hardmyer" Awesome name.
They also had this bit where a politician responds to questions. Every negative property given to him made him turn against whatever the subject was. Any positive property, and he was totally for it. Sounds a bit to familiar, but definately more adult ground than his previous show.

"The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say 'It cannot be done.' " - Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement

My Operating Systems class this quarter is going get down and dirty with the Linux Kernel. The Kernel is the most basic part of the operating system. *nix uses a microkernel, that is the kernel is as small as it can be. Everything else is just a user program. That's why there are so many shells for Linux, for example. It's easy to just write another if you don't have to dig into the kernel. All the programs to move, delete files, change directories, etc, all of these are just small little programs. But I digress. Since we're messing with the kernel, we have to know and use C. Now, I always thought that C was just a subset of C++ (which it is, C++ is an add-on to C). So if you knew C++, C was about the same thing, just a few less wrappers. Boy was I wrong. C is a functional (or procedural) language. That means there are no objects. The early '90s had a revolution in programming design - object-oriented programming. Basically, everything in the system became an object, or a subtype of another object in the system. Objects interacted by calling methods (verbs) on the object, or directly manipulating it's attributes. This made conceptualizing and designing large systems a lot easier. There are even automated tools to develop code-structure from natural-language descriptions. This object-oriented method led to the development of C++ as an extension to C. C/C++ are very powerful languages. C is really just a high-level assembly language: it's low enough you can do cool tricks, but high enough, when you fuck up you don't know why. C++ is easier to design and code large systems in, but it has a larger footprint (higher overhead cost). This is one of the reasons why optimized systems, like the Linux Kernel are written in C. Object-oriented systems are still possible in functional languages like C - after all, C++ is oo, and it just built on / extended C. However, it's more difficult, and doesn't feel as clean. Perhaps it's just taking me a bit to get used to it. We had to design queue and hash table data structures for our last homework assignment. It wasn't as clean as it would have been in C++. It's definately harder to understand, what with typedefs all over the place. (typedefs are pretty much "replace ThisGuy with ThisOne", causing a lot of looking around the files to see what you're really dealing with.) I still feel odd writting from an oo perspective while in a functional language. I've gained a greater appreciation for C++ from this. I'm also liking C more - lots of cool tricks I didn't know/think about before. F*ck you Java! <still like my C# though>

"Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken." - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"