I'm just about to leave my apartment. I'll be heading back to Indiana today for a very short visit. My father and his siblings are putting on a bit of an event for their mother (my grandmother). Basically, everyone who is alive on this half of my family tree will be back in one place for a few hours tomorrow. It is likely the last chance some of us will have to see my grandmother as she is becoming quite old. Since I doubt that this event will extend into the late evening, I may take this chance to make an appearance at the Theta Xi Halloween Party. We will see how things go.

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If I were governator, I would do this too.

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Alarm clock failed to go off again today. Got another wake-up call from my boss's secretary. My car's battery was dead when I tried to start it to go to work. Replacement took 2 hours + $125. I didn't get in to work until 1pm. I'm getting tired of this week very quickly. Given the fact that I'm taking Friday off, there is basically no way for me to recover this week's lost time, so I'm going to have to burn more vacation to make up for it.

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So, I biked to work today. I do this rather often as it is my standard way of getting to work. On my way out to head back home, I noticed that it was very dark out given the time of day and that the winds were a bit strong. As I was biking, I quickly found that there were strong southernly winds blowing dust/loose dirt off of the mountains (remember that little Station Fire that burned down everything that keeps dirt in place?). I made it through the first eastern leg and through the southern leg, but when attempting to turn north again, found the high winds coupled with the continuous onslaught of dirt and dust too much to bear. I was unable to keep my eyes open for long enough to bike safely, so I began walking. About a minute after I began walking, a stranger (but another JPL employee named Curtis) stopped and offered to give me a ride. I was happy to accept his offer and he had a pickup truck into which my bike went nicely. I suspect (though he said nothing about it) that the only reason that he recognized me as a fellow employee was due to the labcoat. Once again, the labcoat proves its utility.

Upon arriving home and after thanking my benefactor appropriate, I went inside and looking at my labcoat, saw that it had shifted in color somewhat to the "brown" shade of the spectrum. I decided that this probably meant that all of my clothes are completely dirty and the brown color that my washcloth turned after cleaning my face leaned further credence to this theory.

I suppose I can at least say that I've been in a dust storm now. It is too bad that I was going to try to do laundry tonight. I do not think my clothing would remain clean if moving through conditions like this.

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Earlier tonight, I finished up may playthrough of Red Faction: Guerrilla. I have to say that I mostly enjoyed the game. The basic premise here is that you are a miner who goes to Mars to make use of his demolitions expertise. The oppressive government kills your brother off about 10 minutes into the game, so you become a freedom fighter (read: terrorist) and procceed to harrass them until you've liberated the planet.

Seems like a pretty standard affair with that. The game itself is a third-person sandbox game with a physics engine finally put to realizing the promise of the first Red Faction game: destructable terrain. In RF:G, nearly everything can be destroyed spectacularly. Buildings, people, vehicles: all of these are vulnerable to your heavy explosives. About the only thing you can't destroy is the actual "earth". I suspect this is to prevent you from destroying a building by digging a hole under one side of it and letting it fall over.

To me, the main draw of the game was finding fun ways to destroy buildings. My personal favorite was blowing up one side of a large smokestack such that it fell onto a nearby guard shack, destroying that as well.

The game has shown up several times on GoGamer at various price points. I ended up getting it for about $32 (minus $25 from a BillMeLater statement credit) in the PC variety. I would recommend it at about the $25-30 range.

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Apparently, my alarm clock failed to go off this morning. I was awoken by my project manager calling to ask if I was coming in today. My response was that it had been my intention to do so. Before actually reaching my office, I had already gotten another call asking about the "instrument issue" that was going on. I was even more confused because I would have thought that such a thing would have come up in my conversation with my PM. I suspect it was part or all of the reason he called me, as he had the secretary leave a note on my door instructing me to check my email.

I love it when the gauntlet starts within 20 minutes of me waking up.

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Apparently, Newt Gingrich is staging a "Twitter reinactment" of the Battle of Trenton. I don't really understand what this accomplishes (aside from promoting Gingrich's book) or even how it is carried out. I want to know who thought this was a good idea. They need to be fired.

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For a very long time, my LJ's name has been "Up ------>". I can never remember that name when flipping through search results or the like, so I decided to change it. I was going to go with Androgynous Misogyny, but I don't really dislike women in particular (plus it was really hard to spell). I ended up with Androgynous Misanthropy as I felt it had a similar vibe. Interestingly, total google matches for both terms together were about 9.

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So, I watch C-SPAN. Right now, Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) is talking about global warming. He used an analogy to try to "discredit" the global warming movement. His analogy was thus: if you draw an 8 foot (diameter) circle on a wall which represented the total volume of the atmosphere, the amount of CO₂ output during the entire history of the United States, drawn on the same scale, would have a diameter of slightly over half an inch.

While this anecdote is fun, it is completely worthless. Even if you don't accept carbodioxide's effect on global warming, it should be clear that mere relative volume has no meaning. For instance, the lethal dose of potassium cyanide is about 300mg. Given a density of 1.52g/cm³, that would amount to about 0.083% of an 8 oz glass of water. Given in the same scale (with the 8 oz glass being 8 feet in diameter), this would be 0.048 inches.

The question is never merely one of volume, but one of lethality. Of course, the lethality of cyanide is undeniable whereas the lethality of atmopheric carbondioxide is far less clear. Nevertheless, by Steve King's reasoning, no one should worry about drinking the water laced with cyanide. After all, it isn't even a tenth of an inch!

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If you want your spam bot to pass the Turing test, it should not describe itself as a "horny grl".

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Haruhi movie. That is all.

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I was googling today about Ada's standard_ouput continuing my train of thought from Friday. Apparently, my lj post about it is now on the first page of results for "ada Standard_Output". I am beginning to wonder if anyone else on the planet has to use this language...

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I just beat Kingdom Hearts 2 again. It was mostly as awesome as I remember, but it seemed distinctly easier this time around. I suspect this may be due to me knowing the "tricks" for the various bosses. I did go to the final boss at the first opportunity, however, which led to it being markedly more difficult than my original attempt since I was only about level 60 or so and didn't have the Ultima Weapon. I'll probably resume Blue Dragon now as my console game of current play since it was what I'd been playing before I was distracted by KH 2.

I still haven't finished 358/2 Days, but I'm making somewhat steady progress. It reminds me of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core in that both area highly "mission-based" which allows me to play it in very small chunks at a time. Individual missions in 358/2 generally run in the 10-20 minute range with some outliers on either side. I think this strategy is highly preferable for a portable device. God of War: Chains of Olympus failed in this respect and that may be the reason that it has been unplayed in my PSP for months.

Of course, what I'd really like to see is a confirmation of a Kingdom Hearts 3 game. Although I have little doubt that they'll get around to making one, Haley Joel Osment isn't getting any younger and neither is Hayden Panettiere. I suspect that this will mean yet another significant age-up in order to make voices be reasonable, but that may be for the best. The last one wasn't bad at all, though hearing KH1 and KH2 Sora in short succession could be considered a case study in voice changes through puberty.

Tangentially related, I think I need to move up my plans for getting another PS2. My current one, starting Saturday, would only read my copy of KH2 while it was in the upright or vertical position. This is a known failure mode caused by failure in the focusing motors of the laser assembly. Although Sony refurbed the system once, I severely doubt that they'll do it again for free given that it was a system produced in the first year of the PS2's life span. A quick look around seems to show Gamestop as actually being one of the cheaper places to get a new PS2. At least, this is true if I want a silver one ($100 + tax, shipping). I can get a black one from Amazon for $100 (no tax) or a white one for $120 (with Singstar, apparently). So I may go that route given my hatred for Gamestop.

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Ada's type system is such that some types are considered limited. In C++ context, these types would have a private operator= function or similar. The net result is that these types cannot be assigned. If you had a limited integer type, for instance, you couldn't say that i := 4. Such a statement would be a compile-time error. Of course, you wouldn't declare an integer a limited type; you would use it for complex object that have internal state information that you don't want being copied without some thought going on (though in C++, that thought should be expressed in the operator= function). This is all well and good, except that the File_Type type is defined as limited. The best analog that I can make to the File_Type is that it seems similar to the C stdio FILE* construct. It is set by using an open operation and is a required argument to all IO calls.

In the C context, something that you do commonly when you have variadic ways of doing IO is to pass around these FILE* constructs rather than passing file names. The reason for this is very straightforward: it gives you more options. For instance, suppose you have a program that can either take a file to act upon or it can read from standard input. The nominal way to do this in C is to check to see if there is a target file defined on the command line. If it is, you set your FILE* pointer to be the result of an fopen operation. If it isn't, you set your FILE* pointer to instead be the predefined variable stdin which corresponds to standard input. Everything is nicely abstracted away and you do your reading from whatever source is appropriate. This concept is great for flexibility and many other languages adopt it, though often in ways that allow you to not worry about the details of pointer mechanics or that apply whatever programming model they use (even Scheme uses a similar model calling the FILE* standin a "port").

Unforuntately, because the File_Type is defined as limited, it seems as though a variable of File_Type cannot be assigned to be Standard_Output. At least, I've been unable to determine how one might make such an assignment. The Ada spec for the various IO packages specify a function called Standard_Output that returns a File_Type which should correspond to the obvious, but since File_Type is limited it seems that the returned variable can't actually be assigned to a variable. I would guess that I could use the function call as an argument to another function directly, but that seems pointless since the default values of the various file io operations default to stdin/stdout as appropriate. Maybe I just haven't found the right incantation yet, but regardless, the fact that a magic incantation is required represents a serious design flaw.

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I've talked in the past about the problems that I have with the Ada programming language. I thought may days of fighting with it had come to an end as we'd found a work around that made it so that we didn't need to use the Ada code (written and commented in French) we'd been provided in order to do our processing. A week or so ago, I found out that getting the Ada code working was required for a validation task that is apparently my responsibility. As such, I'm fighting with Ada again. After running the code again for the first time in a year, it returned the familiar "ERREUR_CALCUL"--Calculation Error--a wonderfully vague thing. Digging around led me to find that Ada does have some ways to examine exceptions. Most notably, you can use Ada.Exceptions.Exception_Information to get a filename and line number where the original exception occured. This led me to the function RACINE_CARREE--a 139 line long function--where the original error was occuring. Scanning over the function gave me no help (even though it happened to have comments written in English), but Google Translate told me that racine carree means square root. My first reaction was "Why is the square root failing?" which I quickly saw was because it is apparently being passed a number less than zero. My second reaction was "It takes over 100 lines to implement a square root function?". Ada has a square root built into the language spec. Also, a Newton's method implementation should be like 10 lines even in the tarpit that is Ada.

Regardless, I now have to figure out what impolite function is calling the square root with negative numbers...

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