In which I stroke Peter Doucet's blog and on Tomas Benda

Alright enough ranting about the imminent EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It). I'd like to talk about a discovery I just made.

I was working with a vendor's SE (Sales Engineer) on a product that really is not ready for prime time (this is the project that has eaten up my entire life for the past week, hence not ready for prime time). Anyway the vendor was trying to trouble shoot a problem and while doing that I had the rare opportunity to sit at my desk and twiddle my thumbs. So I got a chance to catch up on some of my reading. I am listed yet again on the Blog of one of the fastest inline skaters in Canada. Specifically, on Speed Skate World (see the Blog Roll on the right) on Tuesday November 13, Peter wrote: "I thought that the reaction to being linked up to Speed Skate World [in Skater Dreams] was pretty cool..." Well I think this reference is pretty... recursive? No,... more loopish.

When I was an undergrad I had a friend who had a little too much fun making fun of math (recall I have a B. Math from Waterloooooo.) Anyway one line he had was, "definition of loop: see loop". He drew some pretty impressive covers of mathNEWS too, I'm gonna include them because my blog is missing something, specifically art work!



Here Tomas explains the difference between various OSs, ironically, Solaris or SunOS is notoriously slow, Slowaris I've heard it called. Slowaris used to run on ultra fast systems so it actually seemed pretty good. Though not so much any more, now it runs on Intel mostly.

The Traveling Sales man problem is an example of a problem of NP completeness. You have to find the shortest path between n cities starting from any random city and ending there. It turns out that although only slightly different from a depth or breadth first search, just a slight change, random selection of a starting point and touring in a non-recursive manner, makes this problem much harder. Except we cannot prove how hard we think it is! Don't understand, don't worry, just kill the sales man, preferably with a really big gun.

Descartes was the name given to an old Sparc Server, running SunOS, of course! We, Tom and I, loved it because it had such a low CPU load. Descartes had a low load because none of the other undergrads used it, it was an old slow clunker and not up to the Y2K roll-over, Descartes was retired in the summer of 1999.

Tom drew that last one during a bunch of Math 235 classes, for the life of me I cannot remember the name of the professor. The professor was a nice guy though, just not very organized, made boring material (linear algebra II) even worse, but if you appealed a grade on a paper you could watch you mark go from the low sixties to the high seventies. Tom hated that class, by then I think Tom hated university, well we all did, its a love hate relationship, we love it and pine for it after we graduate but hate it when we are there toiling over assignments.

The Math and Computer building was built in 1968 and looks like a massive hulking... tomb, it cost the tax payers of Ontario $7 million dollars to build, the IBM mainframe it used to warehouse cost $8 million dollars, by 1999 that mainframe, long since obsoleted had been replaced a number of times and finally even the data centre (known as the red room), the system was warehoused in, was replaced with more lecture space. The new data centre took up something like an eighth the space. The math building remains an ugly blight on a horrific campus (collection) of appalling architecture. If you want to see megalomania run amok go to Waterloo and ask for the MC building.