So every so often I’ll read through some of the stuff at SysadminCo. It’s a collection of stupid user questions and such send to the sysadmins at some ISP. They have some entertaining stuff sometimes, and have an amusing shell-like interface. Anyway, as I was skimming a bit today, I ran across this one techism that I got a kick out of.
Monthly Archive for April, 2004
So I borrowed some movies from Richy this past weekend (namely Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Batman, and Batman Returns). It reminded me just how good Jurassic Park was. Heck, I even used a quote from it in my high school yearbook (you ever look back at that sort of stuff and wonder what you were thinking… all sorts of really meaningful/significant quotes you can put in there, and I put in something from a fairly silly hollywood flick). Anyways, this got me to thinking about how I’ve been drawn to movies in the past. They frequently seem to end up as the focus for papers I’ve written for classes (including Jurassic Park, Top Gun, Heavenly Creatures, Reservoir Dogs, and of course a host of films I watched in film studies classes as an undergrad). Now that I think about it, there were probably times when I wrote papers on a movie back in high school and before that were technically supposed to be about the book it was based on. But really, who wouldn’t rather watch a dull movie than a dull book?
So I’ve spent a good portion of the weekend working on getting wedding invites/response cards printed up on my old laser. Not to toot my own horn, but I think they turned out pretty cool. The font Amanda used (A Yummy Apology) went really well with her watercolor flowers and the deckled edges on the paper (scares me that I know what that means). Anyway, they’re pretty cool and should be spooling up to send them all out before much longer.
So I realized that IE and Mozilla parse CSS stuff differently. Apparently, Mozilla will interpret everything on a line after # as a comment (at least where appropriate) whereas IE seems to interpret it normally. As a result, my movie db looked absolutely awful in IE since I almost never use it. Anyway, now that I know, I’ve taken care of it. Should looke the same in IE and Mozilla now (at least it does for me in IE6). As such, I also realized my blog looks different in IE and Mozilla. Since I’m not completely happy with it in Mozilla, I guess it isn’t that big a deal cause I need to work on it anyway.
CSS really strikes me as being pretty slick. I really need to look into it further and see what I can make it do.
So my movie database continues to evolve. I guess first I should mention what it does at this point. Basically, I feed movie title in, my script searches for it in the IMDB, presents the possible matches, and then fills in all the info from IMDB (title, year, genres, director, stars, etc). Then I can easily edit it as needed. Tonight I added some basic caching of the main page. In other words, if you aren’t doing any sort of special query (ie list everything), it will dump the webpage to a file and simply display that if it’s current, and only recreate it when the database has been updated. Pretty cool.
So I’ve been going nuts working on class projects this semester. I’m trying to wrap up the last of my class work and am currently taking a couple of ECE497 courses (special topics grad courses where professors largely discuss their own research interests).
Nick’s teaching one on Unconventional Computer Architecture that’s been pretty interesting so far. Project’s coming along pretty well for that and most of my responsibilities have been finished. We’re doing hyperblock formation (in SUIF) supplemented by path profiling (in amalsim) combined with a basic run-time reconfiguration simulator that should estimate performance benefits of swapping hyperblocks out to reconfigurable logic. I wrote up the path profiler stuff which has all been checked in and barring any more surprises in SUIF, should be good to go.
Matt Frank (of RAW fame) is teaching one on Multi-threaded Computer Architecture. It’s been really good. Sort of a good overview of how parallelizing compilers work, how the corresponding hardware works, without getting into really icky details (like CS426). The project is a big question mark at this point. We’re attempting to make the GSA-PDG actually work for real programs (lookin’ pretty scary), then somehow resequentializing it after we’ve got it, and of course do some simulations on it for some basic limit study sort of thing. I’ve just wrapped up my first pass at a simulator. It’s mostly there at this point (reads in Jeff’s GSA description, generates the internal graph representation, and then does some of the functional simulation of that graph in an event-driven logic simulator sense). I don’t have all the operations supported at this point… like I’m not sure what a CVT is, I have no idea how the memory operations should realistically work, and have absolutely no feel for what’s going on with the GSA-specific nodes. If I dig out the GSA papers again, I might stand a chance at those, but since I’m working with a moving target at this point, I’m not going to work too much more on it until I see what Brian and Jeff have been up to…
So Richy had some nice news for me. Turns out somebody managed to get a high quality bootleg of Monday’s concert up by Tuesday afternoon. Quality’s quite good, so you may want to check it out. Also, Richy’s got his pictures up from the concert now. You can see them here.
So Amanda and I (along with Richy, Carrie, Lee, and Dan) went to the Ben Folds concert last night at Foellinger. The show was great! The opening act was a great string trio led by David Berkeley on guitar, and assisted by Will Robertson on upright bass and Adam Buchwald(?) on mandolin. They were really good. I loved the mix of the 3 instruments. You should definitely check out David Berkeley if you get the chance (there’s a mp3 available for download on his page of a song “Fire Sign” that was featured in CBS’ show Without a Trace). Really good stuff. Had to break down and pick up his two albums after the show.
And Ben Folds was absolutely freakin’ awesome. Quite a showman, and really damned hilarious. Does some amazing stuff with a piano. I never knew you could get that sort of sound out of one. Of course, I’ve also never seen anyone pound the shit out of one quite like that either. He really rocked that bitch last night. And hearing him do Liz Phair’s Chopsticks brought a certain smirk to my face. I know I’ve heard some live stuff the two of them have done together, but I wasn’t expecting that last night. All I can say is it was one hell of a show.
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 The DI even has a story on the show. |
McGuffin (aka: MacGuffin or maguffin) is a term for a plot enabling device, i.e. a device or plot element in a movie that is deliberately placed to catch the viewer’s attention and/or drive the logic of the plot, but which actually serves no further purpose – it won’t pop up again later, it won’t explain the ending, it won’t actually do anything except possibly distract you while you try to figure out its significance. More specifically, it is usually a mysterious package or superweapon or something that everyone in the story is chasing.
Possibly coined by Alfred Hitchcock. The perfect example is the “government secrets” that motivate the action in “North By Northwest” (1959). Another typical McGuffin is the Maltese Falcon. It gets the characters together, pits them against each other, but turns out to be worthless.
Also used by Quentin Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” in the form of the suitcase with the mysterious glowing contents.
[Source]
1 : ENERGY, PEP
2 : COURAGE, DETERMINATION
3 : KNOW-HOW, EXPERTISE
[Source]
Pronunciation: 'mäk-sE
Function: noun
Etymology: from Moxie, a trademark for a soft drink