the frig blig

A historic sign of the times occurred this afternoon when computer go program MoGo defeated Korean go professional Myungwan Kim 8P at the 2008 U.S. Go Congress in Portland OR. The computer played with a 9-stone handicap and won by 1.5 stones.

MoGo was written by French programmer Sylvain Gelly and ran on a borrowed European supercomputer with 800 CPUs. MoGo is available for download at Gelly’s home page.

With the current pace of technology I now expect to see computers defeating human professionals playing even games in my lifetime…a vision both exciting and depressing.

I just installed MoGo on my laptop and played it a quick game, and I’m impressed, it played some moves so good it was spooky…but MoGo’s yose sucks. OTOH I made MoGo play white…if I gave it 9 stones and more thinking time it would probably give this 8k a run for his money. I’ll try it, but not tonight.

I updated the sqlver utility (available on the Bamboo utilities page) to detect versions up to Sqlserver 2008; the display format is also more human-friendly than before. Current version is 1.1.

I run Windows XP in a Vmware Server VM on an Ubuntu workstation in my workplace cubicle. Every Monday when I come in I routinely reboot the XP machine in order to free up memory, which invariably will have crept up to > 1G used after a week of running time. I’m not sure if the leak is caused by my six instances of perfmon which I use to monitor server resource utilization, or by some other app which I use every day* — I never have been able to pinpoint the culprit, and learned to live with the workaround of weekly reboots. This is not a bad thing for a Windows machine, according to many IT folks.

So anyway I installed SP3 for XP a couple of weeks ago, and lo and behold (sic) — the most amazing unexpected thing resulted — the memory leak disappeared! I have now been running the same instance of XP for 11 days and memory utilization is only 667M.

Have to congratulate Microsoft on this quiet little bug fix. (Although how long did customers wait between the release of SP2 and SP3?)

* Groupwise, AD Users & Computers, cmd, errlook, taskmgr, SQL Management Studio

Is here. Read it and leap.

Q: How is playing guitar like shooting pool?
A: They’re both all about leave.

Viz. when playing guitar, in order to sound like less of a klutz and move smoothly to the next note or chord, the player needs to be thinking ahead about which fingers will be used in that next note or chord…and that means making sure those fingers are available by using other fingers now.

And when shooting pool, in order to sink more than a single ball, the player needs to be thinking ahead about positioning the cue ball to leave makeable shots.

Q: how is playing tennis like playing go?
A: they both can be approached using a certain style of play; i.e. keep making good returns or moves and wait for your opponent to make a mistake — then capitalize on it. With each mistake your opponent makes, he or she is more likely to try to overcompensate…to your advantage.

Intrepid blig readers may have noticed that the frig blig was down for a couple of weeks. This was caused by the death of the primary (and only) router in the data center. A replacement ordered from ebay took two weeks to be delivered; if I’d realized up front that it would take so long I would have purchased one locally.

Tech info: the old router was a Linksys WRT54G (the original model, about 5 years old); its replacement is a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54. I replaced the original firmware (in both devices) with spiffy and robust dd-wrt.

Our router is also a wireless access point. I considered getting one of the new 802.11n models, but since this protocol is still in draft I decided to wait until the final version is released, currently scheduled for 2009.

After setting up the new router, I upgraded our wireless security to WPA2 but alas, discovered that this protocol is not supported by the Dell Latitude C400 — waaah! Maybe there’s an inexpensive usb-based 802.11g device that supports WPA2 I can get for the C400.

Met a gentleman the other night who adamantly insisted that global warming is a hoax. What’s more, he claimed that he had two college degrees in physics and a PhD in mathematics, and was an active participant in the scientific community, having just published his n-teenth research paper last month.

Very curious. His primary argument was that it’s impossible to accurately predict the weather, citing the Lorenz effect as proof.

Before I could muster my defense he baited me into saying I wouldn’t believe his story about how spotted owls also were a hoax — then triumphantly exclaimed “why should I bother explaining it to you when you won’t believe me anyway.”

His preemptive strike successful, he sat back smugly in his happy little room of delusion.

I spent the next few hours thinking about what’s up with him. First, I noted that he was a refugee of the USSR, and had up-close familiarity with state propoganda from the left. This made him skeptical of official explanations, sensitive to propoganda, and wary of being fooled again.

Clearly, forecasting climate change is vastly different from forecasting the weather. But he had shut me down before I could even start a rebuttal, and I suspect should I have started he had more tactical verbal weapons at his disposal.

I also noticed that he believed in god, and clearly there is less evidence for the existence of god than for the existence of global climate change. I didn’t mention this either.

His foolish beliefs made me question the veracity of his claims of education. Of course I kept mum on this too,

And so the evening ended with the Russian emigre and myself both convinced we were correct, smiling and shaking hands taking our leave.

Since I’ve already learned that the only way to burn a DVD on my mac is by using the iDVD program, I figured this is probably the way to copy a DVD disc as well. My bad, there’s nothing on any of the menus about copying discs. So my next thought was to try the Disk Utility (although the spelling of Disk vs Disc gave me a small pause… are disKs magnetic media and disCs optical media?).

Didn’t find anything about copying on the menus there either so I entered ‘copy dvd’ in mac help and lo and behold, it told me exactly how to copy a DVD using the Disk Utility! Apparently you have to create a disc image first, then burn copies from the image.

So feeling optimistic I loaded the disc into the drive, and WHAM! The Mac’s DVD player autostarts and wants to know my region. I don’t want to play the disc, only copy it. I quit DVD player, and it conveniently ejects the disc. Doh!

I tried sticking the disc into the drive again, and obediently, up pops the DVD player app. This time before closing it I look at the options preferences, and uncheck ’start playing disc when inserted’. Quit DVD player, it ejects the disc, I reload the disc and the !@#$*& DVD player app starts up again, even though it’s not playing the disc. When I quit it, of course it ejects the disc.

At this point I decide to use the linux box, where you can simply copy a disc and the OS doesn’t try to outsmart you. But before going downstairs, I look in Control Panel System Preferences and under ‘CDs and DVDs’ I see ‘when you insert a video DVD’ is set to open DVD player — I change that to ‘ignore’ and insert the disc once more and — voila! the DVD player doesn’t startup, I select it in Disk Utility and successfully burn an image! Woo-hoo! Frog 1, Mac 0.

I updated my getlnk utility (available for free download on the Bamboo Utilities page) to return the icon location and index, in addition to the executable path and args.

Today I’m posting on three little unrelated topics.

algae: S was showing off his aquariums while A was preparing dinner and he pointed out that one aquarium had an algae problem. He told me that fish poop contains phosphate and algae thrive on that. But the most striking thing, to me, was that the algae in this tank was black and spiky. I’d just assumed that all algae was green and slimy. Not!

make: I’m learning to write gnome programs, and they are built via make (like most gcc programs). After adding dirent functions scandir and alphasort to my code, gcc emits errors that look just like it can’t find the function defs. Although the c source contains #include <dirent.h> and the Makefile contains CFLAGS = -I/usr/include `pkg-config --cflags libgnomeui-2.0` (and dirent.h exists in /usr/include) so what’s up? I’m not looking forward to using autoconf — which seems like overkill for a project with a single source file — but I certainly AM looking forward to figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. Googling make and gnome builds and stuff yields results that are either for rank beginners, or advanced coders — nothing for intermediate-type programmers like me. Waaaah!

ugly code: The current (May 2008) Dr. Dobb’s Journal’s editor’s note quotes Alberto Savoia with a pithy definition: “Ugly code is code that someone else wrote.”

‘Nuff said!