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A DRUMMING DREAM JOB

I have long thought that the folks at Elias Sports Bureau who get to dig up surprising and peculiar statistics about the day-to-day goings-on in baseball and other sports have some of the most desirable jobs around. Here's another one of my recreational dream jobs, from a NYTimes article describing the upcoming Rock Band Beatles game):

Nearby, a sound designer and trained drummer was at work on his computer, tagging each of the colored dots that represented drumbeats with information that would automate how the animated Ringo’s hands should move in order to play them: which drum on his kit should he hit, how hard and with which hand, given his peculiar ambidextrous style?

As someone who enjoys Rock Band, who's interested in music, and who doesn't know much about the Beatles, this article was an interesting read.

About the common insults of Rock Band and Rock Banders:

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels.

About Apple's paranoia over the audio data for the game:

Apple’s preoccupation with security meant that the high-quality audio [single-instrument tracks] he created never left Abbey Road. If the separated parts leaked out, every amateur D.J. would start lacing mixes with unauthorized Beatles samples. Instead, Martin created low-fidelity copies imprinted with static for the Harmonix team to take back to the States — in their carry-on luggage. They were just good enough to work with until the game coding could be brought back to Abbey Road and attached to the actual songs.

GREAT TIME FOR GOLF FANS

Tiger's back, NBC's got a new toy that records video at 7000 frames per second (!), and the Pro Tracer makes watching golf feel like playing a video game. The only other thing you could ask for is Tiger back to his usual dominating form, and over the past two days it seems like he's tending towards it.

Oh, and the-next-big-thing Rory McIlroy has been awesome to watch recently.

T-35 MINUTES UNTIL TIGER'S BACK!

Great commercial: Nike Golf: The Good Life.

FIXED WIDTH FONT IN GMAIL

http://blog.leosoto.com/2007/11/fixed-width-font-on-gmail-2.html

Why has it taken me so long to think of searching for this...

Update: http://blog.leosoto.com/2009/03/fixed-width-font-on-gmail-again.html

THINKING FOLD

I first met OCaml in September 2006 (how sad life must have been before then), and I've since written (100-ε)% of my code in it. I'm happy to report that I'm emitting higher-order, fold-y code snippets like the following ever more frequently.

Hashtbl.fold (fun _ -> (+)) G.fidNumRegions 0

Update (7:17pm): I changed the data structure, so that line of code is no longer. Oh well, there will be others...

WASTED KEYSTROKES

In my program analysis projects over the past year, I often run experiments that dump a bunch of information into log files, which I scan for exceptional and not-so-exceptional output, and then head back to my source. I repeat this process frequently and quickly during development and debugging. I'm down to a fairly quick and efficient set of keystrokes for this task, but my workflow consists of closing and reopening my log file.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that Vim probably has a way to reload the current buffer. (I'm sure I've had this same thought a long time ago, but I had never stored the command in my main memory.) Indeed, a simple :e does the trick, which is much better than what I've been doing for so long.

This made me wonder how much time I've wasted in the past year on the unnecessary keystrokes from my reloading process. It's not difficult to estimate the answer to this Fermi question. There have been 10 months where this reloading pattern was a part of my routine (Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Aug, and Sep). The daily frequency at which I rapidly reloaded log files varied between around 5-20, so let's say 10 on average. 10 times a day for 30 days for 10 months is 3000, file reloads. As far as how much quicker invoking :e is than what I was doing, a very conservative bound is, say, 1 second. So that's an upper bound of 3,000 seconds, or 50 minutes, I could have saved since last summer.

I suppose that's not very significant, especially considering that it's taken me about 20 minutes to do the calculation and write this...