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...

NEW JERSEY PRIDE

While stopped at a light today, a driver in the car next to me asked where in New Jersey I'm from (my car still has Jersey plates)? He was from Glen Ridge, so this was enough reason to start a conversation while we waited.

Although we probably had only about 30 seconds until the light change, we managed to commiserate about the Yankees' failure to make the playoffs this year and the long and painful winter ahead; to agree that the Mets' failure again helps to ease the pain; to discuss how the fortune of the Red Sox and Rays would play out this year and next; and to make a prediction that the Cubs would finally win it all.

I don't have a lot of New Jersey pride, not because I dislike the place but because I'm pretty indifferent about it. I started going to school away from home when I was 13 (that's ten years ago now), and I don't think I would have had vastly different life experiences had I grown up in New Jersey or some other suburban American area. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to have this kind of random conversation sparked by our common bond.

I have no idea where Glen Ridge is, though.

LAST NIGHT AT THE STADIUM