I took a long hard look at the OCaml functional (well, mostly) language this weekend. One of the many interesting aspects of OCaml, is that, in addition to offering an interpreted environment, it comes with a REALLY good compiler. So, you can sit there prototyping your latest numerical trick and when you’re happy, you can compile the code to a blazingly fast native binary.

So, whilst reading up on all this, I remembered a question from the [Lush][2] (a lisp-like scientific languages that can also be compiled) [FAQ][3]: “How does Lush compare to Matlab/Octave for speed?”. So the author then shows that Lush is like 50 billion times faster than Octave. (Go look.)

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So, a few weeks ago I spring-cleaned inside my trusty little linux server machine before installing the replacement hard drive. I think I was rewarded with about a kilo of dust and other muck, but at least the machine is now clean. I then replaced the little CPU fan with a brand-new ball bearing fan (4cm). That was a huge improvement, but I was still not happy with the level of noise.

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Right, for those of you who don’t know yet, my group very kindly sent me to attend IEEE Visualization 2004 this week in Austin, Texas, USA, Earth.

The flight here was of course less than pleasant, but this is par for the course when considering any kind of flight longer than 8 hours. One tip: pre-ordering vegetarian meals can make all the difference. Instead of eating one of a few hundred pre-prepared plastic-like food imitations, you get one of 5 or 10 lovingly prepared tree-hugger veggie meals. The difference is astounding, and the lady sitting next to me was obviously very jealous.

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The Seagate 120G drive in my firewall machine died at the very young age of 8 months. I sent it in to Seagate via the RMA procedure and got a new one back within about 3 days, which I did find quite impressive. In the mean time, I started using a cheap-assed hardware firewall/router/modem thingy, which means I have a machine to play with.

Ubuntu went on there without a hitch and I must say I’m VERY impressed. It’s Debian-based, but without all the crap that so sours the otherwise healthy Debian experience. It also has a *much* shorter release cycle. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African who’s rich beyond belief but uses his money for really groovy things like being a space tourist and sponsoring deserving open source projects and whatnot, seems to be inspiration behind the whole project. I’m definitely convinced.

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Dear readers,

cpbotha.net has now als moved to AN Hosting. I can REALLY recommend these guys; their service is top notch and the price/performance ratio is impressive.

In anycase, the weblogs have already been migrated. That went okay, partly due to Movable Type’s brilliant documentation. It will take a bit longer for the rest of the website to be migrated… I’m evaluating Content Management Systems while we’re shifting things around.

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HARR HARR! I kicked it in the crotch when it wasn’t paying attention.

Yes ladies and jelly-beans, the draft of my PhD thesis is finally done. Not bad, if I might say so myself. My PhD contract ended on September 15, today is the 21st. 6 days overtime.

Lest I forget: On September 16, I was officially appointed as PostDoc in the Visualisation group of the TU Delft. In other words, I’m staying just where I am, except that now I’m getting paid BUCKET LOADS of cash.

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Dear Readers,

My self-inflicted thesis deadline of the end of August whooshed by, slightly ruffling my alread ruffled hair in the process. One of the many good skills I picked up at StoneThree Pty. Ltd., may it become a huge company and may the people behind it become staggeringly rich, was to build ‘slop’ into any schedule. ‘Slop’ is extra time that comes in very handy when things take longer than you had planned. Like now.

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This is what we thought up and constructed for dinner last night… it was divine. Thanks to Paul for suggesting the pancetta, it’s perfect for this dish.

Ingredients:

• one aubergine per person
  • one ball of fresh mozzarella per 2 persons
    • 60 g of pancetta per person (amazing italian bacon, you’ll have to get this from your deli)
      • chestnut mushrooms (I think this is what they’re called; in Dutch they’re called “kastanje champignons”) – obviously you can improvise if you can’t find these
        • onions
          • italian spices (oreganum, dried basil, etc), salt, freshly ground black pepper
            • basil pesto
              • rucola (aka rocket salad)
                • fresh tomatoes

                  • fresh focaccia or other rough bread
                    Recipe:

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Yes, boys and girls, this is the one and only official and authoritative Ninja website, Real Ultimate Power. This is a brilliant resource, chock-full of hard-hitting information such as the following:

1. Ninjas are mammals.

2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.

3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

You can also buy the book through Amazon.

Don’t forget to read the hate-mail linked from Real Ultimate Power. The amount of utter stupidity on the internet is frighteningly evident when browsing these mails, all written by functionally hydro-encephalitic cretins.

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Hopefully this will help me to cut down on my WAB1 activities… an extremely groovy RSS/ATOM newsfeed aggregator plugin for Mozilla Firefox. See the screenshot here and download the extension, called Sage, here.

1 Work Avoidance Behaviour; you know, you’re supposed to start working, so first you clean up your desk, then clean up the room, then the house, then you take up gardening or perhaps embroidering… in my case, I spend far too much time reading nerdy web sites instead of finishing this little story I started writing.

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