After setup yesterday, we returned to the Hotel at 2AM. I slept for 3.5 hours, and then went back to the convention center for the start of the competition. We’re having some network trouble, but not anything that would be unworkable.

Our situation is much worse than last year.

I’m leaving my comfy abode for Austin, Texas this morning, to help the MIT team with their cluster in the SC08 Cluster Challenge. Stony Brook isn’t participating this year but a couple of months ago the MIT team contacted me about the possibility of helping this year. I’ll be taking photos and writing more as more interesting things happen: stay tuned!

The recent kerfuffle with the economy, as well as that election everyone is speaking about, prompted me to do some more serious think on my own political stances. I recently re-evaluated myself on the Political Compass, and my positions seemed to have shifted slightly. About 1.5 years when I started this site, I was Libertarian Left (i.e. a social Libertarian and Left economically) but retaking the test has put me slightly into the right on the economic scale, and slightly more Libertarian socially. So I’ve updated the About page to re-classify myself as Libertarian Right. Perhaps in a year or so I’ll re-evaluate again and see how I shift.

Several hours from now I will fly out of JFK Airport, destination, Boulder, Colorado. I’m visiting Boulder for a few days courtesy of all the companies listed over at Boulder.me.

I spent this summer programming for the New York Times. The experience was valuable in quite a number of ways, and I really enjoyed myself. Here’s how it went down.

Sometime in March, I saw a post on the Times’ Open Blog, a blog dedicated to technical topics, and written by developers - not suits. The post I noticed explained how the development group in the Times was looking for several technical interns for the summer. I decided to apply, and I emailed the provided address with my resume and some more information.

If you’re using PHP to output XML, and you have empty lines outside of your <?php and ?> tags, you may insert empty lines before your opening XML tag - a big no-no.

I’ve turned off trackbacks for the site. I was getting large amounts of spam, and very little signal. Although my blog is pretty unknown, and doesn’t have a lot of visitors, the amount of spam was monumental - I don’t want to have to deal with it in the future. Also, the value was not very helpful. I have a couple of RSS feeds tracking mentions of my name and blog, so I’ll definitely know when someone writes about me. Like SMTP, TrackBacks are inherently broken - both were not designed with Evil in mind. So, until something better comes along (because, the idea is great) your only method of replying is by either composing an entry on your own blog, and leaving a comment here with a link (preferred) or, simply, leaving a comment with your reply. Whatever floats your boat.

Seeing as how I’m going to be working for the Times this summer, I’ve put in a bit of thinking about the role of news, newspapers, and journalism in today’s hyperconnected world. The death of paper newsletters has been predicted for a while now, but strangely enough, they are still around. Wired Magazine, in their 15-year anniversary retrospect, highlighted one of their unfulfilled visions: “The Death of Media”. Wired called for the death of “Old Media” over and over again, but Old Media is still around, and rumors of their death are exaggerated…for now.

Whew! My final exam (Algorithms) is done, and the semester is over! It was lots of fun, (except for Physics) and lots of work (mostly, Physics), and I’m glad it’s over. Next semester promises to be lots of fun: highlights include Artificial Intelligence, Communication and Networks, and Software Engineering. That last one might be interesting. While I’ll have to draw endless UML diagrams, the Professor will also let use something other than Java (finally!) to write our web app, so I plan on using the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails. About time. Anyway, looking forward to next semester, but until then, I have the whole summer.

So, a while back, I applied to a couple of places, in search of a summer internship. I spoke with VMWare, Google, The New York Times, and a few lesser-known places. I applied to the Times’ Summer Internship Program, and after a great interview, I accepted - dropping midway out of the VMWare interview, and turning Google away outright (I might have went to Google if they hadn’t lost my first application, and the second later offer was as attractive as the first). So, this June and July I’ll be working with some talented people on the Platforms team for NYTimes.com, working on … something. They haven’t told me what, exactly, yet. But, I’m convinced it’ll be fun. As a perk, they are even paying for a place for me on Manhattan, in some NYU dorms. Future things I’m allowed to reveal about the internship and The Times will be found on the NYTimes topic page.

I’m back to posting here after a long hiatus, mostly because I have something interesting to report. I’ve been avoiding/neglecting this site because I’ve been incredibly busy with schoolwork, but everything is getting more leisurely in a calm-before-the-finals sort of way.

Anyway, I have in front of me the thick (1k pages) 3rd edition of O’Reilly’s “Programming Perl”, graciously lent, because at some point, that’s what I hope to do. In preparation for this summer (more on that later) I hope to work my way at least partly through this tome, and in the process, hopefully post some reactions to the language as I go.

I guess I’d better be upfront about my prejudices and preconceptions: from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’ll like Perl. I have a distaste for extraneous punctuation (eg, I try to leave parens and such off as much as I can when coding in Ruby, and I consider Ruby’s @variable an offense to the eye and sensibilities), and from what I’ve seen from Perl, it has plenty of extra $(%]&*# to annoy the hell out of me. I imagine I won’t like the lack of turtles-all-the-way-down OO that Ruby has, and I think the general lack of cohesiveness and cobbled-together inelegant TMTOWTDI messiness won’t sit with me well either. But hey, I’d love to be shown wrong — two favorite languages are better than one!

So, in general, expect some more activity at this place, and especially some more Perl posts.