Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Just ordered from work Harry Warden Jr.’s book Hacker’s Delight, which deals with a delightful combination of arithmetic operations, logic and bitwise operations to perform operations like “count leading zeros in a 32 bit word” and “rotate left” efficiently. [I actually had to implement these two last week, which renewed my interest in the book]. Hacker’s Delight website, Amazon page, IBM Systems Journal book review.

On Saturday night, Orna, nyh, Ranny and I met at my place to watch Fight Club and eat nyh’s chili. The movie was superb, as usual, and the chili was very good as well. Somehow A Beautiful Mind[1] came up in the conversation, and Ranny mentioned that he hadn’t watched it, so I guess we already know what the next movie is going to be 🙂

[1] Reversing the usual roles, it’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and a pretty good movie. You don’t see that happening very often.

Yesterday started off fine, and then took a turn for the worse. I had a technical report to write on the work we did for the last few days, and the words just wouldn’t flow. A writer’s block of the worst kind. Eventually, today, I finished it and got it all written down, but I labored over every sentence of the 4 measly pages.

In the evening, while depressed over the lack of progress of the paper, I wolfed down six(!) hot dog buns. Since I hadn’t eaten much during the day, it didn’t carry me too badly over the daily food intake limit, but it certainly fucked up my mood, to have transgressed so badly in my diet. Gaaargh!

I went home, rested a bit, read a bit, did NOT eat anything else, and went to sleep.

Nice things that did happen today: I agreed to give a talk on Linux kernel hacking at a workshop in Tel Aviv University in July. I compiled and installed oprofile, and was quite impressed with its profiling prowess. I read another chapter of Turnbull’s The Great Mathematicians – I’m up to Descartes now, me’thinks.