Archive for January, 2008
Florida Primary
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Looks like McCain has it. That should slingshot him into Tuesday. I think a lot of Giuliani supporters have defected to McCain since his numbers have dropped signifigantly just in the last week, while McCain’s numbers have improved over the same period. He also appears to be leading in most other states, including California. No complaints here, I’d be happy to support him.
Clinton looks to be in the same position, however, the Democrats have that weird super delegate thing where the politicians in Washington have 40% of the say in who wins. (strange.) She’s so far out ahead right now though in so many states, I think it’s inevitable.
I think it’s going to be McCain vs. Clinton in November. Congrats to both if they win, this has been one crazy race.
Berkeley Parallel Browser Project
Monday, January 28th, 2008
How did we become interested in browsers? We realized that browsers must be parallel while brainstorming about the vision of the Berkeley Par Lab. We identified a few great “killer applications” enabled by many-core processors, but all of these applications were either already parallel or contained components that naturally could be implemented in parallel, such as machine learning. In these applications, the revolutionary role of upcoming manycores was to (i) fit these applications into smaller form factors (on a desktop rather than on a supercomputer) or (ii) make them to run in real time (rather than in batch mode).
Since all our killer applications appeared to be already parallel, we became curious whether the multicore revolution is going to have any impact at all on the sequential software (it has been widely speculated that we would have to start rewriting today’s sequential software into parallel). The web browser, predicted to be the new desktop, was the logical sequential application to examine.
Initially, it seemed that browsers currently run fast enough, and will do so even as web pages get richer. However, measuring today’s browsers on old laptops suggested that tomorrow’s pages will make today’s browsers run unacceptably slow (because neither processors nor browsers will become much faster, while page complexity will increase). Furthermore, Bell’s Law’s insistence that handhelds will soon play the role of laptops nailed it for us: given the CMOS roadmap, there was no way a sequential browser could run fast enough on a phone.
We have a long way to go, but a great goal. If we can build a parallel web browser, tomorrow’s handhelds could provide as rich an experience as today’s laptops.
Out in Cali again – seeing a talk on this today. Sounds interesting.
New Tech – Monitor Scrubbing
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Throw away the bottle of Windex and simply land your browser on this site to clean things up.
Hat tip to smays for the link.
HHD Software’s Free Hex Editor
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
HHD Software offers up a free hex editor aptly called ‘Free Hex Editor’. The version I installed was the latest, 3.12 which was released on 10/12/2005. It is not, in any way shape or form compatible with Vista, so don’t install it. If you do you may experience sporadic crashes in the explorer.exe process. Vista recovers from this gracefully but it’s still very annoying. I’ve had this installed for a month or so, it took me a while to figure out what was causing it. I finally broke the crash down in Visual Studio and found a dll installed with FHE latched into the shell was the cause.
Faulting application Explorer.EXE, version 6.0.6000.16549, time stamp 0x46d230c5, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bdc9, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00042e7b, process id 0×1368, application start time 0x01c854ca4f2daea0.
It’s too bad too, the editor is pretty good. Hopefully they’ll have an update at some point. You also might try removing the offending dll or unregistering it, I decided not to waste the time with that though and just uninstalled.
UPDATED – from the comments, HHD has an updated version. I haven’t had a chance to install it yet but feel free to give it a wirl on Vista or Win7 and please post back on how it goes.
AAPL
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Low second quarter guidance and flat U.S. sales growth for iPods over the first quarter. Probably the strongest indication I’ve seen we are in a recession right now. Fancy tech gadgets are the first to get axed off the shopping list when consumer’s pull back. Microsoft’s earning on thursday should be interesting as well.
One More New Years Resolution
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Spend more time at the beach. 
110 MPG Jeep
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Green is still pretty fugly, but we’re getting there. The problem of course is that this is a concept so we have to wonder if it’ll ever see the production line. Still, for a jeep lover like myself, I really wouldn’t mind having one of these in the garage assuming Chrysler builds it. 110 mpg, constructed entirely of recyclable materials, and boasting a respectable zero to sixty time of a 8.5 seconds. Nice. Perfect for those outdoorsy types who want to trample all over the environment while saving it at the same time. More details and pics here.
Prepping For The Tax Man
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
I’ve always taken the position that doing your tax return really isn’t that hard and can be accomplished on your own. Today though I sat down with a tax professional to go over all the information I’m going to need to complete my 2007 return. When I was younger taxes were easy, the old 1040EZ got the job done. But for the last few years I’ve been going to a professional “just to be safe” and today’s meeting convinced me I’ll never go back to doing it on my own. We ended up working up a large laundry list of information I’ll need to collect before filing, including a big list of costs I can deduct related to my home office and equipment I currently use in getting my job done. All combined I should get a really excellent deduction – none of which I would have been able to figure out on my own. It’ll cost me to have this done professionally, but in the end I’m sure I’ll save far more. Lessons learned.
Wholly Mackerel, It’s McCain FTW!
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
Looks like Rudy’s gambit of skipping the first primaries backfired. In addition, I think more than that, the shift of the main concerns of voters from Iraq to the economy has helped McCain as well. What really blew me away this morning (aside from McCain’s win over Huck in a heavy evangelical state) was the current national poll averages and the Florida vote –
I have no problems getting behind McCain in this race. (Just donated $100.00 to his campaign) While some of his past votes do conflict with my core beliefs, on the issues that are most important – government spending and taxes, securing the border, Iraq, the environment and global warming, energy independence, and healthcare reform, he’s spot on.
Proto 0.9
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Say hello to your competition Safari… Mozilla really did a nice job on this. But here’s an ironic twist – over the holiday break I asked my sister why she prefers Firefox to Safari on her Mac. “It breaks up the monotony of the UI.” Somehow though I don’t think she’ll complain too much about Proto, and the classic theme will still be available if she prefers it. Personally I can’t wait for the new Vista refresh to be completed.
