When you find important logic locked up in a regex:

This morning, I got up with the sun. I really missed this over the winter — there’s something lovely about having the sun pouring into your bedroom as you wake up. 

We’ll see how I feel about it when the sun is getting up an hour or more before I want to 😁.

Good Friday was the warmest day in recent memory. It was fortunate then that we had chosen to go on a little adventure that day, an adventure to Rouge Park. 

It was lots of fun, here’s a few pictures. 

Just about a year ago I linked to a study out of the University of Arizona on reproducibility in CS. I had some complaints, and later linked to a crowd-sourced effort to check the results.

It appears that the authors of this study paid some attention to the criticism, and reexamined their study. It’s worth looking at the updated technical report and results, which are located at the original project homepage.

Whelp. I may have found the worst search result on the internet. 

Alright. Let’s break this down. 

1. I searched for ‘seedling’. The page responds: “No results for ‘seedling’. Displaying 13 results for ‘seedling’”. WAT. 
2. The results are all lamps. 
3. Except for Miracle-Gro. So there’s that. 
4. There are only 12 results displayed. 

They also think I’m in Vancouver. Which is about as wrong as they can be. Except, when I try to change it, it says “null” in the top left, and then thinks I searched for an empty string. 

**edit: **Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, it turns out that 13 results is actually accurate: There’s also the “Know how” tab that I missed. So 13 results, 12 products, 1 pieces of ‘know how’. 

“Many people have tried that problem,” Iwaniec said. “He’s a private guy. Nothing is rushed. If it takes him another ten years, that’s fine with him. Unless you tackle a problem that’s already solved, which is boring, or one whose solution is clear from the beginning, mostly you are stuck. But Zhang is willing to be stuck much longer.”

From The Pursuit of Beauty (via Knowing and Doing)

Leaving for work in the sun! Woo!  

After a long wait in the preprint queue, our journal paper on Blue Gene/Q’s transactional memory system is finally available.