» treehouse

John Derbyshire of National Review fame and some excellent mathematics histories (I guess that's what you'd call them) built a treehouse for his children, documenting the process in prose and photos. I always wanted a treehouse when I was little, but I never thought about how much work it'd be to actually put one together. Maybe if we plant a tree in our new house, my grandchildren can have a treehouse...

posted by Nate @ 9:07 PM [ 2 May A.D. 2008 ]

» young programmers

Everybody in the family except myself seems to be somewhat sick lately, so I have been taking a chunk of time off each day this week to assist with care. Yesterday that involved playing Duplos with Becca while Tricia and Ally slept. We built a Duplo car that was roughly the size of a good-size U-Haul moving van...strapped onto the chassis of a Honda Civic. As part of its accoutrements, it featured a house in the back for one of the Duplo animals she owns (the lion, in this case).

Becca also decided that there needed to be a computer on the roof of the car. She sat down one of her little Duplo men in from of the computer, prompting the question from me, “What's the Duplo man doing, Becca?” Her response: “Oh, he's just writing...he's just writing GCC.” She is her father's daughter.

posted by Nate @ 2:52 PM [ 30 April A.D. 2008 ]

» library thing meme

(via Zack Weinberg and bitbashing)

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing's users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

I'm too lazy to underline the ones I read for school. (Most of the not-published-the-last-fifty-years ones, though.) I need to work on my classic literature.

Current Music: Cates and dpL - Living in A

posted by Nate @ 10:09 PM [ 29 April A.D. 2008 ]

» home safety announcement

Pro tip: when attempting to determine if a burner on the stove was previously being using for cooking, do not lay your hand flat on the burner to test its temperature. Instead, hover your hand slightly above the burner to check for radiant heat. It's amazing how even a small number of pain points on the inside of your fingers can make doing simple tasks uncomfortable.

posted by Nate @ 12:25 PM [ 26 April A.D. 2008 ]

» shadow and claw

Mom and Dad D bought me Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun quadrilogy for my birthday this year. I read the first three by checking them out from the library last year, but was cruelly stymied from reading the conclusion because the library didn't have it. (They had virtually every other Gene Wolfe book...except The Citadel of the Autarch...go figure.) I'm rereading it right now, enjoying it just as much, but not perceiving the depth I've heard other people attribute to the series. I must say, though, that the stories Severian reads from Thecla's books are worth the price of admission just by themselves.

posted by Nate @ 11:33 PM [ 23 April A.D. 2008 ]

» mortgage payments

One down. Three hundred and fifty-nine to go. (Well, really more like two hundred and seventy-five if we can accelerate our payment schedule a bit, as our lawyer never tired of reminding us.)

posted by Nate @ 11:31 PM [ 23 April A.D. 2008 ]

» hugs from ally

We drove to see my grandmother this past Saturday. While we know she loves to see us, doing so makes for a long day--about eight hours on the road. Sometimes the girls sleep in the car, sometimes they don't. Today was one of the days where they--especially Ally--choose not to, and it made for a bit of a long day. Tricia did a great job entertaining the girls in the backseat of the car today: singing with them, reading with them, reasoning with a tired 2.5-year old about singing songs and not playing with her sister's sunshade while her sister was sleeping for ever-so-briefly, etc.

Saturdays are bath nights in the Froyd household. Despite getting home late and thinking it would not be a good time to attempt a bath, Tricia suggested filling up the tub for Becca just a little bit and letting her splash around before going to bed. I did this and Becca climbed in and began cheerfully pouring water back and forth between containers. Tricia went to get Ally ready for bed and I stepped out to get a glass of water.

When I came back into the bathroom, Tricia was standing there with Ally in her PJs. Before I explain what happened next, y'all ought to know that I am not Ally's favorite parent. Tricia insists that this is only because I don't have breasts and therefore don't provide the “mommy milk,” but I sometimes suspect it goes deeper than that. Every once in a while, however, Ally does something that indicates she does appreciate having her father around. Tonight provided just such an occasion.

I walked up to Tricia and began talking to Ally a little bit. Ally unwrapped herself from Tricia and leaned forward: this is her way of indicating that she's willing to be passed off. Usually I need to hold my hands out to her before she will lean forward. But hey, I'll take whatever daughter adoration I can get, so I held out my hands and held her upright against me with one arm.

Ally then laid her head down on my shoulder, which is out of character for her, especially when Mommy is around. She usually has this “up-periscope” sort of posture that is focused on ascertaining Mommy's location and distance to Mommy. If she is within range and it does not appear that Mommy is making a move in her direction, she activates her Mommy Proximity Alarm (MPA) to indicate her displeasure with this state of affairs. Again, I'll take whatever daughter adoration I can get.

What happened next, though, totally surprised me. She popped up, looked at me, and reached her hand up to stroke the side of my face. She then leaned in and gave me a kiss right on my mouth! She has “given kisses” before, but that involved her leaning her head forward until her forehead made contact with some part of your face; this was much different. It didn't seem accidental, but very deliberate, especially because we think the head-on-shoulder bit was “hugging” me and we talking about Becca and Daddy giving Mommy and Ally hugs and kisses before Ally gets put down for bed each night.

Tricia and I started laughing and I had a few tears sliding down my check from this unexpected outpouring of affection from my daughter. I think we must have freaked Ally out somehow, because she was ready--not upset, just ready--to go back to the safety of Mommy shortly thereafter. And she refused to do any sort of repeat performance before Tricia had to put her to bed. Hopefully we didn't indicate that this was undesired behavior. Her little gestures totally made my day.

posted by Nate @ 12:40 AM [ 8 April A.D. 2008 ]

» something substantial

In which several things are combined to make them appear more substantial:

Tiona Marco: Creating fine art with Crayola crayons.

I read Persuasion by Jane Austen last Saturday morning while lying sick in bed. Recommended. One cannot help but feel a sense of disgust when the story moves Anne back to her family at Bath.

We received notice at work this week that after four years, we get a month to do anything we want that is “loosely related” to the mission of the company. It's not Google's 20% time, but it's a nice perk. I am already plotting what to do when my time rolls around in early 2011...

Thought on discourse: one often labels a critique as “devastating” not because it possesses such a destructive force, but merely because it happens to align with the opinion of the labeler and assures the labeler than he will not need to interact with the critiqued. It works in the opposite direction too: one labels a blunder or misstep of one's opponent “devastating” in hopes the opponent will be marginalized or go away altogether.

posted by Nate @ 9:18 PM [ 19 March A.D. 2008 ]

» new trees release

Long ago, when I was still tweaking my blog software, I decided I wanted to eschew databases. Instead, I wrote a simple binary tree package for an in-memory database of sorts (my blog was getting to large to deal with linear lists and I wanted things sorted by date at the very least). It worked for me and didn't seem to erase my hard drive, so I released it to the world as TREES. I marveled at my contribution to Lisp software.

However, over the years, bug reports came trickling in, mostly saying, “Hey, I tried AVL trees and deleting elements from AVL trees goes into an infinite loop.” Like a negligent maintainer, I paid little attention to the reports, as I used red-black trees and they Worked For Me (tm). Not the greatest contribution to Lisp, eh?

I recently decided that life is too short to have buggy software with one's name floating around. Over the past month or so, I have been rewriting TREES and released version 0.10 yesterday, with improved interfaces, more efficient code, and a real testsuite. I thought I'd share a few lessons from my grand rewrite:

I still have things to fix; I took out DO-TREE-RANGE and WITH-TREE-ITERATOR because my code didn't need them, but they should probably go back in--especially WITH-TREE-ITERATOR. But I wanted to get the code out the door; two years between releases is long enough!

posted by Nate @ 8:44 PM [ 19 March A.D. 2008 ]

» name of the rose

I finished Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose last weekend. The book is one of the best justifications for learning Latin that exists. (While the book is perfectly readable without knowing Latin, I think it would have illuminated the story at a few points if I actually did.) It's also one heck of a story, too.

posted by Nate @ 6:49 AM [ 14 March A.D. 2008 ]

» wheat chex

Does anybody purchase Wheat Chex for anything besides including them in Chex Mix?

posted by Nate @ 12:25 PM [ 6 March A.D. 2008 ]

» christian academics

What does faithfully executing your work as a Christian mean? At least in the academic world, it looks something like this:

Oddly, the most objective History of Philosophy I've ever read, and it's a big one, is Frederick Copleston's. It's a nine volume thing, about 4,000 pages in all, but it's also a blast. Plus, there was lots of remedial stuff that, even after I got by B.A. in Philosophy, I really didn't have a handle on, and I feel that Copleston is really great refresher training as well. Ironically, for Russell, Copleston was an Orthodox Catholic, almost personally a Fundamentalist, and so it is odd, even bizarre that such a source, which would seemingly be the most unobjective, really does a wondrous job.

And on people Copleston disagrees with, he does so with a phenominal fairness. In fact, the people he disagrees with, you can tell he made an extra effort to be very careful to represent those views as the people putting them forward really intended.

So, although I am a die-hard Agnostic who believes that Copleston's Catholic Orthodoxy is pure silliness, amazingly, I must say that his ability to portray other philosophers in a way that is true to those philosphers in question, is almost uncanny, really sheer genius. That being said, probably Russell had a higher I.Q., and that may have gotten in his way with his particular History project...

The shot at the end is quite unnecessary, however. The sheer bewilderment of this reviewer that this Orthodox Catholic could improve upon Betrand Russell is a response worth striving for.

posted by Nate @ 2:02 PM [ 27 February A.D. 2008 ]

» gossie

We picked up Gossie at the bookstore last weekend. which is a truly delightful children's book. How much do we like it? I went online looking for prints of some of the pages--pages in which joy leaps directly from page to eyeballs to neurons--the same night we bought it. We also immediately added every other book by the same author to our Froyd family wishlist on Amazon. And we have read the book at least 20 or 30 times since purchasing it, so much so that Becca has both it and the sequel--given to her Thursday evening by her grandparents and read numerous times since--memorized, as evidenced by her reciting them to her sister for entertainment this morning. Highly recommended.

In the book, there are two facing pages talking about what Gossie likes to do: “She walks backwards.” and “She walks forwards.” The pictures depict her walking to the left and walking to the right, respectively. And that made me wonder: would translations of Gossie in right-to-left languages like Hebrew flip the illustrations so she would be walking to the right for backwards and to the left for forwards?

posted by Nate @ 4:48 PM [ 24 February A.D. 2008 ]

» calvin's prayers

I have been taking a break from WoW this Lenten season and using that time I would normally be slaying pixelated monsters to read. One of the things I have been reading is Calvin's commentaries on the Old Testament, specifically the minor prophets. I have enjoyed Calvin, especially the realization that Calvin did deal with historical and textual issues; his commentaries are not simply florid prose. But I have enjoyed at least as much the prayers that punctuate sections of the commentaries. Consider this one:

Grant, Almighty God, that, since to a perverse, and in every way a rebellious people, thou didst formerly show so much grace, as to exhort them continually to repentance, and to stretch forth thy hand to them by thy Prophets,--O grant, that the same word may sound in our ears; and when we do not immediately profit by thy teaching, O cast us not away, but, by thy Spirit, so subdue all our thoughts and affections, that we, being humbled, may give glory to thy majesty, such as is due to thee, and that, being allured by thy paternal favour, we may submit ourselves to thee, and, at the same time, embrace that mercy which thou offerest and presentest to us in Christ, that we may not doubt but thou wilt be a Father to us, until we shall at length enjoy that eternal inheritance, which has been obtained for us by the blood of thine only-begotten Son. Amen.

Or this one:

Grant, Almighty God, that since we cannot otherwise really profit by thy word, than by having all our thoughts and affections subjected to thee, and offered to thee as a sacrifice,--O grant, that we may suffer thee, by the sound of thy word, so topierce through every thing within us, that being dead in ourselves, we may live to thee, and never suffere flatteries to become our ruin, but that we may, on the contrary, patiently endure reproofs, however bitter they may be, only let them serve to us as medicine, by whcih our inward vices may be cleansed, until at length being thoroughly cleansed and formed into new creatures, we may, by a pious and holy life, really glorify thy name, and be received into that celestial glory, which has been purchased for us by the blood of thy only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

posted by Nate @ 4:38 PM [ 24 February A.D. 2008 ]

» new ironclad release

Ironclad 0.25 is out and available from the usual place. There are a few optimizations suggested by Attila Lendvai, and corrections for two thinkos: CRC32 was bugged and the testsuite wasn't included (it works perfectly, I promise...). Thanks to Todd Sabin and Peter Graves, respectively, for pointing out those flaws.

Also, somebody suggested a long time ago that it would be nice if Ironclad included a “dummy” cipher that did nothing. (It might have been a simple XOR cipher, actually; I do not remember.) I thought that seemed like a silly idea at the time, but have since come to think that having such a cipher would be useful in real-world cases. So Ironclad now includes the NULL block cipher, which--at least in ECB mode--copies its input to its output unmodified. Enjoy!

posted by Nate @ 4:30 PM [ 24 February A.D. 2008 ]