Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 21 January 2002

# 7 PM

I'm actually writing this entry at the same time as the one for 9:30 tomorrow. Is it cheating to backdate diary entries? I certainly meant to write this entry at 7PM yesterday, but I was too tired.

Anyway... Today I took the bus to work. That was fun. The bus doesn't go all the way to work, but all the buses in this town have bike racks bolted to their front bumpers, so I could load my bike on there, get off about half a mile from work, and pedal the rest of the way. (I have to wonder what it's like driving the bus with a bike rack jutting three feet out in front of it. The drivers don't seem to mind, though.) There were lots of interesting people on the bus with me. One little girl, must've been about four, was running all over the bus ignoring her mother... then this elderly woman got on the bus and managed to get her to calm down in seconds.

It rained in the middle of the day and I thought I was going to regret the decision, but then it stopped. And, not having to drive around for ages when I get home, looking for parking, is definitely worth it.

The current bug I'm working on is rather intractable. It's a case of incorrect initial code generation. The initial code GCC generates, before any optimizers get their hands on it, is remarkably bad. Bad to the point where it interferes with human comprehension. I printed out a thirteen-page debugging dump of the function being miscompiled, taped it to my door, and drew all over it in red and blue ink to try to trace the control flow. Having done this, I still didn't know what was wrong.

If I can get my hands on a digital camera, I'll take a picture of the mess and post it here for your amusement.

One of the managers came by as I was drawing on the door and cracked up—I thought he was laughing at the extremes I was going to, but it turned out he just liked the joke bumper sticker I'd taped under my name plate on the wall. It says goddamned internet in big white letters on black. There's also some website pointer, but I don't remember what it was and google can't find it. According to the manager, this is a M*A*S*H reference. That show was long before my time, of course; I just picked the sticker up from Sumana's junk pile, thinking it was funny in its own right.

# 8:30 AM

I usually have dreams that are too incoherent to make weblog material, even if I remember them. Today, though, my subconscious decided to hand me a perfectly realized narrative fragment, illustrating what might have happened if the One Ring had been found by two Ankh-Morpork City Watch officers instead of Sméagol and Déagol. It went something like this:

"Oi, I found this ring, makes me invisible when I put it on."

"Magic ring. You don't wanna mess with magic rings. We'd better hang on to that till a wizard can come and look at it."

"I wonder what happens if I throw it inna fire, see?"

"You idiot, stop—dammit. Gimme them tongs."

"It's not hot at all... oh, lookit, writing."

"I cannot read the fiery letters."

"Yer right, we better get a wizard to come and look at this. Y'know any wizards?"

"There's that one in the gray beard and blue hat, comes by every now and then...what was his name? Mithrandir?"

I don't know why the one who speaks in dialect decided to throw the ring in the fire. Nor do I know what happens next, but I suspect the story ends a lot more peacefully for everyone involved. Well, except that now you have Ankh-Morpork inserted into Middle Earth, that could get messy.