2006-12-28
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ever have one of those weeks?
Actually it's been several.
Gave myself an embarassing injury a couple weeks back. Both how I did it, and the fact that I had to ask a friend to come over and look at it because I couldn't see it (and it was bad enough telling the friend, telling a doctor was Right Out unless it'd been serious. Fortunately, it wasn't).
Then there was the bit with a bank I posted about.
And my health insurance has gone up something over $700/year (that's an increase of $700/year, not a total)
Still fighting uncooperative software on the new computer.
Spent several hours today tearing my hair out over a *simple* program I threw together to let me merge messages from several old incarnations of my mail program, without winding up with tons of dupes.
Finally realized that the problem was one of these details that was so "everybody knows" that they hadn't mentioned it in the manual for the ancient version of BASIC I was using. Seems that the ctrl-Z char being used as a message seperator in the folder files I was tryimg to break down into individual messages is used as "end of file when you do OPEN file FOR INPUT AS #x.
I had to change to opening as Binary.
Meanwhile, my other attemp to do some importing messed up some stuff in the mailer. Mostly a matter of having to spend a few hours at some point in the future manually editing a file to allow deleting some phantom folders. L-(
Christmas with Chrissy & Stacy had some ups and downs too.
And then there's finances.
2007 is not gonna be fun... :-(
Gave myself an embarassing injury a couple weeks back. Both how I did it, and the fact that I had to ask a friend to come over and look at it because I couldn't see it (and it was bad enough telling the friend, telling a doctor was Right Out unless it'd been serious. Fortunately, it wasn't).
Then there was the bit with a bank I posted about.
And my health insurance has gone up something over $700/year (that's an increase of $700/year, not a total)
Still fighting uncooperative software on the new computer.
Spent several hours today tearing my hair out over a *simple* program I threw together to let me merge messages from several old incarnations of my mail program, without winding up with tons of dupes.
Finally realized that the problem was one of these details that was so "everybody knows" that they hadn't mentioned it in the manual for the ancient version of BASIC I was using. Seems that the ctrl-Z char being used as a message seperator in the folder files I was tryimg to break down into individual messages is used as "end of file when you do OPEN file FOR INPUT AS #x.
I had to change to opening as Binary.
Meanwhile, my other attemp to do some importing messed up some stuff in the mailer. Mostly a matter of having to spend a few hours at some point in the future manually editing a file to allow deleting some phantom folders. L-(
Christmas with Chrissy & Stacy had some ups and downs too.
And then there's finances.
2007 is not gonna be fun... :-(
time, big numbers (and small ones too)
(from a mailing list I'm on)
And at the opposite end of the time scale...
Modern personal computers run at gigahertz rates. That means that a one gigahertz system has a "clock cyle" that is one nanosecond long. A two gigahertz system has one that is half a nanosecond long.
But to get a better feel for a nanosecond, consider this.
In one nanosecond, light travels about 11 inches. Electricity in wires travels much slower. So in one nanosecond, the signals in your computer may travel less than 6 inches.
Which is why the "onboard cache" on the CPU is so important. There isn't *time* to fetch data from the memory chips a few inches away on the motherboard!
Scientists will speak of picoseconds in discussing some phenomena. How long is a pico second? It's 1/1000 of a nano second. Or about the time it takes light to travel the width of a grain of salt.
Greetings all
As a research scientist I sometimes find myself explaining things to folks that are way outside their realm of expertise. This is especially so if you are talking about long periods of time (in this case it was evolution and how things change slowly over the eons), most folks just can't grasp terms like "million" and "billion." To try and help someone this morning grasp these numbers I came up with the following scale and I though I'd pass it on.
A billion seconds ago it was (more or less) April, 1975.
A billion minutes ago it was August of 105 AD.
A billion hours ago it was 112,070 BC and humans-to-be were just getting the hang of how to chip stones into tools.
A billion days ago was 2,740,000 years in the past (again, more or less). Megafaunal mammals were wandering around looking at the flat spot that would one day host Mt Hood and some short, hairy creatures were balancing precariously on their hind legs and leaving their bones in Oldivai Gorge.
A billion years ago nothing at all lived on the land and in the oceans multicellular creatures were still somewhat of a rarity.
And now back to my time sheet which is due tomorrow.
Arnor
And at the opposite end of the time scale...
Modern personal computers run at gigahertz rates. That means that a one gigahertz system has a "clock cyle" that is one nanosecond long. A two gigahertz system has one that is half a nanosecond long.
But to get a better feel for a nanosecond, consider this.
In one nanosecond, light travels about 11 inches. Electricity in wires travels much slower. So in one nanosecond, the signals in your computer may travel less than 6 inches.
Which is why the "onboard cache" on the CPU is so important. There isn't *time* to fetch data from the memory chips a few inches away on the motherboard!
Scientists will speak of picoseconds in discussing some phenomena. How long is a pico second? It's 1/1000 of a nano second. Or about the time it takes light to travel the width of a grain of salt.