HR Geeks

Gather round ye nerds
Coasters, Coupons, were Conversed
Many attended

So, last night produced quite a reasonable turnout, however not prime in magnitude. As in the past, I’ll try to recall the attendance: Jody, BSD Bandit, Sunpuke, Tele, Mark G, TJ, Andrew, Dave, Bill, and myself (enferex). This is not a static association of people to chairs (e.g. order), as we are human and exemplify dynamic properties. Thus, people move around and change sitting order. Phrase of the evening “grind-core.”

-Matt (enferex)

It seems that some of us will be attending Shmoocon in DC this year. So, if anyone happens to show up at the meeting, drop a comment or write a post to let us attending Shmoocon know whats up!

Also, this upcoming meeting will mark the 7th anniversary of HR 2600, as February 2003 was the first gathering.

-Matt (enferex)

Happy new year… sure, it’s not based on a true lunar calendar, but ah, it’s periodic. Anyways, new year, and another meeting. Despite the mall closing early (6:00), Jody and myself did show up, thus upholding the existence of this edition of As The Nerds Tur (yes, I just applied verbage to Alan Turing’s last name and concept of Turing Machine). We chatted about stuff and then moved the meeting, temporarily, to B&N where we could browse some magazines, kill time, and hang.

FOSS for all!

-Matt (enferex)

As in the past, we converged upon a table, or two, within the food court of the mall. As I arrived the meeting was already rocking, in attendance was Sunpuke, Jody, Tele, Remad, Dave, and myself. (Order derived from where I was sitting and iterating in a clockwise fashion). Fun meeting, as we did become like a pack of nomads in search of collaboration and variety, we decided to move the meeting to Kelly’s (also in the mall), which is open late, and allowed people with a penchant for the distilled beverage to imbibe. The meeting continued until midnight, and then disbanded.

Overall, the meeting was great, and I think the moving from the food-court was a great decision, and just goes to show that pseudo-random variety can enhance the social efforts of a group, as was seen by this possibly being the longest running HR-2600 episode. So… a buttload, yes, is a unit of measure. But, is there a platinum SI unit for this?

-Matt (enferex)

Zoiks Shaggy! Nice turn-out out tonight, rather, last night. But time… can I impose some kind of restriction on a dimension I have seemingly little control over. Time is a human definition of some, pretty abstract, thing. So the order of sitting, while it does mutate during the course of the meeting, was at one time:
Tele, Remad, Paul’s girl, Paul, RD, Sunpuke, and myself.

And what was the topic of choice……… sensitive dependence on initial conditions (a definition of Chaos Theory). In other words, we had no planned topics, but we found enough order to communicate as a group. Also, the Bat Phone is no more, a Blackberry was dissected, pill-containers can hold lots of Torx, and corn own3s us.

-Matt (enferex)

Prime number off attendees. Of course, all meetings start like that, 1, 2, 3, ….. 5. 5 attendees ahhh hah hah (Count from Sesame Street). Those attendees being Remad, Tele, Wallybert, MarkG, and myself. It was a good meeting, with little if any cross-talk. Some discussion on previous Shmoos and HOPEs, along with some mention of this upcoming years Shmoo and HOPE. No need to elaborate any further, but did any one-catch what those illuminated jelly-looking things were at the Last HOPE?

-Matt (enferex)

Nice, chill, meeting this week. Lots of great talk and there was really little contention for talking. In attendance was Mark G, Paul, a brieeeefff appearance by Paul’s wife, the Spawn of Jody, Jody, Sunpuke, Remad, and myself. Some interesting discussions came up, such as music, queuing theory and its relation to real life, and table-to-chair-hight ratios. Short summary, however that factor should not be a testament to the meeting and its content. We stayed ’till kicked out. Ok, so “kicking-out” is a tad rough, we were nicely advised that the mall was closed.

-Matt (enferex)

So, I was on a plane flight from Newport News to Boston this morning when a really cool thing happened to me. Shall I mention, 7AM is early early for me, and a 7AM flight requires even more time to drive to the airport and do the flight shindig, like stripping off the shoes and passing a stool sample. I figured, as I didn’t sleep well the prior night, that I could also catch some z’s during the flight, or at least ’till they deliver some coffee. Anyways, as we approached Boston, the flight attendant announced the temperature.

As long as I can remember, I have always tried to “predict” values before they are announced. In this case, the value being that of Boston’s temperature. So, when the attendant was jussssst about to fill in the “blank” in a phrase somewhat structured as: “The current temperature in Boston is ______” I decided to guess that value. My guess: 68. And to my surprise, I was right! Now, I decided to investigate this a bit more, being extremely tired, and just chillin’ with my eyes closed, this seemed like a fun exercise. So my conclusion follows.

First, lets assume coincidences do not exist. I started thinking about Schrödinger and his cat. If the value, that being the number on the display representing Boston’s temperature, was in some quantum superposition, the flight attendant’s observation might have knocked it out of superposition and made the value so. OR! Or possibly, my guess was observation enough to set the value. And then the attendant was announcing the number I mentally created. Well, of course this sounds a tad pseudo-scientific. I do not tout quantum physics, and this field has of course only confused many, as there are many aspects that seem to outsmart our inherent intelligence. In fact, maybe the mere fact that I had Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in my lap was enough to make me the thermostat of Boston. If only I focused on creating snow. In fact, maybe the result was not a Schrödinger cat act, but rather quantum entangling, and just flipping the neurons in my brain that were subconsciously trying to tune-in to the value. We could go in this hypothetical way for some time. Pretty cool. But lets try something else. How about a more statistical approach.

Since the radio informed me, upon travel to the airport, as being in the 70s or 80s in Virginia, I assume that the more northern locale of Boston should be cooler. Well, being August, I can guestimate a reasonable range of about 65 to 75. So that’s a rough range of 10 values or so. Being that I would also assume the number as natural, our fractions are eliminated. In this thought experiment, I now have a 1/10 probability of being the envy of all meteorologist. That seems a fair chance that I would make a reasonable guess.

So, either way, I was quite impressed with my conclusion of 68. Despite how I arrived at that value, I believe my subconscious had all to do in this case. I envision my subconscious as doing the churning here, and merely telling my conscious that “Hey conscious here’s a value for ya!”. At the time of guess, it seemed as if the number came out of nowhere. But upon deeper analysis, it seems logical that, however it happened, my subconscious had something to do. Therefore, upon delivery of this value to my conscious, and at the time not knowing where 68 came from, I felt mega-psychic. It was quite a humbling surprise. The mind is amazing. But, I confess, last night, I had the news on and Pick-Three came on. Well, to my surprise, I was off. I wonder if barometric pressure affects the results, pick-o-the beast. .

Yeah, nice turn out. So this month, we had a really good attendance. But attendance does not matter so much, it is not like we are a cult and seek some kind of monetary profit from attendance. Rather, we seek intellectual contributions as a profit, thus mere attendance is not a function of output. However, attendance does provide a greater probability that unique discussions will surface. Even though we now center along-side a linear table, as opposed to a circular design, we can still have a great meeting. The turnout was quite interesting, we had, assuming the table is a graph and starting from the back edge, the nodes of communications were: Ninja Gumby, Ian, Jody, Skhisma, Mr Geeeeeee (with his eeeeEeeEeee) or at least a netbook of some form, cdated, Tom, RD, Grey, Dave, Tele, Remad, and myself. For some reason I feel like I’m missing a node, so if that is the case, just drop a comment. Aside from attendance, Tele was workin’ his stereo, that tried to eject itself earlier in the day; and Remad brought a great magazine that, some of us Conspiracy nuts *cough*me*cough*, really enjoyed. And no Sunpuke? Most of us figured he was probably either hanging out with Slayer, or at a metal show.

-Matt (enferex)

libsheap is a simple shared library to aid runtime heap analysis of an application. This library wraps malloc and free calls. The allocated data returned by the memory allocator is output as well as the amount of CPU cycles between calls to the true, underlying malloc implementation. If glibc’s malloc, ptmalloc2, is used the actual size, including the header malloc attaches to each returned chunk is reported. The size of a returned chunk is typically more than that of what the user requests, as the extra size can help reduce fragmentation.

Special thanks to Google and stackoverflow.com where I learned about wrapping routines in the GNU/Linux system. Much of the wrapping code was paraphrased from Checker’s answer to a post over at stackoverflow.com Thanks Checkers!

This project is released under the GNU LGPLv3 license. So take to your shears!

-Matt (enferex)