tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53357222012-01-13T05:06:16.370-05:00Various praise/comments/rants about Troy, RPI, PhDs, Macs, and life in general.laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-37286858454714324882008-11-18T00:20:00.002-05:002008-11-18T00:31:53.430-05:00

You are in a mailbox. Space is limited. You decide to reward one of the recipients (with completely fair probability) by attaching a $100 bill to their letter and delivering it personally. There is only enough space in the mailbox to accumulate x letters, where x &lt n, the number of letters you will receive. How do you choose which letter to which you should attach the money?Some assumptions

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-38481369647168281632008-08-17T00:37:00.002-04:002008-08-17T00:40:57.516-04:00

Oh good lord how much of a pain in the ass this has been. Just trying to get GNUstep on the Linux cluster so I can run my stuff. I decided to do my RPE in Objective-C, which is an (old) language Apple has been pushing for a while. I knew gcc would compile Objective-C code, so I figured why not? MISTAKE! Objective-C is not the problem, having the free Cocoa user-space environment (GNUstep)

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-4850839946789690722008-08-08T02:56:00.002-04:002008-08-08T02:59:30.779-04:00

Well the AFC East just got more exciting now the Favre has joined the Jets. I've been a Pats fan (I'm from RI). But if they're not playing the Pats, I'm going to be rooting for the Jets from now on. Good luck Brett and I hope you tear it up in NY!

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-27530310762357003242008-08-07T21:11:00.003-04:002008-08-07T22:08:44.670-04:00

OK, so I thought maybe Garbage Collection was going to work out well for me. It did - for a while. When my network size was relatively small (~20 nodes) everything worked great. Crank that up to 50, not so great. 100, and depending on the random network layout, one simulation would take 90 minutes and 2GB of RAM. Not good. I decided to re-write it w/o GC using good old-fashioned retain

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-78227827760459701952008-08-02T03:40:00.002-04:002008-08-02T03:43:34.327-04:00

So, I'm hoping to start the whole Body for Life diet again. Actually, it's not so much a diet as a lifestyle change. Either way, tired of being overweight. It's especially dangerous for type 1 diabetics. So we'll see if this time around maybe it'll last a little better. Maybe this time it will go the distance. I would really like that. Last time what happened? Not sure, but grocery

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-57627011163443773162008-07-29T20:30:00.003-04:002008-07-30T00:14:59.429-04:00

OK, Honda totally blew me away. I didn't even know about this, but apparently Honda has released a fuel cell-based car, the FCX Clarity, in CA. Now it's not a full blown release, and it's only SoCal that gets them, but still, this thing can help with a lot of problems, like dependence on foreign oil, pollution (by products are essentially just H2O), high gas prices, etc. Once I'm out of school

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-20648346661576092892008-07-29T00:16:00.003-04:002008-07-29T00:23:24.544-04:00

OK, so on Tuesday (7/22/08) Gov. Paterson signed a bill passing more video game legislation. Why? We all know it's just going to get shot down as being unconstitutional by the ESA. Every bill like this does. So it's a waste of money and time. And Paterson is really working hard at making me not vote for him, what with his treatment of SUNY and now this. All he had to do was basically

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-13049978761407115542008-07-28T01:43:00.004-04:002008-07-29T00:24:35.155-04:00

OK, I was just scouring the web for any indication of sample code for GRG when I somehow stumbled upon MacResearch.org - a site dedicated to using your Mac for scientific research! How friggin' cool is that?

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-29522818769236484852008-07-28T00:51:00.002-04:002008-07-29T00:13:20.920-04:00

I don't suppose anyone has any code for the GRG algorithm lying around, huh? That's Generalized Reduced Gradient for the google-impaired. Let me know - I could sure use it. In the meantime, I'll be hunting around netlib.

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-75650197854915982122008-07-25T23:02:00.005-04:002008-07-29T00:13:42.581-04:00

Where is the god damn accountability? I swear to christ it must be a Long Island thing where people just don't care about the posted hours - hours during which doors should stay open and people allowed in or out! I just tried going to Waldbaum's, specifically store 278. Granted, when I tried going in, my cell said it was 10:56. Now that's cutting it a little close, but still, accountability.

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-63687695329352203582008-07-23T17:47:00.003-04:002008-07-29T00:14:15.870-04:00

Flash flood this morning. Not very common for Long Island, but a little devastating nonetheless. On my way in to school, there's a slight dip where the road passes under a railroad bridge. It was completely flooded, complete with a late-model Mercedes up to its windows in water. So I turned around, skipped my Dunkin Donuts breakfast (a daily ritual) and went and got some Wendy's instead...

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-64890921180132092432008-07-21T21:00:00.003-04:002008-07-29T00:14:40.652-04:00

I told my mother that whatever happens with my PhD, I don't need to make a huge splash, but I would like it to be more than a ripple. I thought that was good enough to change the name of this blog.

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-19843587820076270722008-07-17T03:15:00.013-04:002008-08-08T03:01:57.217-04:00

K - one more problem. For my project, I was looking for a quick Objective-C or Cocoa priority queue implementation. You'd think they'd have one, but no. I tried googling, and I did find some stuff, but everything was zip files you had to download to open. Too much of a pain in the ass for me. So I broke open the CLRS book to find priority queues. Here's my quick implementation of a priority

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-72254909859689240342008-07-16T03:42:00.003-04:002008-07-29T00:15:50.835-04:00

OK. Quick rant time.I've been working on my RPE (it's like a candidacy) for a while now and it's really crunch time. So I'm trying to get this discrete event simulator completed in time to collect some results for my presentation on the 25th of July. This really needs to get done quick, what should I use? C++? C? Those are very fussy about types and what you can pass where. Maybe this

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-1072060034169699402003-12-21T21:27:00.000-05:002004-09-06T15:34:04.566-04:00

Wow, how's that for a six-month hiatus? Well, back to blogging... Anyway, so that six months on coumadin rolled by fairly quickly. Graduation from RPI was looming over my head as I began counting the days I was to continue taking coumadin. Eventually, the day came, and I went to Albany Medical to consult with my doctors. I don't remember which I saw first, but in the end I had seen both Dr.

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-955230602003-06-10T17:45:00.000-04:002003-06-10T17:45:34.000-04:00

After that, I think it was the next day, they moved me out of intensive care. I think they had a ward for people recovering from vascular events, like blood clots. They put me on coumadin, which is a blood thinner. It's also used as rat poison. Crazy how stuff like that works, eh? Penicillin = bread mold, coumadin = rat poison... What next? Anyway, so they kept me at Albany Med. for a few

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-935107882003-04-30T00:16:00.000-04:002003-04-30T00:24:19.000-04:00

To continue... So Deana brought me to RPI's infirmary. He looked at my leg, took some measurements of it with a tape measure, and told me I had a blood clot. I really didn't know what all that meant - just that blood wasn't flowing easily into my leg. He said it was in my veins... I asked how he knew it wasn't in my arteries. "If you had a clot in an artery in your leg, your leg would be

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5335722.post-934441242003-04-29T00:02:00.000-04:002007-02-04T02:28:33.910-05:00

OK. So this is going to be my web journal. It will give you some insight about what it is to be me. So let's kick it off.My name is Justin. I was born February 3rd, 1980. I've had a 70-year old's worth of medical mishaps -- and I'm not happy about it. I went to South Kingstown High School in Wakefield, Rhode Island. It's pretty good so far as public schools go. I scored a 1400 on my SATs

laprejhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16517666916175623058noreply@blogger.com