Time Heals All Wounds.. And Then Kills the Patient

A yellow haze.. a lone eyeball floats in the water, a mind somehow fits inside.. all it experiences is the endless bobbing and the haze.. cannot blot the sight, no eyelids. It worries that it has gone insane, as the world continues to bob and splash around it... meanwhile, the fish continue to nibble on its optic nerve beneath the water..

I setup my new shredder yesterday, and finally started shredding my sensitive junkmail (how funny we live in such a world).. it's a lot of fun, enough that I started shredding nonsensitive junkmail. There's something nice about seeing the thin strips of paper coming out the bottom..

I think I'm starting to enjoy getting rid of the extra energy I sometimes have by bike rides or short runs. It's not often that I have enough energy that I want to do this, but it's a new phonomenon that's slowly increasing in regularity. Yesterday evening I went running for about 40 minutes, and it was nice. The soreness will probably last me about 4 days if past experiences are any indicator, although I'll probably be ok to rock climb again by Sunday if I get back in time. I wonder if my body will eventually decide that I'm getting enough exercise as things are now, or if I'm going to want more. I'm probably going to want a new pair of shoes soon -- my current ones feel kind of flat.

After the run, I went to the philosophy discussion group that's forming at CMU, and we talked about disenfranchisement and capitalism. There was a Libertarian there, and so the conversation was interesting. Having been something really gives one good insight into how to argue effectively against it. Free-market types can generally be pushed to understand when government needs to step in to protect non-market values, although they tend to have the form of that intervention take place in form of a market. Developing arguments against that development is very interesting. We also talked about ways to make the system suck less. I really love political philosophy... and I do find myself wondering if I'm becoming a full-fledged socialist. Hmm...

After I got back home, a ways past midnight, it started to rain really heavily, with thunder and lightning. I was too sleepy to go out and play in the rain, although it was very tempting. Something about the rhythm and lights in a thunderstorm is very appealing to me... Makes me feel very alive. I dozed off in the living room with the windows wide open, so I at least got as much of the wonderful weather and sounds as I could given my tiredness.

This weekend is Marf's wedding. I'm going to need to get the gift ASAP to the wedding, so I'll probably get it tomorrow. Hmm.. I've been thinking about the wedding, and truth be told, I'm kinda jealous. Not of her or him specifically, but just in general that peers seem to be doing well in relationships, engaged, married, or at least in long-term mutually loving relationships. Their life has what I want so much.. and as I keep getting older, my chances of finding someone before I'm too old to enjoy sharing my youth with go down. I really want to at least know of someone for awhile before I start to date them, and I'm so picky. An old face is something that's supposed to be beautiful by accustomment, not in itself. I suspect that if I haven't met someone by 30, I'll be very unlikely to be attracted to anyone at all at a compatible age. I wonder if I will spend most of the rest of my life alone. It might be tempting to be less picky, but I don't think I can really do that. I know the rough parameters of what I want. And, na klar, as people get older, the people capable of good relationships get weeded out, and so the signal-to-noise ratio, that is, the sane, cute, really smart people who arn't unsuitable for some reason mostly end up getting married, leaving a higher proportion of the other folk.. dating is thus harder for older people. I really thought Debb was the one for me. I'm still stunned at how things worked out.. sad.. I think I probably did the right thing -- when someone can't even be civil and isn't willing to work to fix things, what can you do? .. but .. it's still hard for me to reconcile all my emotions. And now.. to go see my first ex-gf get married.. and seeing all the other couples there... Oy...

No Russian class today... I'm not sure if I'll hang out in Squirrel Hill for a bit before I head to Brecksville, or head right off... I hate driving in the daylight, but OTOH I can visit more with people if I leave earlier. I really think I need to take a weekend completely off sometime, not going anywhere and not doing anything more complex than the rock climbing on Sunday. I want to finish cleaning my apartment, rearrange my apartment a bit more, sleep a LOT, and otherwise do very little.

Finally, at work, I made a breakthrough and got matlab talking to code living in shared objects. It turns out that the existing documentation is really terrible on the web -- some describe nonportable ways of doing things, others appear to poke at functions that don't actually work on my platform, and in fact look to be bugs in the packaging of my Matlab. The original, simple, but not-very-portable interface that I originally had tried really hard to avoid actually looks like it's the best way to go -- I'll just have a single-function interface to matlab that calls C code that does dlopen()/dlsym()/dlclose() as needed. Because it's been awhile since I've used that interface, I created some new demos to make sure I get it right. In case you're interested, here's a simple example of how to use dlopen and friends on Unix..

include <stdio.h>

void hi(int input) { printf("Hello, world, you said %d\n", input); }

include "stdio.h"
include <dlfcn.h>

int main(void) { void* libhdl; void (*myfunction)(int); libhdl = dlopen("/home/pgunn/matlabi/hi.so", RTLD_NOW); if(libhdl == NULL)

       {printf("Failed to dlopen: %s\n", dlerror());return 1;}

myfunction = dlsym(libhdl, "hi"); (*myfunction)(4); dlclose(libhdl); return 0; }

It's not bad, until we start messing it up with #ifdef and similar to do the same thing on Windows, and adding another platform unfortunately means that this code may need to be touched. Oh well, at least I'm moving forward again -- the rest of the code should fall into place pretty quickly.

Evening	Fri May 21 14:36:09 2004
Sea of Eyes
Topics: Programming
A yellow haze.. a lone eyeball floats in the water, a mind somehow fits inside.. all it experiences is the endless bobbing and the haze.. cannot blot the sight, no eyelids. It worries that it has gone insane, as the world continues to bob and splash around it... meanwhile, the fish continue to nibble on its optic nerve beneath the water.. I setup my new shredder yesterday, and finally started shredding my sensitive junkmail (how funny we live in such a world).. it's a lot of fun, enough that I started shredding nonsensitive junkmail. There's something nice about seeing the thin strips of paper coming out the bottom.. I think I'm starting to enjoy getting rid of the extra energy I sometimes have by bike rides or short runs. It's not often that I have enough energy that I want to do this, but it's a new phonomenon that's slowly increasing in regularity. Yesterday evening I went running for about 40 minutes, and it was nice. The soreness will probably last me about 4 days if past experiences are any indicator, although I'll probably be ok to rock climb again by Sunday if I get back in time. I wonder if my body will eventually decide that I'm getting enough exercise as things are now, or if I'm going to want more. I'm probably going to want a new pair of shoes soon -- my current ones feel kind of flat. After the run, I went to the philosophy discussion group that's forming at CMU, and we talked about disenfranchisement and capitalism. There was a Libertarian there, and so the conversation was interesting. Having been something really gives one good insight into how to argue effectively against it. Free-market types can generally be pushed to understand when government needs to step in to protect non-market values, although they tend to have the form of that intervention take place in form of a market. Developing arguments against that development is very interesting. We also talked about ways to make the system suck less. I really love political philosophy... and I do find myself wondering if I'm becoming a full-fledged socialist. Hmm... After I got back home, a ways past midnight, it started to rain really heavily, with thunder and lightning. I was too sleepy to go out and play in the rain, although it was very tempting. Something about the rhythm and lights in a thunderstorm is very appealing to me... Makes me feel very alive. I dozed off in the living room with the windows wide open, so I at least got as much of the wonderful weather and sounds as I could given my tiredness. This weekend is Marf's wedding. I'm going to need to get the gift ASAP to the wedding, so I'll probably get it tomorrow. Hmm.. I've been thinking about the wedding, and truth be told, I'm kinda jealous. Not of her or him specifically, but just in general that peers seem to be doing well in relationships, engaged, married, or at least in long-term mutually loving relationships. Their life has what I want so much.. and as I keep getting older, my chances of finding someone before I'm too old to enjoy sharing my youth with go down. I really want to at least know of someone for awhile before I start to date them, and I'm so picky. An old face is something that's supposed to be beautiful by accustomment, not in itself. I suspect that if I haven't met someone by 30, I'll be very unlikely to be attracted to anyone at all at a compatible age. I wonder if I will spend most of the rest of my life alone. It might be tempting to be less picky, but I don't think I can really do that. I know the rough parameters of what I want. And, na klar, as people get older, the people capable of good relationships get weeded out, and so the signal-to-noise ratio, that is, the sane, cute, really smart people who arn't unsuitable for some reason mostly end up getting married, leaving a higher proportion of the other folk.. dating is thus harder for older people. I really thought Debb was the one for me. I'm still stunned at how things worked out.. sad.. I think I probably did the right thing -- when someone can't even be civil and isn't willing to work to fix things, what can you do? .. but .. it's still hard for me to reconcile all my emotions. And now.. to go see my first ex-gf get married.. and seeing all the other couples there... Oy... New photos from Iraq Oblique Begging Lest anyone think that only artsy folk do Film Festivals.. What a fun language No Russian class today... I'm not sure if I'll hang out in Squirrel Hill for a bit before I head to Brecksville, or head right off... I hate driving in the daylight, but OTOH I can visit more with people if I leave earlier. I really think I need to take a weekend completely off sometime, not going anywhere and not doing anything more complex than the rock climbing on Sunday. I want to finish cleaning my apartment, rearrange my apartment a bit more, sleep a LOT, and otherwise do very little. Finally, at work, I made a breakthrough and got matlab talking to code living in shared objects. It turns out that the existing documentation is really terrible on the web -- some describe nonportable ways of doing things, others appear to poke at functions that don't actually work on my platform, and in fact look to be bugs in the packaging of my Matlab. The original, simple, but not-very-portable interface that I originally had tried really hard to avoid actually looks like it's the best way to go -- I'll just have a single-function interface to matlab that calls C code that does dlopen()/dlsym()/dlclose() as needed. Because it's been awhile since I've used that interface, I created some new demos to make sure I get it right. In case you're interested, here's a simple example of how to use dlopen and friends on Unix.. file 1 LINK: include <stdio.h> void hi(int input) { printf("Hello, world, you said %d\n", input); } to compile: gcc -shared -nostdlib hi.c -o hi.so file 2 LINK: include "stdio.h" include <dlfcn.h> int main(void) { void* libhdl; void (myfunction)(int); libhdl = dlopen("/home/pgunn/matlabi/hi.so", RTLD_NOW); if(libhdl == NULL) {printf("Failed to dlopen: %s\n", dlerror());return 1;} myfunction = dlsym(libhdl, "hi"); (myfunction)(4); dlclose(libhdl); return 0; } to compile: gcc -ldl hello.c -o hello It's not bad, until we start messing it up with #ifdef and similar to do the same thing on Windows, and adding another platform unfortunately means that this code may need to be touched. Oh well, at least I'm moving forward again -- the rest of the code should fall into place pretty quickly.