March 03, 2003

The Switch Blog

Cool! Apparently there's a Switch Blog where you can read about those who have switched.

Score another one for technorati.

Posted by jzawodn at 10:33 PM

Studying Again

I haven't really had to study since my college days. And even then I didn't study much. But I have a final exam of sorts coming up this Friday: the FAA Private Pilot written test.

Most of my "spare" time for the next several days will be consumed be taking on-line practice tests, reading about weather and navigation, and going over a bunch of rules and regulations.

What fun.

The last time I took this test (back in college), I got a 96%. I don't expect to beat that score, but I hope to come close. Passing is 70% but I'd feel like an idiot if I got less than an 80% on it.

I'll be sure to post the results in my flying blog late on Friday.

Posted by jzawodn at 08:25 PM

Success!

After about three weeks of fighting with an optimization problem at work (including an interesting detour into Perl guts), we have finally prevailed. The processing didn't run out of memory and die after the first few iterations.

The solution was to re-think the algorithm yet again. Our first few attempts helped but didn't get us far enough. The most recent change, however, has kept us far enough under the memory limit to ensure that it should run to completion. I'll know for sure in the morning.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when the Perl code is converted to Java. Will it be faster or slower? Use more or less memory? How many more or fewer lines of code will it require?

Time will tell.

Posted by jzawodn at 07:43 PM