05.29.07
Posted in movies, web at 11:35 pm by danvk
I wrote a few weeks ago about enjoying The Fog of War, the 2003 Academy Award winner for best documentary. The list of winners over the last sixty years has some fine-looking films on it. Clicking around Wikipedia, I’d quickly assembled a list of five movies I wanted to see:
I hit up my usual movie source, but it only had the first two. I watched The Wind That Shakes the Barley last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It brought me back into the Irish history kick I was on after visiting the Emerald Isle last winter. The Deer Hunter is on the way.
For the others, though, the internet has failed me. The free internet, that is. There’s still Netflix. They have all but the last movie on my list. Craig, Nick and I had a good experience with them two summers ago, so I’m tempted to give them a try. I’d most likely go with the $15/month plan, which gets me two DVDs at a time and unlimited monthly rentals. It also gets me their Instant Viewing service, which lets me download movies. Or would, if only I didn’t have a Mac. This is almost annoying enough to make me avoid Netflix entirely. To watch movies online, you need to be running Windows, Windows Media Player, and you can only watch them inside a special Netflix application. Lame.
Netflix has a two week free trial, so I may give that a shot. Any Netflix subscribers out there? What do you think?
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05.24.07
Posted in math, programming at 9:47 pm by danvk
(I noticed today that Rice has finally taken down my owlnet page. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be giving some of the interesting pages from that site a new home here on danvk.org. First up is Beal’s Conjecture…)
I’ve put a link to last summer’s work on Beal’s Conjecture over on the right-hand side of the site. A quick overview:
Beal’s conjecture states that, if (x,y,z) are co-prime and m,n,r ≥ 3, then xm + yn ≠ zr. Sound familiar? It should. It’s a generalization of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
What makes Beal’s conjecture especially exciting is that Andrew Beal, a Texas billionaire, has put a $100,000 prize on the proof or disproof of the problem. If it’s false (and most generalizations of FLT have been), then a computer search may have a chance of coming up with the counterexample. Peter Norvig did an initial hunt but came up empty. I extended his results, and also came up empty. Now that I have access to lots of machines, I’d like to extend the search a bit further.
The old article I wrote is still valid, though it contains a misstatement that’s made all the more embarrassing by being in ALL CAPS. I’ll be lazy and leave it as one of those pesky “exercises to the reader” to figure out how I goofed.
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05.23.07
Posted in tennis at 8:35 pm by danvk
Apparently there’s a big gaping hole in my RSS subscriptions. Roger Federer beats Rafael Nadal on clay and it takes me three whole days to notice?
This is kind of a big deal. Nadal hadn’t lost on clay in over two years, the past 81 matches. Federer was 0-5 against Nadal on clay before this match. And that’s a record that mattered, since the biggest clay-court tournament, the French Open, is coming up in four days. If Federer can win the French, he’ll have pulled off tennis’s greatest feat, a Grand Slam, something no man has done since Rod Laver in 1969.
The French is definitely the most exciting Grand Slam tournament these days, since it’s the only one that Fed isn’t expected to win in a rout. I woke up at 5 AM to watch the final last year, and it was phenomenal. Nadal was up two sets to one and a break, and it seemed as though it might just end there. But Fed kicked it up a notch, won some absurd points to force a tie-break, and for a moment, it looked like he just might pull it off. But all to no avail. Nadal took him out 7-4 in the tiebreak.
You’ve got to give Nadal some serious credit. He’s the only reason that Federer hasn’t won eight slams in a row, and 12 of the last 13. That’s some kind of pressure, but he’s never withered under it in the past. Mark your calendar, the French Open starts on Sunday, and the men’s final is on Sunday, June 10. I’ll be tremendously disappointed if it’s not a rematch of last year’s.
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Posted in personal at 12:59 pm by danvk
Bike to work yesterday during rush hour: 14 minutes
Drive to work today during rush hour: 12 minutes
In fairness, though, the car time outside of rush hour is probably closer to six minutes.
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05.21.07
Posted in movies, reviews at 8:29 pm by danvk
(no spoilers, I promise!)
I thoroughly enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth this weekend. It’s set in Spain in 1944, at an outpost where a few rebels are holding out against Franco’s regime. The stories of the Rebel’s fight and the fantastical world of Ofelia’s imagination run in parallel throughout the movie.
The rebel story is brutally violent. The last time I remember covering my eyes at a movie was American History X, many years ago. Pan’s Labyrinth made me do it at least three times. The violence wasn’t gratuitous, though. We all became completely desensitized to guns and seeing people being shot long ago. This violence will still make you feel something.
Ofelia’s story is the one that makes this film particularly fascinating. It’s not violent so much as occasionally gross and cringe-inducing. In the innocence vs. experience contrast that the film sets up, she’s clearly the innocent one. But she’s exceptionally brave and loyal in her own peculiar ways, just like the rebels.
I will say no more plot-wise to avoid spoiling, but a few observations:
- The sound was just phenomenal. The Captain’s gloves and the Fairies’ wings are recurring themes.
- The wiki page points to Borges as an influence. I picked up the Narnia parallels, but I have to admit, I totally missed this one. It’s there, though — the “Labyrinth” is right there in the title. It makes me wonder if there are other, more subtle Borges influences I also missed.
- The Labyrinth was very cool. It reminded me of some of the ancient art I saw in Ireland. There were about 30,000 years between the advent of art and the dawn of recorded history. That’s a huge expanse of time, and god only knows what stories are hidden in there.
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05.17.07
Posted in personal at 11:25 pm by danvk
Today was Bike to Work Day in the San Francisco Bay Area. I celebrated appropriately, along with many, many other Googlers. My commute is about 10-15 minutes by bike. It’s almost respectable, but nothing compared to the 45-mile San Francisco to Mountain View commute that a surprising number of people undertook.
There were some fun activities organized around the day. The coolest: I got to ride a brand-new Conference Bike, a seven-seated, three-wheeled beast of a bicycle. There were also free chair massages. I heard Larry’s unmistakable, gravelly voice during mine, so at least one of our founders participated. I can only assume that Sergey was still on his honeymoon.
Google has a program to encourage self-powered commuting. The company makes a donation to a charity of my choice each day I bike in. So how have I been doing?
I made the commute 16 times in Q4 before the winter cold set in. I remember that November 30 bike ride pretty vividly. It was freezing cold, dark, and I didn’t have a long-sleeve shirt. Brrrrrrr.. it was enough to keep me off my bike for another two months. I hit 20 in Q1, thanks to a surge in March. My goal is 40 this quarter. I’m at 17 as of today, hopefully 18 by tomorrow. That’s a little off-pace, but it’s definitely doable. I’ll need to bike in 3/5 days two weeks and 4/5 days four more weeks to make it. That’ll be tough.
The main thing reason I don’t bike in every single day is racquetball. If I’m going to be playing in the afternoon or early evening, it just doesn’t make sense to bike in, bike back home, drive to the racquetball club and back.
And speaking of racquetball, I’ll hopefully have some hardware to show off in a forthcoming blog post…
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05.16.07
Posted in personal at 10:48 pm by danvk
A friendly welcome to the world to my new nephew, Jasper Vanderkam Conway! He was born 2:15 AM on May 16th, and weighed in at 7 pounds 8 ounces.
Let’s see that face!
Baby and mommy
And Daddy
Long ago, Bob Dylan wrote about seeing “a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it.” Things look turbulent with mom in that picture, but he looks pretty happy and doll-like with Daddy. Wolves? I think he’ll be OK with those two. I’ll get a chance to meet little Jasper the weekend of July 4 when I visit the fam in New Jersey.
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05.06.07
Posted in movies at 5:03 pm by danvk
Google took everyone to see Spider-Man 3 on Friday. This one fits under “movies to not see.” My favorite moment was “Spidey” swinging across a nicely-backlit American flag rippling in the wind. Seriously, what were they thinking? Close seconds for favorite moments: every time a character opened his/her mouth. Ugh.
To get the bad taste out, I watched Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, an Academy Award-winning documentary about Robert McNamara. This is definitely a movie to see. McNamara narrates the story of his life and offers some lessons he’s learned along the way. His discussion of the Vietnam War is especially fascinating in light of current events. McNamara gave me the impression that most people in the White House had realized by 1967 or so that Vietnam was a lost cause, but that it was politically impossible to withdraw. Fewer than half the total U.S. casualties had occurred by 1967. Let’s hope we’re not still in Iraq in 2010.
Then there’s The Room, by this stud. Let’s just say that Rocky Horror is so eighties. Wikipedia’s summary is pretty good: ‘After a brief run in Los Angeles, the film went on to develop a cult following in the city, because of its perceived unintentional humor. It continues to have monthly midnight screenings. Wiseau promotes the film as a black comedy and insists that the “unintentional” humor is intentional. Most people who have seen the film doubt this claim.’ Here’s two choice clips from the film. This review is also excellent.
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05.02.07
Posted in boggle, programming at 10:58 pm by danvk
I took JRuby 0.9.9 for a spin with the exceptionally-inefficient Boggle program from a few months back. Here are the numbers:
$ time ruby short.rb c a t d l i n e m a r o p e t s
2338
ruby short.rb c a t d l i n e m a r o p e t s 241.95s user 1.20s system 97% cpu 4:08.35 total
$ time jruby short.rb c a t d l i n e m a r o p e t s
2338
jruby short.rb c a t d l i n e m a r o p e t s 1178.86s user 40.84s system 108% cpu 18:44.44 total
I’d heard JRuby was slow, but this is spectacular. Four times slower than the already-slow Ruby?
I’d always thought that the point of JRuby was to run Ruby programs on the JVM, and hence get the benefits of the JVM’s JIT. I guess not. With that kind of performance, the only possible justification is the ability to use Java libraries.
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Posted in politics, web at 7:35 pm by danvk
I’m generally a big fan of Barack, but this gaffe really bugs me. It’s so incredibly heavy handed. The asking price was a pittance for his campaign.
I doubt Barack himself had much to do with it, but it makes me sad to see his organization strongarming an ardent supporter like this. Or, as the Daily Kos article puts it, “Shitting on your biggest supporters is generally not a wise thing to do.” Ugh.
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