As a corollary to my last post, it’s important to be careful when calculating file seek positions (if you’re skipping around that way). It turns out it’s necessary to cast all of the numbers being used when calculating a seek position to a large integer, such as unsigned long int.
By the way, Rob had some […]

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So far my attempt at making one post per day on average, aided by my little PHP tool is going well. Here’s a plot made with the output and Google Spreadsheets showing how I’m doing as of today:

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I had one major New-Year’s resolution (though I had resolved it before then): post to my blog on average once per day. This sounds simple, but I don’t just want one post on each day. I’m happy to let my posting muse cycle between wordlessness and logorrhea. Therefore, if I post three things one […]

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Someone in the lab recently came to me asking for help in diagnosing a strange problem. The time output from their program was drifting inexplicably — that is, they were adding a certain increment every iteration, but the time was changing by some value slightly different from that increment. It turns out that this was […]

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There is a rank list of the most powerful computers on the planet: Top500.org. (It looks like they’ve recently done a site redesign for the better.) Statistics on these computers are available here. Of the top 500 most powerful computers on the planet, a measly 1.20% run a non-UNIX operating system (OS). 76.20% […]

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