after neglecting her for over four months I took "felicidad" (my
western guitar) out of her case tonight. at the beginning of today's date
she was quite "desafinado"
but after a few minutes of tuning we started to have a nice session.
Some time ago I wrote a note about VSTi on Linux. Today I tried to run FL Studio with WINE and... it works almost ;) perfectly!
I'm really impressed. Now almost all VSTi plugins works seamlessly and even external plugins can be used, i.e. my favourite Superwave P8 :)
I think it might be an issue with registration of full version copy but at least there are some cracks working.
It's good to see the real audio software run on Linux. WINE developers, you've done an amazing job. Thank you!
Here is something I wrote some while ago, hope this will be useful for some World of Warcraft p(l)ayers. Has no other relation to Linux or Debian, except it works on it flawlessly. Also note that 2.3.2 patch went live last week.
It is not a secret anymore that mages of all talent specs will be getting a present when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms - the Ice Block will be available from any friendly mage trainer for a nominal fee. Currently this spell requires a whopping 21 point investment into the Frost talent tree. With patch 2.3.2 Ice Block will become trainable to all mages, Ice Barrier will take it’s place in the talent tree and a new awesome talent - Icy Veins will take the place of the Ice Barrier, so that even frost mages have a new toy to gain in this 2.3.2 mage winterly fiesta.
While there is a significant proportion of mages that are frost for PVP or grinding survival purposes, a large proportion of mage population have never used Ice Block or haven’t used it for a while. For that reason, the rest of this article (after the break) will explore all the great uses of Ice Block, that all of you can look forward when patch 2.3.2 hits the live realms (or sooner, if this article convinces you to re-spec frost :)).
So, what does the Ice Block do? When you cast the Ice Block, it purges you from all debuffs and releases you from all snares, you get frozen solid into a large block of ice (same look as hunter’s ice trap) and for 10 seconds you are immune to all damage, but unable to do anything - no moving, casting anything, no bandages, nothing.
Getting rid of: Ice Block is a buff, so you can get out of the Ice Block by right-clicking it off at any time. Another way for keyboard-addicted mages is to press Ice Block keybinding button again (after the global cooldown is done). Enemy shamans can purge it off you and priests can mass dispel your Ice Block in PVP.
Cooldown: the Ice Block is on 5 minute cooldown, which can be ended early using the Cold Snap talent from the mage frost tree. To prevent mages casting two ice blocks back to back by using the Cold Snap, Blizzard added the Hypothermia debuff (in 2.1) that prevents you from casting the Ice Block 30 seconds after the last cast.
The main use of Ice Block is to survive pulling aggro in groups. While we all know that “good mages don’t draw aggro”, experienced players can easily show situations when drawing aggro is not mages fault and surviving that can be the difference between a wipe and a win. When Ice Block is used, your threat is NOT reduced, so you need to stay inside the Ice Block at least until you are under 130% of the tanks threat. After you Ice Block, the mob will run to the next person on the threat list. If your tank is dead, Ice Block will send the mob to another DPS or healer giving you a couple seconds to nuke it when it will be running back to you again. I have seen a few bosses loose their last 2-3% of health running between mages with Ice Block and hunters with Feign Death after a unfortunate death of the main tank.
Ice Block is a great way to get rid of almost all debuffs that exist in the game: warlock DoTs, stuns, snares, polymorph, mind control … Even boss debuffs go away in a snap - Garrote from Moroes, Demonic Chains from Illhoof and many more deadly debuffs are no threat to a mage with an Ice Block ready.
Ice Block can be used as an alternative to Slow Fall if you’re out of Light Feathers. Just do not cast it too high in the air - if the 10 seconds tick by and you haven’t hit the land yet .. you could as well kiss 10% of your durability goodbye.
When solo grinding there is noone to draw aggro from you, so the mobs will continue to beat on your personal icy sculpture, however during that time your Water Elemental or other battle pets could be dishing some damage, your cooldowns will tick down and also you will also regenerate some mana inside the Ice Block. The Ice Block could thus make the difference between your death and Frost Nova+Blink+Blizzard and their death.
Have you had some fun experience with Ice Block? Leave a comment so that others could repeat it too!
Been a week since I posted. I've not done much, though I did
complete most of the migration of my planet-searching code to
gluck.debian.org.
This is now logging to a local SQLite database, and available online.
I've updated the blog software so that I can restrict comments to posts made
within the past N days - which has helped with spam.
My other comment-spam system is the use of the crm114 mail filter.
I have a separate database now for comments (distinct from that I use for email), and after a training on previous comments all is good.
Other than being a little busy over the past week life is good. Especially when I got to tell a recruitment agent that I didn't consider London to be within "Edinburgh & Surrounding Region". Muppets.
The biggest downside of the week was "discovering" a security problem in Java, which had been reported in 2003 and is still unfixed. Grr. (CVE-2003-1156 for those playing along at home).
Heres the code:
#!/bin/sh
#
# Grep for potentially unsafe /tmp usage in shared libraries
#
find /lib -name '*.so' -type f -print > /tmp/$$
find /usr/lib -name '*.so' -type f -print >> /tmp/$$
for i in $(cat /tmp/$$ ); do
out=$(strings $i grep '/tmp')
if [ ! -z "$out" ]; then
echo "$i"
echo "$out"
fi
done
rm /tmp/$$
From December 12th to December 15th, Junta de Extremadura hosted another one of the Debian Meetings; five i18n guys shared ideas, food, buses and fun with the Debian KDE maintainers. We would like to thank Extremadura for hosting us during the Hispalinux Meeting 2007, the event was held at Universad de Derecho (Law University) in Caceres, Spain.Posted on d-d-a: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00002.html
These are the minutes, results and notes from our work, it is a brief description but hopefully complete of what we have done and what is still missing/pending.
Thanks to Cesar (cek) we had the chance to work on churro (i18n.debian.net) locally; the server is still running a 2.4 kernel because of some "tick" problems with 2.6 series, the last one tried was 2.6.21 and we should try newer ones, in order to support upgrades and not get stuck with 2.4, we hope Cesar will find time to test new Debian kernels.
First, let me introduce everybody to the services, robots and resources being hosted by i18n.d.n:
- MoinMoin wiki for local and simple reference documentation, it contains all the links to the below resources. (http://i18n.debian.net/wiki/)
- Pootle experimental server
- dl10n scripts, aka dl10n robots (codename Lion), these scripts are responsible for the status of pseudo URLs used by some translation teams, by the Project Smith and by the NMU Priority List for i18n NMU Campaign
- Synchronization of the i18n material used by the Debian website to generate translation statistics about PO and PO-debconf
- Generation of Compendium PO files per-language
- Different types of statistics
- Other non user-visible services like a full source mirror for stable, testing, unstable and experimental, used by the scripts and robots.
- DDTP, Debian Descriptions Translation Project
- DDTSS, The Debian Distributed Translation Server Satellite, a web front-end for DDTP, now integrated to DDTP to use the Database back-end instead of the e-mail interface.
And, at some point, we found important to state clear the acronyms and names used in related DDTP projects/tools:
- DDTS, Debian Description Translation Server, this is the main "back-end" used in DDTP, it tends to be the interface between translator tools (present and future ones) and the database;
- ddt.cgi is a CGI interface that is able to provide info for specific packages or translations, including diffs, related packages and active/inactive descriptions.
- DDTC which is the old (and still functional) command line client for DDTP.
We took the chance to organize a few things on churro, old accounts were cleaned out and removed, we moved from /org to /srv and got more GBs of space to the "playground". Old files were also removed and some are schedule to deletion on early 2008. With the reallocation of /org we also find some more space to /home and /var, we reorganize some of the links on the web space (specially to remove services from people's accounts), and we changed the mirror script to also synchronize the Packages and Contents files.
Grisu and Martijn worked mainly on DDTP and DDTSS integration. DDTSS now provides statistics for stable, testing and unstable, we are also working with Debian Med to provide support and infrastructure to a specific audience, like packages related to Medicine. The conversion to talk directly with DDTP/DDTS database also provided:
- Fetching new translations is almost instantaneous and marks translation as requested (avoiding duplicated works via the e-mail interface).
- After sufficient reviews occurred, the upload is instant
- Committed DDTS / DDTSS / DDTP website generation into SVN
- Added READMEs for the above directories
DDTSS now announces the user using authentication because of its integration with the Database backend used by DDTP. Quick trivia: DDTP is now a compound of 25 languages occupying 18 GBytes.
A few days before the meeting we had the offer to use "AUTOBYHAND" to upload a package with the Translation-* files. The package is now called 'ddtp-translations' and we worked during the meeting to create scripts to build the package and to test it on the archive side. This approach allow Debian i18n Team to upload new translations and remove old ones (or inactive ones) without bother FTP Master Team. Special thanks to Anthony Town, he has been working with us to prove tips, fixes and info on how to produce the package and the scripts. The code is available in the debian-l10n SVN under pkg-ddtp-translations:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/debian-l10n/pkg-ddtp-translations
In our case, "BYHAND" processing consists of a simple tarball of the main,contrib,non-free /i18n/Translation-*, we decide to work on a set of scripts to make it easier to create new packages (ddtp-translations) in a consistent way and keeping debian/changelog up-to-date. We also made some suggestions to the script what will run on the archive side to check the tarball structure, base on the examples of debian-maintainers and debtags (tags-override).
One of our initial targets for the meeting with regards to Pootle and Debian was to try big PO files per language, fortunately, Nicolas and Friedel were able to increase Pootle performance enough to get a few languages from DDTP loaded in Pootle. Using the upstream Pootle-diet branch, which uses a database back-end for the generation of statistics, the time to browse the DDTP POs of a language (~20.000 files) went down to a dozen of seconds.
Speaking about Pootle, Friedel gave us a good picture of what is coming next in terms of Pootle's development. There are improvements planned in the areas of permissions and rights delegation, as well as file management (for projects and templates). Improved management of terminology projects is also planned.
Improvements in the QA capabilities of the translate toolkit and Pootle are planned to help with the "false positives" of the pofilter checks. Better reuse of existing translations will become possible by using better translation memory techniques. There is also work planned on formats and converters involving, for example, XLIFF, TMX, TRADOS and WordFast.
Another pending task for quite a while was the CVS migration to SVN, it is now done, with a new layout. Commits to the CVS were disabled and every single script or resource depending on CVS should be changed to use SVN. For now, we are publishing (via HTTP) the status files generated by the pseudo-urls robots until we can fix the scripts to re-enable the commit of the files. You can find them here: http://i18n.debian.net/debian-l10n/status/
We are pretty happy with the changes and results of the work during those days, but we still have some items pending on our TODO list:
Maybe Eddy would love to do that? :-)
- More advertisement and usage information about PO Compendiums
There are two use cases are identified:
- Filling new PO files.
- QA work to find inconsistent translations.
Extend the duration of the statistics history. (Nekral) Debian packages of the services running on churro
- DDTP (Grisu)
- DDTSS (Martijn)
- dl10n (Nekral)
DDTP: add some scripts to handle packages with version in the description (e.g. kernel and kernel modules) (Martijn) DDTP: Standard generation of the translation tarballs (faw) DDTP: document the bracketed stats on the main page (faw) DDTC: should be updated to match the current features. Documentation to ease integration with procmail. (Nekral - low priority) Implement mail service for translation teams with their own robots (e.g. Dutch) (faw) Collect data from http://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/ (Nekral) http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po/,
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/po-debconf/
are built based on the churro material. It would make more sense to build these statistics on churro (Nekral)
- We could "fork" the page and add some fancy new features on these pages (Nekral)
- Add information from the coordination page to indicate that a translation is ongoing. (Nekral)
Pootle: missing review indication. Hard with PO back-end. (Friedel)
There are a couple more reports to be sent but they are more focused on i18n specific questions, tools and plans for 2008. So, probably those will be sent only to debian-i18n mail list. If you are interested, please, stay tuned. :-)
An article by Sam Varghese appeared on ITwire today, entitled
linux.conf.au: What is Novell doing here?:
A GNU/Linux system does not normally load modules that are not released under an approved licence. So why should Australia’s national Linux conference take on board a sponsor who engages in practices that are at odds with the community? What am I talking about? A company which should not be in the picture has poked its nose in as a sponsor. Novell, which indicated the level of its commitment to FOSS by signing a deal with Microsoft in November 2006, will be one of the supporting sponsors for the conference.Novell was also a minor sponsor of the 2007 conference, and Sam wrote an article in January expressing similar thoughts, which included this quote from Bruce Perens:
“I’d rather they hadn’t accepted a Novell sponsorship. It wasn’t very clueful of them, given Novell’s recent collaboration with Microsoft in spreading fear and doubt about Linux and software patents,” Perens said.Ultimately, I think that’s a mistaken view. Linux.conf.au is what it is thanks to the contributions of four groups:
Asked whether it was right that Novell should be allowed to be a sponsor for a conference such as this - which, in my view, is a privilege - […] […] Novell, obviously, is hoping that, as public memory is woefully short, it will be able to wriggle its way back into the community. Providing such leeway is, in my opinion, a big mistake.In my opinion, the ability to contribute to open source isn’t a privelege, it’s something that should be open to everyone, including people who’ve made mistakes in the past: and that’s precisely what the “free” in free software is all about. OTOH, if you want to see who’s been participating most in the Linux world lately, you’re much better off looking at the list of speakers than sponsors. Novell (or at least SuSE) folks giving talks in the main conference this year seem to include John Johansen and Nick Piggin. Interestingly, the count of HP folks seems a bit low this year, with only two that I can see, which leaves them not only merely equalling Novell/SuSE, but beaten by both Intel and Catalyst. Tsk! I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that changes when we can see the list of attendees’ companies in the booklet this year…
The other day, I had an interesting problem, regarding Apache, the
LocationMatch directive and regular expressions. I'll put it
here, so I'll be able to find it again...
Actually it was a quite simple problem: A simple web page, where all web
pages are protected with a password. No big Problem: Use a <location
/> and AuthType basic, problem solved.... or isn't
it?
Some documents might be needed to be available without the
authentication... for example robots.txt... or the funky custom error
document, which explains how to get the authentication data, in case
the authentication fails.
Looking at the documentation, found a solution:
LocationMatch exists, where you specify a regular
expression, which must match, for the following configuration to
apply.
What isn't mentioned in the documentation, that the obvious
solution... something like <LocationMatch
!"^/(robots.txt my401handler.html"> doesn't work. See apache bug
10932. Needed quite some time, to find this out...
Luckily Meike found the bug report above, which has a workaround for
that problem: Use <LocationMatch
"^/(?!robots.txt my401handler.html)">
Oh... and if your customized error handler references some pictures or
style sheets, don't forget to add them to the regular expression above,
too.
A few years back I asked Branden Robinson for access to the X Strike Force SVN repository in order to improve the X server's autodetection, with the goal of stealing what I could from knoppix. At the time, users were constantly wandering in to #debian saying that they had used knoppix to create an XF86Config-4 and then they used that file on their Debian installations. They were also constantly whining about how Debian wasn't doing as good a job. So I decided to do something about it, and took a look at what knoppix was actually doing so much better than us, and I was surprised to find that they pretty much just wrote a skeleton configuration file and let the X server fill in the details. I had no idea the server was capable of such things. So Branden graciously gave me SVN access and I began comparing the knoppix method to the script called by "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and realized that we probably couldn't adopt the same method because we had tons of checks for portability. So I put the problem on the backburner for few weeks and worked on something else for a while.
The Frontal Cortex provides an astute explanation as to why he shies away from political blogging in this election season:
My hypothesis is that political judgments are like moral judgments. When you see a candidate, you experience a visceral, instinctive, inexplicable response. Your brain generates an emotion - Obama is uplifting, Hillary is commanding, McCain is honorable, etc. - and then the rest of your brain goes about explaining your emotion. The inner interpreter gathers together bits of evidence, post hoc justifications, and pithy rhetoric in order to make our automatic reaction seem reasonable. But this reasonableness is just a fa ade, an elaborate self-delusion.Personally, I haven’t done much (any?) such blogging lately for lack of time, but I also generally agree with his conclusions. “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Technorati Tags: Politics, Elections, Neuroscience
Slow day today.
I slept at home, and got in at around 9:40am. Sarah didn't sleep well again
overnight, her O2 saturation levels kept dropping below 90%
because she wasn't breathing deeply enough in her sleep, and that causes an
alarm to go off. So she was pretty flat when I first got in, but she picked
up as the day went along, and was fairly chirpy by around 11am.
The doctor came by and explained the photos that we've been
given, so I'll have to try and regurgitate all of it and update the
captions. Her lungs are still looking a bit suboptimal. The third lobe on
the right lung isn't inflating well apparently. They said something about
there being some fluid as well, although the nurse said she can't hear
anything.
All that said, she spent a lot of time in a chair today, and her
O2 saturation levels have been the best they've been since she
was in the ICU. So good, that they're trialing having her off oxygen while
she attempts to take a nap as I write.
Her blood sugar levels are settling down. I think they're still slightly
elevated, but not to the point that insulin is required. She only needed
insulin with lunch yesterday, so it definitely looks like it's improving.
She's already been on her three walks today, by 4pm. An occupational
therapist came by, and went through the sternal precautions again, and
showed us how to get in and out of bed without putting undue pressure on the
sternum, and Sarah's been getting out of bed unassisted from horizontal
since. Her pain has been quite manageable.
So while today started out looking like it was going to be a small backward
step, I think it's still a good move forward. Sarah's continuing her
breathing exercises, so I'm sure her lungs will sort themselves out in the
next day or two. I guess they'll take another chest x-ray this afternoon,
although it's getting a bit late in the day.
Sarah's starting to get a bit of cabin fever, but I think today's been
pretty slow, in part because we deferred having visitors on account of her
being not up to it in the morning.
There have been several long-term wishlist bugs on Mutt to include the
(in?)famous "sidebar" patch. It adds a panel on the left side of the screen to
list mailboxes with message counts.
We do ship several patches with Debian's Mutt package that are not considered
for inclusion by the upstream authors, but this one is different. It touches
the core of the UI renderer and adds extensive counting of messages. There's
been quite a hype about the patch, it was even included in the (now
discontinued [1]) mutt-ng fork. Unfortunately, the patch was technically questionable, it
was written for the Mutt tarballs and didn't easily apply to CVS, and most
versions floating around contained lots of cruft like backup files and
temporary editor files. Furthermore, it is far from bug-free and even segfaults
occasionally.
Some months ago we decided we would build a second binary package to put the
patch in so we don't destabilize the standard package. Thanks Dann Frazier, we
got a clean patch, Adeodato had the right idea on how to build two binaries
from the same, differently-patched source (make install would run havoc, the
trick was to build the patched version before the regular one), and I
resolved some more involved conflicts with the maildir-mtime patch.
So, finally, there it is:
mutt-patched.
Disclaimer: As said, there are bugs. YMMV.
On related news, there's now also a -dbg package now for the victims of the
IMAP and header cache segfaults that we still see sometimes.
Update: The sidebar patch was not the reason for the creation of mutt-ng,
but many mutt-ng users were using it because of this patch.
Update 2008-01-08: [1] mutt-ng used to be a Mutt fork. It is now maintained
as a patch collection for Mutt.
Version 0.9.0 of QuantLib was
released a couple of days ago on Christmas Eve; as usual, Debian packages for QuantLib
were uploaded right away following a few earlier pre-releases.
As QuantLib is approaching its 1.0 release, a few API changes
requires updates to basically all of RQuantLib's C++ source files. Luckily
most changes were minor. At the same time, we also generalised the Binary
(aks Digital) option pricer to allow for a 'binType' argument (with values
'cash', 'asset' or 'gap' for CashOrNothing, AssetOrNothing or Gap digitals)
as well as an 'excType' argument to switch between European and American
exercise. Dominick made a small change to the DiscountCurve object to
seamlessly pass a switch variable indicating whether we have 'flat' curves or
not.
Another change was the addition of formal unit tests using the RUnit
from CRAN (which we happened to have added to Debian recently in the wave of
new RMetrics packages). We use the scheme initially proposed by Gregor
Gojanc and extended by Martin Maechler for RMetrics that allows the unit tests to be
run from both the source and the installed package which is nice.
As QuantLib itself has a massive amount of unit tests in its code; I
am hoping to add more and more of those into RQuantLib itself as we add more
functionality.
On that front, more exciting news: RQuantLib is now
hosted on
R-Forge. Potential contributors are encouraged to register at R-Forge
and to get in touch -- this is a great way to learn about combining C++ and
R.
To wrap up, the new version 0.2.8 is currently in the queue at R's master CRAN host and should hit the CRAN
mirrors shortly; likewise the Debian package has
been uploaded and should also propagate to Debian mirrors in due course. As
usual, source are also available locally on my site.
A few weeks back, someone asked on
debian-68k about an unexpected result of some piece of software when
it was compiled on ARAnyM, an m68k emulator that can run Linux.
His initial idea was that this could perhaps be a bug in ARAnyM,
since it only occurred to him inside ARAnyM, and not on any of the other
architectures he tried. In fact, it was a bug in his code.
Let's have a look at what's going on here. The example program which
Sergei provided and which exhibits the problematic behaviour is spread
over two files. The first file contains this:
#include <stdio.h>
void *f();
main()
void *a;
a = f();
printf("%d\n", (long)a);
while the second contains this:
#include <stdio.h>
long f();
long f()
long a = 84;
printf("%d\n", a);
return a;
Many people familiar with the C programming language will intuitively
expect that this program, when run, will output the following:
84 84When in fact, when compiled and ran on an m68k machine, the output is as follows:
84 -1072577264What's going on here? In order to understand that, we have to take a look at the assembly code. This is done by use of "objdump -d", and gives (amongst others) the following output:
800004c4 <main>: 800004c4: 4e56 0000 linkw %fp,#0 800004c8: 61ff 0000 001a bsrl 800004e4 <f> 800004ce: 2f08 movel %a0,%sp@- 800004d0: 4879 8000 05aa pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4> 800004d6: 61ff ffff feec bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt> 800004dc: 508f addql #8,%sp 800004de: 4e5e unlk %fp 800004e0: 4e75 rts 800004e2: 4e75 rts 800004e4 <f>: 800004e4: 4e56 0000 linkw %fp,#0 800004e8: 4878 0054 pea 54 <_init-0x800002f0> 800004ec: 4879 8000 05aa pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4> 800004f2: 61ff ffff fed0 bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt> 800004f8: 7054 moveq #84,%d0 800004fa: 4e5e unlk %fp 800004fc: 4e75 rts 800004fe: 4e75 rtsSo what's happening here?
#include <stdio.h>
void* f();
int main()
long* a;
a=(long*)f();
printf("%Ld\n", *a);
return 0;
void* f()
static long a=84;
printf("%Ld\n", a);
return &a;
To close up: there's a reason why compilers emit warnings if you do
something strange or "clever". In this particular case, the warning was
suppressed, since both files contained a declaration of an f() function,
even if the declaration was different. This is a horrible hack that
tries to work around those warnings, rendering them utterly useless.
Please, pretty please, with sugar on top: don't do something like
that. If you write C code, please compile it with -Wall
-Werror, and make sure it compiles that way. If you want to access
a function in a different file, create a common header file that both
will #include, so that the compiler can notice differences
between declaration and definition of a function; and don't expect that
something will work because you fixed it for a common and well-known
case, because there will often still be other places where your bug will
still trigger. In this case, by declaring the function as one returning
a long value, they made sure it could not break on 64-bit
architectures. However, as shown above, that doesn't make the bug go
away...)
Writing clean and portable code is way more fun. Trust me.
I'm going to be giving a reprise of the Laptop Liberation talk I
gave at Cornell University in November at the Nara Institute of Science
and Technology in the Kansai region of Japan on January 7th. If you
around, please feel free to show up. If you are in Osaka, Kyoto or
Nara and would like to have lunch or dinner, please email me and we
can try to arrange something.
Details on the talk is online here in English and Japanese (thanks
Mika!) although the talk itself will be in English.
Once again Techdirt carries an
excellent summary for the situation we Japanese are currently
facing. Also I recommend the
original article Techdirt refers.
I missed this one when it happened earlier
last month, but I'm still putting it on
my 2007 page of Bad Technology.
Thanks to a colleague for pointing it out.
Apparently MSN's Santa-bot made inappropriate
comments to children and was exposed in
Microsoft's
sex-obsessed RoboSanta spouts filth at children The
Register
After that, it was almost inevitable that it
would be taken off-line, even if just for a
short while, so I think the next headline
could have been predicted:-
Microsoft
kills Santa Claus The Register
What surprised me was the ham-fisted PR
attempt described in
Microsoft
accuses kids of bullying Santa into sex chat The
Register
If it was a mistake, then admit it. How did
it happen? Unruly programmers wanting
easter eggs
at Christmas, did someone
make the Santa-bot by modifying a porno-bot,
or was it a learning bot finally corrupted
by all the abuse it was sent - like Arnold on
UEA/tsw's #pubfood IRC?
Truly bizarre.
In [5]: %time e=((x+y+z)**100).expand()
CPU times: user 0.57 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.57 s
Wall time: 0.57
In [6]: %time e=((x+y+z)**20 * (y+x)**19).expand()
CPU times: user 0.25 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.25 s
Wall time: 0.25
(%i7) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x+y+z)^100)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o9) 0.41
(%i16) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x + y+z)^20*(x+z)^19)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o18) 0.080000000000005
>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**20 * (y+x)**19).expand()
CPU times: user 0.03 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.03 s
Wall time: 0.03
sympycore:
>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**200).expand()
CPU times: user 1.80 s, sys: 0.06 s, total: 1.86 s
Wall time: 1.92
swiginac:
>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**200).expand()
CPU times: user 0.52 s, sys: 0.02 s, total: 0.53 s
maxima:
(%i41) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x + y+z)^200)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o43) 2.220000000000027
sympycore:
>>> from sympy import *
>>> x,y,z=map(Symbol,'xyz')
>>> xx=((x+y+z)**20).expand()
>>> yy=((x+y+z)**21).expand()
>>> %time e=(xx*yy).expand()
CPU times: user 2.21 s, sys: 0.10 s, total: 2.32 s
Wall time: 2.31
swiginac:
>>> xx=((x+y+z)**20).expand()
>>> yy=((x+y+z)**21).expand()
>>> %time e=(xx*yy).expand()
CPU times: user 0.30 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.30 s
Wall time: 0.30
maxima:
(%i44) xx:expand((x+y+z)^20)$
(%i45) yy:expand((x+y+z)^21)$
(%i46) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand (xx*yy)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o48) 0.57999999999993
Next.