These are a few of my favorite plans in 1993. -- Adam Rifkin, adam@vlsi.caltech.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------- work address: Caltech Mail Stop 256-80, Pasadena, CA 91125. home address: 1028 E Del Mar Blvd #201, Pasadena, CA 91106. home: (818) 584-5808, work: (818) 356-6846, fax: (818) 792-4257. The phones are Baroque right now. Please call Bach later. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Hello, my name is Adam, and I am new to K. Mani Chandy's group. I am on Tethys, a Titaness, daughter of Uranus and wife of Oceanus. At work, I live in Booth Computing Center, room 12. My phone number here is: (818) 356-6846. My mailing address here is: Caltech Mail Stop 256-80, Department of Computer Science, Pasadena, CA 91125. At home, I live in a quaint two-bedroom Catalina apartment, with my roommate Peter Bryant, a 3rd year astronomy Ph.D. student. My phone number there is: (818) 584-5808. My mailing address there is: Adam Rifkin, 1028 East Del Mar Blvd #201, Pasadena, CA 91106-3287. I am not the walrus. *** work address: Caltech Mail Stop 256-80, Pasadena, CA 91125 fax phone # : Dept of Computer Science (818) 792-4257 Please do not expect a mail reply from me any time before the fifth of January. I'm somewhere on the Eastern seaboard of the United States right now. My tentative schedule: Dec 12-13 In Connecticut with family (203) 762-2676 14-15 Winter Simulation Conference, Washington DC 16-18 Visiting College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 19-22 Visiting MITRE Corporation, Northern Virginia 23-26 In New York with family (203) 762-2676 27-31 APO National Convention, Boston, MA Jan 1-4 In Connecticut with family (203) 762-2676 4 Return to Caltech, Pasadena, CA -- Quarter 2 Begins! I hope you have a happy and safe holiday season. *** Professor Carlo Cipolla, formerly of U. C. Berkeley and the University of Pavia, Italy has laid down a framework for explaining human dumbness in his paper, "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity". Try out the basic laws: 1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." 2. "The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person." 3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." 4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people inevitably turns out to be a costly mistake." 5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person" and a corollary, "A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit." *** A novel approach is to remove all power from the system, which removes most system overhead so that resources can be fully devoted to doing nothing. Benchmarks on this technique are promising; tremendous amounts of nothing can be produced in this manner. Certain hardware limitations can limit the speed of this method, especially in the larger systems which require a more involved & less efficient power-down sequence. An alternate approach is to pull the main breaker for the building, which seems to provide even more nothing, but in truth has bugs in it, since it usually inhibits the systems which keep the beer cool. *** In fact when I've a floppy of a maximum diameter, When I can call a subroutine of infinite parameter, When I can point to registers and keep their current map around, And when I can prevent the need for mystifying wraparound, When I can update record blocks with minimum of suffering, And when I can afford to use a hundred Gigs for buffering, When I've performed a matrix sort and tested the addition rate, You'll marvel at the speed of my asynchronous transmission rate. Though all my better programs that self-reference recursively Have only been obtained through expert spying, done subversively, But still for input vegetable, animal, and mineral, I've built a better model than the one at Data General. *** Robert Harley and I will be in Mexico until Sunday, March 28. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you then. Ah, Mexico... where the hills are alive... with the sound of... maggots... Pointers to pointers to printf()-like functions; Unary minus and nested conjunctions; Integers, booleans, characters, strings; These are a few of my favorite things. *** Top 5 wrong answers to the question: "Do I look fat?" (asked by Women to Men) 1) I wouldn't call you fat, I wouldn't call you thin either. 2) Compared to what? 3) A little extra fat looks good on you. 4) I've seen fatter. 5) Could you repeat the question? I was thinking about your insurance policy. Top 5 wrong answers to the question: "Do you love me?" (asked by Women to Men) 1) I suppose so. 2) Would it make you feel better if I said yes? 3) Depends on what you mean by love. 4) Does it matter? 5) Who, me? *** If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call you to say they had a nice time. Now you'll be be expected to throw another party next year. What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake up several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've been indicted for anything. You want your guests to be so anxious to avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from having another one... If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas through your living room window. As host, your job is to make sure that they don't arrest anybody. Or if they're dead set on arresting someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ... *** My plan is to stop all these darned committee meetings. eText Committee Rules from now on: (1) Never arrive on time, or you will be stamped a beginner. (2) Don't say anything until the meeting is half over; this stamps you as being wise. (3) Be as vague as possible; this prevents irritating the others. (4) When in doubt, suggest that a subcommittee be appointed. (5) Be the first to move for adjournment; this will make you popular -- it's what everyone is waiting for. *** To write Vogon poetry. My love runs by like a day in June, And she makes no friends of sorrows. She'll tread her galloping rigadoon, In the pathway or the morrows. She'll live her days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot her. My own dear love, she is all my heart -- And I wish somebody'd shoot her. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Current number of days without corn: 7. ARGH!!! Current number of days without caffeine: 9. ARGH!!! Current number of days without alcohol: 10. ARGH!!! ---------------------------------------------------------------- work address: Caltech Mail Stop 256-80, Pasadena, CA 91125. home address: 1028 E Del Mar Blvd #201, Pasadena, CA 91106. home: (818) 584-5808, work: (818) 356-6846, fax: (818) 792-4257. The phones are Baroque right now. Please call Bach later. I will be at the History of Programming Languages conference in Boston from April 20 through 25. I will be at the Harvard Venture Capital conference in Irvine on April 26. I will respond to email on April 27. If you absolutely MUST reach me, contact me through Linda Rifkin in Wilton, CT. (203) 762-2676. The cost will be $5 for the first minute, and $3 for each additional minute, so be snappy. ---------------------------------------------------------------- When my younger brother applied for his first job delivering our neighborhood newspaper, he was told, "You'll be earning three dollars an hour. And next year you'll make five dollars an hour." "Sounds great," my brother replied. "I'll see you next year." *** I am back from the History of Programming Languages II conference. Best of the quotations (see me for a full transcript): "There are 3 signs of senility in a professor. When his dreams turn to education, ethics of history." -- JAN Lee "The Worst Language Ever: OS/360 JCL." -- Fred Brooks "Being right is not an explanation." -- Michael Mahoney "A camel is a horse designed by a committee. Algol 68 was no camel." -- Charles Lindey "History gets wiped out by the barbarians. Since I was a barbarian, I didn't mind." -- Bill Whitaker "The greatest secret about the atomic bomb was that it could be built. Same for high level parallel programming." -- Per Brinch Hansen "The more lambda calculus, the better." -- Guy Steele Jr. "I played Lil Abner because I looked the part." -- ibid "So many parentheses, so little time." -- the crowd "Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous." -- Richard Gabriel "Alan Robinson's paper... I could not understand it." -- Alain Colmeraurer "That is not an oral misprint." -- Jean Sammet "MIT is an educational institution, so hopefully it trains people and then they leave." -- Joel Moses "The worst enemy of a terrific idea is a good one." -- Alan Kay "Anyone could have done physics in the Middle Ages." -- Alan Kay "Hire people who don't know what you want them to do is hard." -- Adele Goldberg speaking as Alan Kay would "Do not have customers. They request support." -- ibid "Programming languages hang around for too long." -- Alan Kay "Give me a few minutes and I can relate any 2 things." -- ibid "Reading old email, we were lunatics." -- Ralph Griswold "Everybody likes it so they want to change it." -- Dennis Ritchie "I tried to implement Simula in BCPL, which makes C look like a high level language. At that time I lost most of my hair." -- Bjarne Stroustrup "I do not care if you give me a hangar with my plane, as long as I do not have to carry it when I want to fly." -- ibid "Slash bin was a critical path for disaster." -- Stu Feldman "I do not understand your question, but I have an answer." -- Niklaus Wirth "I am not allowed to have opinions, but I am allowed to answer questions." -- Per Brinch Hansen "No language is religion." -- Alan Kay ---------------------------------------------------------------- work address: Caltech Mail Stop 256-80, Pasadena, CA 91125. home address: 1028 E Del Mar Blvd #201, Pasadena, CA 91106. home: (818) 584-5808, work: (818) 356-6846, fax: (818) 792-4257. The phones are Baroque right now. Please call Bach later. *** To perfect the sixth sense. Don't LOOK at anything in a physics lab. Don't TASTE anything in a chemistry lab. Don't SMELL anything in a biology lab. Don't LISTEN to anything in a philosophy department. and, most importantly, Don't TOUCH anything in a computer lab. *** How many hardware engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll fix it in software." How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "We'll document it in the manual." How many tech writers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: "The user can work it out." *** Login name: robert In real life: Superfly Guy Directory: /ufs/jan/robert Shell: /usr/local/etc/tcsh Last login Thu Apr 22 16:12 on ttyp0 from flora.cs.caltech No unread mail Project: shmoject Plan: Everything you never wanted to know about me: Name: Robert Joseph Harley - call me Rob (or Joe, Bartholomew, whatever) Born: yes - on 27th November 1970 in Dublin, actually Sex: someti^H^H^H^H^H^Hmale Office: Booth 10, x6498 - with Cap'n James "Tiberius" Cook UserID: robert@vlsi, rjh@csvax, rjharley@cco TAing: CS20 - office hours whenever I'm around Home: 442 Sth. Catalina Ave. # 301 Pasadena, CA 91106 Phone: (818) 796 0279 Interests: women, computer science, women, math, women, travel, women >>> Mandelbrot to a .pgm file: float x,y=1,s=1./128,X,Y,V;main(i){for(puts("P5 257 127 63");X=Y=0,x?/*Hi Mom*/ x+=s,1:(x=-2,y-=s);putchar(i))for(i=64;--i&&X*X+(V=Y*Y)<4;X=X*X-V+x)Y=2*X*Y+y;} >>> 2556 decimals of e: main(i){int j,s,M=1e3,d[1001];for(i=M;i;)d[i--]=1;for(printf("e>2.");/*Hi Dad*/ ++i<427;printf("%06d",s))for(s=0,j=M;j>1;d[j]=s%j,s/=j--)s+=1e6*d[j];puts("");} Subject: 8 queens q(a,b,c){int e,f,i=8;for(;a&&i--;)if(e=1<