Insomnia, decaffeinated coffee, too much to learn!

Ya know, I'm still awake at three in the morning. It might have to do with the decaf coffee that I spiked with caffeinated beans because we ran out of decaffeinated ones....

I'm starting to yawn now. About bleedin' time. In the meantime I've been doing research on multicore software, .NET 3.5 and F#. Insanely, the three are intertwined. However I hopefully only need to learn two of them. There is now apparently some new toy in VS 2008 that abstracts the multicore processing thing and will now do much of the hard programming for you. Nifty. I'm trying to find good ways to boost the performance of the software I work on. It's not parallelizable at the moment and any moves in that direction would be highly desirable for my career advancement.

The other activities one gets up to when dealing with insomnia include playing guitar (very quietly so as to not wake anyone else), reading Facebook, updating my LinkedIn contacts, and searching for something slightly interesting on the internet.

Add blogging to that list.

Anno domini Two thousand and eight

It is officially International Year of the Potato. It is perhaps significant that my father used to call me 'Spud'. Perhaps it is also significant that I have also landed a job at SunGard AvantGard and thus I can finally say goodbye to the insecurity and poor pay for contracting work I've been doing the last couple of years.

I'm in the middle of a paradigm shift from designing software for radio test engineering systems to financial mathematics software. Five years of knowledge amassed in VB6, VB.Net, LabVIEW, TestStand, SQL and Tait's product range for not very much. Well so I thought.

What am I doing now? I'm bound by confidentiality clauses and certain aspects of professional conduct, but I can say I'm now developing software solutions in a computer language that is almost as old as FORTRAN. APL (A Programming Language) is a high level, powerful symbolic language with a small yet dedicated following. This opportunity to learn this highly mathematical tool can only benefit me. This is the language I've been waiting for.

It uniquely unifies my two professional interests and a strong data visualisation ability. Mathematics and software engineering have both been close to my heart for many years. For the last eighteen months mathematics has been coerced into a dismissively dismal few days of dedication to university. Now, finally, I have a vocation that frees my mathematical concerns from their cramped confines: They may engage in forays into my forty hour focus on financial follies! Alliteration and assonance. Turns out you can win a Booker Prize with that as your sole literary device. Sadly I have discarded the author's name from my memory so I cannot warn against her horrid, childish prose.

And, miraculously, years of effort understanding the intricacies of National Instruments' LabVIEW has not gone to waste. The overall principle of LabVIEW, dataflows, is a deep, underlying principle of APL, too. I never expected to see the concept implemented in a textual language. But then again it has been done linguistically since before the invention of Sanskrit. It's almost a natural and desirable progression from LabVIEW to APL*. APL is more powerful, more stable, highly optimised and not as bloated as LabVIEW. The downside is that the IDE is nowhere near as powerful or pretty. But I guess programmers have been living with that for longer than Visual Studio, Eclipse, SharpDevelop and JBuilder have been around. It is a pleasure to be learning APL. Its undeniable power is looking me square in the eye for my thesis. If I get that far.

Finally, a new job is tiring. Learning the business rules, the complexities of a new organisation, the software and the somewhat non-intuitive design decisions by my predecessors, even trying to decide on my superannuation options are all energy-consuming, brain-munching tasks. For the last three weeks I have been unable to face any extracurricular activities. Weekend mountain biking trips with my mate, Jaron, have been the extent of my extension.

Must get out more!

* = After hearing what LabVIEW did to Mathworks' Simulink, I'd be interested to see if any of National Instruments' patents are invalidated by APL.

A new toy...

Blogging is so 2006. Facebook is the new toy. A social networking website that suits my purpose of keeping track of old friends and showing my pictures. Neato!

PC upgrade to Band 1 PC...

Ah, Hanmer: how its shiny hot pools beckon like a dirty old man with a bad of lollies. Alas, I am about to be a victim of this horrendous small North Canterbury township. Diana and I are heading away for a weekend of soaking, walking and loving. Yippee!

I'll be glad to get away. The last two weeks have been ones I'd be quite keen to not live through again. My sister's dog, Rosie, contracted Canine Parvovirus (CPV-2) and nearly died. Feeding her an electrolyte solution with a syringe every half hour for 72 hours straight is the only thing that saved her from dying. Damn, it was worth it though: I would've been shattered if Rosie hadn't lived.

She's my best friend!!

Rosie's still at risk of septicaemia (CPV tends to shred a dog's intestines into little bits) for the next couple of months. She'll be in the clear about the time I head over to Europe (it'll take that long for her intestines to heal. Until then it's a strict diet of shredded chicken, antibiotics, other medicine and lots of love.

Ogden Nash, Philip Larkin, random mutterings...

These are my two favourite poets. You can find copious amounts of their material on the internets. I'd particularly recommend the following: Ogden Nash's You'll drink your orange juice and like it, comrade and Philip Larkin's This be the verse. Their sublime efforts at capturing what is important to my soul makes them absolute musts in my life. Couple that with the truly manic brilliance of Spike Milligan and you have a collection of intellectual property that makes Auckland University look like a kindergarten. (Isn't it already?)

On that note, do look for a Bob Jones book: Degrees For Everyone. It perfectly captures the essence of New Zealand universities at some level. I can assure you that there is still some good academic work being done, but capitalism is clearly proving to be a downfall in standards at universities where grades no longer matter, but financial performance which equates to headcounts, fee rises and service cuts. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, while Bob's book is very accurate (he admits he didn't realise how bad it was!), it is also one of the funniest books I have ever written - it is up there with Milligan and Monty Python for some serious fun. I remember the first time I read it (I've read it a couple of times), I was constantly being told off by my girlfriend for incessant giggling and sniggering! That's what the book is... it's an IGS-inducer.

Anyway, work's good at the moment. I'm dipping my toes in some VBA, and it's not too hard at all, just have to get my head around the fact that it isn't .NET, and the editor has fewer features than the VB6 IDE, and you need to know a few hacks to prevent "Excel has suffered a fatal error and needs to close... Report Yes/No"-type popups. Frustrating when it happened for about 10 minutes, but hey... I'm supposedly an engineer - I worked out a solution.

Other than that, it's not too bad. University is providing the buzz that I've needed for a while. A friend of mine, Zhewy, has encountered the same feeling of wanting something more for the brain. I don't pity his workload: my part-time load is bad enough with full-time work, but his workload sounds crazy! I hope he doesn't burn out. At least not before we have noodles.

Last night I cooked a rather good meal... Thai-Japanese fusion! I had stir-fried veges on udon noodles and dashi broth with battered, pan-fried fish on top. Delish! I must write the recipe down before I forget it - I think I want to make it again.

This is quite a rant.

Killing time until my first lecture of the morning: Math406: Bioinformatics I. It's intriguing how the models used in biology are not that different from applications in communications networks. Indeed, I can see how the examples we are presented with apply to communications and often interpret the results of theorems and such mentally. While a background of working at a radio engineering firm is handy, I can't help but wonder if I really should be starting to think in terms of biology/ecology! I can't help myself.

For instance, on Tuesday, I was nattering away to the lecturer of my Math405 course and we were discussing the model I've implemented. It models density spectra of fish in the North Atlantic - exciting, I know. At the end of the conversation, I started discussing the New Zealand economy and how we are bound to lose a lot of smart people from the country due to the economic downturn induced by the high US dollar. I compared the instability of a fish density when the large fish are overfished to the economy without a critical mass of intelligent people to pass on their experience to the not-so-experienced people in the industry. I am a bit worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow. Errr... and the loss of smart people! NZ should do something about it, and also they must stop penalising young adults who go overseas to advance themselves by charging excessive interest on their student loans. They're going and acquiring experience that NZ industry needs. We shouldn't be provoking them to bugger off and never come back!

Anyway, rant over. I need a coffee so you bastards can wait.

Lotsa love,
Jonathan

The mo... a quarter of the way there.

This is for all the ladies out there who want a piece of my action! Ain't I cute?

Movember

I'm growing a moustache... can you tell?

Support Movember and raise funds for prostate cancer research.

If you'd like to sponsor Movember, go to www.movember.com.au and use your credit card to good effect for Mo #26225 (That's me!).

Updates will follow shortly.