I always keep my computer up to date with the latest software, patches, drivers, etc. On Patch Tuesday I get the latest upgrades and install them. There were some new video drivers for my ATI card this week. I was happy to install them because the old ones are at least a year old. But I noticed last night that the video on the laptop LCD display was kind of blurry. I investigated and found that although the display is physically 1400 x 1050, the video was set to 1280x1024. Not only that, but there was no longer the option to set it to the correct resolution. It was obvious what was wrong, but it was not obvious how to fix it. I searched around and couldn't find anything that discussed this particular problem. Eventually I decided that I'd just restore to the save point of a day or two ago. After all, that is what the save points are for, right? In theory, anyway. I tried to do the restore, but each time, after it rebooted the computer several times, it popped up a window telling me that it couldn't restore to the save point and that it just left the machine alone. (At least it only wasted my time.) What is the point of saving periodically if you can't actually use the save? After some more poking around, I finally figured out that I could roll back the device driver update from the device properties. That worked. This is ridiculous, though.

Stupid software

Stupid blog lost a post. How am I supposed to rant? It's bad enough that I feel like I'm talking to myself here, but the damn computer isn't even listening.

Schematics

Schematics for the K-Machine are now available.

Wasteland

I was going to write an essay about tail recursion, and I wanted to demonstrate my point with some actual code. I was going to do it in C# because I happen to have some profiling tools that will help me get some numbers. I wanted a small, portable benchmark-like program that anyone could run and reproduce my results. I suppose I should have known. The world of object-oriented programming is overwhelmingly imperative. Most of the functions I found return `void'. This is the level of sophistication I expect from assembly code! The bulk of the code is still hacking and thrashing at memory locations. Of course these are named and encapsulated memory locations, so I guess that makes it OK.

Just spent the day trying to recover from a software update. It seems that `Spyware Doctor' is a new part of `Google Pack' and although it does detect spyware, it is a real dog and resource hog. It also had a habit of crashing on shutdown. What a piece of crap.

I'm kinda tired of digging through old LMI stuff, so I'm going to let that rest a while. I was thinking what else I should put up, but work has been extra busy and I'm not feeling inspired today.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
1922 - 2007

Added even more old lisp machine stuff to the code project.

Added a bunch of LMI Lambda code.

Added SYS directory to jrm-code-project. Subversion is a piece of crap. It lost the updates to a few of the files when I added them, and then I couldn't get my local machine to sync with the server to reload the files. I had to delete and replace the damn files that shouldn't have been lost in the first place. Hasn't anybody heard of transactions? Hasn't anybody heard of re-synchronizing? Hasn't anybody heard of sanity checking? Good grief. ChangeSafe never had these sorts of problems, and it had special commands for recovery for these problems in case they ever happened.

Added some more code to Bits and Pieces.

Restored my Warp Speed Introduction. I need to improve it.

Redid my Google Pages. Created all lisp custom search engine.