Joe Ganley [http://ganley.org/]

Writing code since 1979

I have been a professional software engineer for over 10 years. I have written many kinds of software, but my particular strengths are interactive graphics applications, compilers and interpreters, and algorithms.

I also enjoy writing, woodworking, and home improvement. Also this.

Resumé

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Thursday, November 30, 2000

Normally I try not to regurgitate SlashDot stories, but this one led me on such a trip down memory lane that I can't help myself. The story is that a guy has implemented a Turing Machine in Conway's Life. The following /. commentary pointed to Stephen Wolfram, one of the leading cellular-automata people in the world, and an interesting Forbes article about him. I was really interested in cellular automata as a teenager, and this led me to dig out a big notebook full of cellular automata papers that Wolfram sent me back then (amusingly, I even still had the cover letter). Such cool stuff; I'm definitely looking forward to his new book. I've always liked Stephen Wolfram, because he's brilliant and arrogant. Arrogance is a great trait for a scientist to have; nothing gets other scientists' juices flowing like getting all up in their face and telling them they've been doing it all wrong; instead, they should be doing it this way -- your way. Even if you're wrong, it gets them thinking. Anyway, back to the Turing machine, back when I was a teenager the big question in cellular automata was whether they were capable of universal computation. I believe that question was answered some time ago, specifically an existence proof that it is possible to implement a Turing machine in Life, but this is the first time I've actually seen it done.

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Tuesday, November 28, 2000

I told you so.

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Friday, November 24, 2000

This is so cool: the world's first commercial power plant that converts oceanic wave motion into electricity.

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Wednesday, November 22, 2000

A very cool article about Seymour Cray and the CDC-6600, which was probably the world's first supercomputer. It also, perhaps, marked the beginning of the end of IBM's total domination of the industry, and also wonderfully illustrated how a very small team of very smart people can engineer circles around a big behemoth like IBM.

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Thursday, November 16, 2000

Fortune just released its annual "Top Cities for Business" list, on which San Jose had fallen from #2 to #5. One of the spoilers was D.C., making its debut on the list at #4. I can't decide whether to be happy about this.

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Tuesday, November 14, 2000

At long last, I've put up a few recent pictures of Megan! It has been something like a year and a half since I last put up pictures of her, which is an eternity on the scale of a little kid's growth. I blame Microsoft: my scanner, which worked beautifully on my Macintosh, causes my Win98 machine to refuse to boot if I install the scanner drivers on it. Hopefully I'll scan some more pictures from the last year and a half, and improve the picture navigation, soon.

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Monday, November 13, 2000

What the hell is this guy doing? I saw this while driving my daughter to school, and had to shoot a picture because it looked so weird. Cathy thought he might be some sort of low-budget Ghostbuster, but later I saw a guy in the same getup emerge from a Virginia Department of Transportation truck, so I suspect it might be some sort of surveying rig. Then again, he might be an alien scouting for a good landing site. Does anyone really know? Update 11-1-01: My brother-in-law Chris tells me he in, in fact, surveying; the rig on his back is a highly-accurate GPS unit. He walks along and pushes buttons on the handheld part of the unit to indicate landmarks (manholes or whatever).

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I simply cannot say enough good things about Enlightenment With A Vengeance. It's the travelogue of a guy from NYC who quit his job and went wandering about the US. It's funny, interesting, insightful, contains some good photography, the site is well-designed... oh, hell, check it out for yourself.

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If you'll allow me to pretend I'm Dave Barry for a moment, wouldn't "Hanging Chad and the Double Punches" be a great name for a rock band?

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Friday, November 10, 2000

I'm a telecommuter, and I've spent logged quite a few hours working from places other than my home--for instance, a week in a condo at a ski resort--but this pales in comparison to this guy.

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Keyboard news:

First, for desktop PCs, there's this extremely weird "keybowl" keyboard. This consists of two domes, on top of which you rest your hands. You then "type" by simultaneously pushing each of the two domes in one of the eight compass directions, thus creating a 64-"key" keyboard. The appeal of this is that it requires no fine finger motion, and thus is supposed to be much friendlier with respect to repetitive stress injuries. However, (a) it's really pricey, at $320 currently, and (b) although they make some vague claims about typing speed, I have trouble imagining how I could even approach my typing speed of 140wpm with such an arrangement.
Second, for PalmPilots: I loved the idea of the Fitaly keyboard, designed for one-finger typing as on a PDA, but the keyboard their software provided was right in the middle of the screen, always in the way. Now they've come out with a version that uses an overlay in the graffiti area of the PalmPilot as the keyboard: much better.

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Wednesday, November 08, 2000

The otherwise-wonderful Car Talk guys listed the top 10 worst cars ever, and the Vega came in at #2. I'm shocked; I loved mine.

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Back of the envelope, round 2: How much liquid water is there on Earth? I calculated 5.98x10¹⁹, Chris got 1.27x10²⁰. It turns out the real answer is 3.59x10²⁰. The error was that Chris and I both underestimated the average depth of the oceans -- I said 2,000 feet, Chris said 5,000. The average depth of the top three oceans (Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian) are each around 12,000 feet! And if I replace the 2,000-foot figure in my calculations with 12,000, I get within 0.05% of the right answer. (It's worth noting, by the way, that our ground rules prohibit looking at any references.)

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Wednesday, November 01, 2000

I rented High Fidelity a couple of nights ago, and I've spent the last couple of days trying to convince myself that it was as good as I'd expected it would be. I failed. While I found much to like about it, overall it tried too hard to be deep for me to just sit back and enjoy it, but it wasn't deep enough to actually be thought-provoking.

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