David's Mumblings

Last Exam (ever)

category: School
Assuming that my petitions all get accepted -- the final one was submitted two days ago -- I just took the last exam of my entire university career. It's a strange feeling, knowing that I will be done with school in a quarter, after finishing my thesis. I've been in one form or another of school for pretty much as long as I can remember. While I have worked full-time before, it was always as a break between academic phases. This time, in July, it will be a more or less permanent change in my life... I suppose I could always go back and get a PhD like my parents did, but that would be several years from now. :-)

As a somewhat amusing fact, I will be starting work on Bastille Day: July 14th. ^ TOP

Posted on 03/21/08 at 02:52:47 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Computer Maintenance

category: General
My computer had been a little noisy of late, enough that it was starting to irritate me. I decided to not study for my exams and instead open it up (one must have one's priorities straight... err... or something like that...) to see what I could do. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 03/19/08 at 01:34:45 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Thoughts of GGP prover implementations

category: General Game Playing
I always knew that the logical prover I wrote for CS227b back in 2006 was not terribly efficient, but recently I learned just how inefficient it is. While it takes on the order of a second to list legal moves in the first state of chess, a Prolog implementation takes on the order of 100ms. An order of magnitude is a pretty impressive improvement. What follows is an exploration of the inefficiencies of my implementation and my thoughts on improving it. Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 03/15/08 at 03:36:15 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Exam schedule blues

category: School
I have two exams this quarter. One is scheduled Thursday 8:30am-12:30pm. The other is scheduled on the same day 7pm-10pm. Sigh.



Incidentally, this post was made by accessing the web via my HTTP proxy through my software router, both of which were running a TCP/IP implementation I wrote. I.e., over my own version of the Internet! (Well, almost...) Much grooviness. ^ TOP

Posted on 03/14/08 at 05:56:30 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Actual vs. Perceived Performance: progress bars

category: Programming
My friend Adam sent me this link to an article on actual vs. perceived performance. The gist of it is that by altering the rate at which a progress bar fills, even if the actual time it takes to fill the bar remains constant, you can change people's perception of how long it takes.

I think it's pretty interesting that you can make people think something is faster simply by making the bar move continuously and more rapidly towards the end, rather than have it increase in jumps and be slow to get started.

It also means that if you want to trick users, err, I mean, "improve performance" of your application, you can just fake the progress bars to not represent what's actually happening... ^ TOP

Posted on 03/03/08 at 03:44:57 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Dad and Vi: the T-Shirt

category: Humor
I have to say, if they had this t-shirt in adult sizes, I would have immediately bought one. It would have been very funny -- if people asked me about it, I could be all like: "Oh, it's nothing really, it's just that he co-wrote the first version..."

Well, made my day, at least... ^ TOP

Posted on 03/03/08 at 02:31:17 by dchaley (David Haley)
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