Author: H Walker Jones, Esq

A professional programmer with a sordid past involving sysadmin, tech support, and cooking.

Cape 2014, Day 4

Oh, the sunburns. No beach today (except Joan).

We wandered out after lunch (meatball grinders, yum!) to stroll downtown Chatham. Megh and Joan walked the length of it, while the kids and I were waylaid by a couple of toy stores and ice cream. We played at the park until the womenfolk returned. They came laden with items so I regret letting them loose without supervision.

After returning home we waited for Tim, Kelly, and Delta to arrive. We had a great dinner out on the back deck, and finished up with a visit to Schoolhouse Ice Cream.

Cape 2014, Day 3

We spent the middle of the day at the beach, bayside this time.

I knew that going midday would be a mistake, and I was right: we’re all sunburned across our shoulders. All the extra time I spent in the sun for the past few weeks, preparing for this trip, was for naught. Megh didn’t stand a chance, though the kids aren’t too bad (they had pretty good tans already so their burns are light).

We crept out during the afternoon in search of our traditional source of salt water taffy, plus a birthday gift for our latest nephew Delta (a stuffed whale and a dump truck seemed appropriate for him).

For dinner we introduced Joan to our home-made meatballs over spaghetti.

Cape 2014, Day 2

The bad weather trailed away by lunch time. The clouds remained but we went to Hardings Beach (which is on the ocean side). The water was freezing but the girls swam anyway. They both had new flippers to try out, you see.
Michelle and John went home around 4 pm. We all hung out on the beach until then, after attempting to swim with the kids (with varying success).
Afterwards the five of us (me, Megh, Alpha, Beta, and Joan) went home to make supper, followed by an obligatory trip to Sundae School and a quick jaunt towards Dennisport to a) look for the kite shop we had thought was in downtown Chatham (nope, Harwich), b) see if Wee Packet is still open so we can plan a breakfast trip (it is), and c) check out the house we used to stay in.

Cape 2014, Day 1

A crummy day, weather-wise, but a good day otherwise.
Family friend Michelle came out with boyfriend John for an overnight. We ate lunch together and took a trip to downtown Chatham. The girls shopped, while John and I sat and chatted about current events (Ukraine and Russia is big in the news right now), WW2, and personal histories.
We returned in mid-afternoon and sat out on the back deck. We learned some surprising family lore, (e.g. who smoked pot). When the rain really started Megh and I retreated inside to tend to the kids, while the older folk sat under the deck umbrella and drank wine.
I finally got to watch The LEGO Movie with the girls over their dinner – Mac and Cheese mixed with leftover taco meat. Yay!

Cape 2014, Day 0

Late start to the cape: Alpha’s riding lesson at 2:30 meant that we wouldn’t leave until 3:30 at the earliest. Well, then 4:15 pm isn’t too bad, really. The house was clean and we were ready!
We got smart this time and packed groceries in with the other stuff – the groceries on the cape are really expensive! But the car was pretty full because of it.
Joan had made her way out to the house earlier and had dinner waiting for us when we arrived, about six o’clock. Then socialize for a bit, make the beds, and off to sleep.

Rate Yourself From 1-10

This… is genius.

In technical programming interviews a common (terrible) question that interviewers may ask is, “rate yourself from 1-10 on x”, where x=one or more programming languages.  I’ve been asked that myself, but I’ve never seen what 1-10 would actually correspond to until now.  It’s a very fuzzy measure and most everybody (from junior to senior) seems to rate themselves about a 7.

Without further ado:

  • 10 – Wrote the book on it (there must be a book)
  • 9 – Could have written the book, but didn’t.
  • 8 – Deep understanding of corner cases and esoteric features.
  • 7 – Understanding and (appropriate) usage of most lesser known features.
  • 6 – Can develop large programs and deploy new systems from scratch.
  • 5 – Can develop/deploy larger programs/systems using all basic (w/o book) and more esoteric features (some w/ book, some without)
  • 4 – Can develop/deploy medium programs/systems using all basic (w/o book) and a few esoteric features (w/ book). Understands enough about internals to do nontrivial troubleshooting.
  • 3 – Can utilize basic features without much help, manage a small installation competently.
  • 2 – can write hello world without looking at a book, kind of figure out how a system works, if necessary.
  • 1 – Can read programs, make small changes to existing programs, or make adjustments to already installed systems, w/book handy.
  • 0 – No experience.

Credit goes to /u/icydocking for providing the list on reddit.

GCC Tuning

File this under “things that should be obvious but I just found out about”.  GCC will tell give you optimal flags for your processor.  To wit:

echo "" | gcc -march=native -v -E - 2>&1 | grep cc1

Stick the results into your make file or command-line call to GCC and your executable should be as optimized for your processor as GCC can make it.

You could, of course, always use --march=native  and forget all that but that doesn’t work so well if you’re cross-compiling.