Benj’s blog!

Decided I would try to tidy up the blog a little. The result is the new style you see now (unless you’re reading via RSS). Let me know what you think …

This evening, on the way back from playing at a wedding in Freiston, John and I decided to call in at Newark for pizza at Pizza Express and to enjoy some of the music at the “Newark on Water” festival.

The pizza was great, Pizza Express really do know how to make pizzas (no sh*t!). The restaurant setting is nice too, a converted building right along side the River Trent. It beats the Dominos pizza I had a few weeks ago by a factor of 100!

Anyway, we walked over to the festival venue and arrived at about 7pm. Café Aman were doing their sound check. Around 7:15 they started playing. We were stood right next to the P.A. system at the stage. IT WAS LOUD! ;). It was great though, the whole set moved along nicely, grooving well.

After the first track I decided to look around to see what the rest of the few thousand people thought. Barely any reaction at all. How can they NOT be enjoying the music? Sure the soloists were using a lot of modal stuff in their improvisations (it was a Greek influenced band after all…) but was the music so radically different that people didn’t like it?

My opinion (shared by John) was that people just don’t know good music when they hear it. Unless they’ve been told it’s good on the radio (be it implicitly, as a result of playtime or explicitly as a result of “DJs” saying ‘this is good’). Anyway … rant over for now.

On Saturday I somehow discovered the website of Dave Thomas and stumbled upon this little gem.

Essentially it’s a programming challenge and I spent several hours this weekend working on a solution in C that actually performed better than his Ruby(??) version. I’ve never even looked at Ruby, but I can only assume it’s like Haskell or something. Of course my C implementation rocks. Running in around 0.3x seconds on my 667Mhz powerbook (My initial implementation took over 5 minutes to run!).

[benji@mac Anagrams]$ time ./fastest wordlist.txt | wc -l
    2531 

real    0m0.327s
user    0m0.240s
sys     0m0.040s

His Katas are a really good idea and I’ll try them all at some point. I’d also like to see how well my algorithm performs in Haskell (and how much shorter it is …).

Anyway, enough technobabble!

This evening I watched the 3rd part of the BBC documentary ‘Fighting the War’. It’s your basic fly-on-the-wall stuff but, what I can’t figure out is:

• Did the MoD/government use the BBC to put this show out to try and bring some closure and/or legitimacy to the war.
• or
• Did the members of forces really fear for their lives, really believe that Iraq was a credible thread to them? Maybe the beeb just chose to emphasise this point, or perhaps it’s the good training of the UK armed forces showing through. I suppose it could be fairly disasterous if UK military approached the war with a “ha, we can win this with 1 hand tied behind our backs” attitude.

Was certainly an interesting show though. I’d never realised to what extent modern warfare is reliant on technology. Maybe I should go into that business?

It’s generally accepted that Apple will release new desktop machines tomorrow.

DON’T DO IT! SAVE YOUR MONEY!

(Well, I have to try and restrain myself somehow, the credit-card is practically screaming to me “buy something, buy something!” )

As a result of looking around for people’s opinions on the Mac G5 launch, I came across spl’s soapbox. If you have some spare time the articles are worth the read. (although the article on infinity and the universe seems a little pointless!)

Check out spl’s thoughts on the G5.

It’s a well known fact that I have too much free time, and so I decided to have a look at PragDave’s Kata Eight. This time I got a fast solution right away, it’s a much easier problem to solve.

What would be interesting is relaxing the restrictions, so that the suffix and prefix can be anagrams and then trying to come up with an efficient solution, I spent some time over the past few days thinking about it, but didn’t get anywhere! Thoughts?

Anyway, here’s how I did (case sensitive combinations only):

[benji@mac Ang-Comb]$ time ./presuf wordlist.txt | wc -l
     693 

real    0m0.129s
user    0m0.050s
sys     0m0.040s

Here is the result list, does anyone concur? Does anyone care?!