James's Weblog

A themed collection of various pencil doodlings:

(Don’t forget to scroll to the right.)

I am feeling better than I was a few weeks ago, though.

>_<

I am completely inept.

I guess that’s what I deserve for deluding myself into being hopeful about something.

A few days ago I had my first swig of an alcoholic drink. My coworkers and I all went to a bar to celebrate someone’s birthday. One of them ordered some mango drink, couldn’t finish it, and not wanting to see it go to waste, I drank a bit of it. It wasn’t much, but it’s probably the most alcohol I’ve ever had in my life.

Sigh. Did I sell out my (admittedly useless) principles?

This has been a landmark week of firsts for me. I wonder if I’m going through some kind of mild identity crisis due to some impending doom I’m expecting.

I went to San Francisco with a few friends last night and went to a club for the first time. I think I have too many inhibitions for clubbing to be an enjoyable experience. The rod up my butt must have a rod up its butt.

Maybe I should start drinking.

I am amazed that programming languages (well, the typical ones, at least) don’t make it easier to manipulate files.

A common way files are read in C is to create a struct that matches the file format and to call fread to read the file into it. Isn’t that easy enough?

Not really. This approach is fine in isolation, but it’s non-portable:

• Different architectures or compilers may lay out structs differently. Your compiler sometimes can choose to add padding bytes to guarantee alignment requirements. Luckily compilers aren’t allowed to do it willy-nilly, and some compilers offer #pragmas to control this.
• Different architectures have different integer sizes. Appropriate typedefs often can mitigate this, but it’s still imperfect since it requires a small porting effort.
• Different architectures use different endianness. If a file format is defined to store integers in big-endian byte order but your architecture is little-endian, then if you read the bytes out of the struct without first swapping the bytes you’ll end up with the wrong value.

The typical way to solve these problems is to read a file a byte at a time, copying each byte into the appropriate location within the struct. This is tedious.

Programming languages should provide a mechanism for programmers to declare a struct that must conform to some external format requirement. Programmers should be able to attribute the struct, prohibiting implicit padding bytes and specifying what the size and endian requirements are for each field. For example:

file_struct myFileFormat
{
    uint8 version;
    uint8[3]; // Reserved.
    uint32BE numElements;
    uint32BE dataOffset;
};

When retrieving fields from such a struct, the compiler should generate code that automatically performs the necessary byte swaps and internal type promotions.

On the other side of the movie spectrum, I watched the rather disappointing Cube last night.

I try not to write about the nitpicks I have with movies, especially with non-mainstream movies like Cube, because who really wants to read someone complaining? But I just can’t help myself.

The bad math soured a lot of the experience. For example (spoilers ahead):

(more…)

Well, I finally watched The Incredibles. Even though I found it to be totally predictable, it managed to be really fun along the way. Who cares if it’s full of clichés when they’re done that well?

I think it’s probably the best movie I’ve seen all year (okay, that’s not saying much… best movie I’ve seen in the past year, then), and possibly it might turn out to be one of my all-time favorites.

Brad Bird is my new hero. (He made one of my other all-time favorite movies, The Iron Giant.) He’s not a gun—he’s Superman!