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| Expressway Blues |
| Mon September 21st, 2009 at 5:29 AM PDT |
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On Mondays and Wednesdays I leave my apartment at 6:00am and begin my journey to the office. My route is to get on I-290 at Racine, and get off I-290 at Thorndale. That's a distance of about 26 miles. Even when leaving at 6am this morning, it took me 45 minutes to get to work. That's an average of 35 miles per hour. Whoever decided that it would be a good idea to make I-290 outbound, Chicago's main East-West artery, go from 4 lanes to 3 while having two onramps simultaneously merge in, right at its busiest point, needs to have the appropriate licenses revoked permanently. Oh yeah, and right at that busiest point, the exits switch to being on the left side, just to further ruin any traffic flow that may be remaining. At mile 23, Central Ave's onramp merges in on the right, at the same time the left lane becomes the Austin Blvd offramp. Almost nobody takes that Austin Blvd offramp; people just use it as a way to screw everyone waiting in the left lane by flying past dozens of cars and then merging in at the last second. Right after that, a ton of Oak Park traffic merges in on the Austin Blvd onramp, from the left, and again from Harlem Ave in a similarly screwed up fashion. All this means that even at 6 in the freaking morning, traffic is at a standstill for a good 2-mile section of I-290, minimum. This backup lasts essentially all day, until about 8pm when it finally starts to dissipate. You'd think that IDOT would want to fix this horrible bottleneck. Well, you'd be wrong, because it's been there since I-290 was conceived (the section in question is the oldest part), and we all know IDOT doesn't care about improving traffic flow even the slightest bit. Why else would they schedule routine highway maintainence starting at 9am or have the speed limit set at 55 miles per hour across the Chicagoland area? Unfortunately, we're probably stuck with that section of I-290 because in addition to being designed by a bunch of brain-dead morons, they left no space for expansion. Unless the CTA cedes some land (their tracks run in the middle of and alongside I-290, depending) or the State decides to buy up land from Oak Park, that section of I-290 can't be changed. And don't even get me started on the inbound traffic. That has two more traffic jams that develop every day. Can we just blow it up and start over? |
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| Arch Linux |
| Sat September 19th, 2009 at 3:25 PM PDT |
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I started using Arch Linux on my main workstation this month, and so far have been really impressed. Why Arch? I wanted something with the customizability and control of Gentoo, but I've been frustrated with Gentoo's slowness due to compiling everything, and its dependency hell caused by poorly written ebuilds and the brokenness of the Portage system. Arch is a lot like Gentoo. Very bare-bones base system, no graphical installer, and the ability to compile everything from source. It departs from Gentoo, though, in that by default the package manager, pacman, downloads and installs binary packages. This is possible because the Arch repositories contain binary packages of everything! However, if you want to customize a given package by reconfiguring it, you can download the script used to make the binary package, modify it, and recompile your own package, and then use pacman to install it like normal.This is perfect, because in reality, recompiling every single package like in Gentoo is overkill. There are really only a handful of packages on any system that need to be customized that way, and the time wasted for the others is immense. So far my Linux distro progression has been:
Finally, the obligatory screenshot:  Corresponding desk photo: 
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| C Arrays |
| Sun September 13th, 2009 at 7:35 PM PDT |
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Oh hi, haven't been here in a while, just thought I'd stop in and rant a little bit. I know a lot of people (myself included) like to rip on Java for its obnoxiously verbose syntax, like how the standard library frequently makes you write the same thing out 3 or 4 times in one statement. Well I've been working in C a lot lately, and suffering from the same problem. Say I want to declare a dynamically-allocated array of IP addresses, with an initial size of 10. In C that means typing this: struct in_addr *array = (struct in_addr *) malloc(10 * sizeof(struct in_addr));Seriously now C, is that really necessary? I just typed out struct in_addr 3 times in one statement.Yeah, I know you can leave out the explicit cast to struct in_addr *, but then when you turn on compiler warnings you get yelled at a lot, and I like my compiler to check stuff for me.Luckily in C++ they have made this a little better, by making you not have to call malloc to allocate memory, and not having to multiply by the datatype size when making an array, and not even having to specify the struct keyword:in_addr *array = new in_addr[10];Cool. But I'm stuck using C for my university networking assignments, so I think I'm just going to write some preprocessor macros to do the typing for me. ;P -WRF |
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| Shoutbox |
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Anonymous:
lonely shoutbox :( Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:09 PM PDT |
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Anonymous:
hello Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:12 PM PDT |
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Anonymous:
o hai Mon April 28th, 2008 at 12:31 PM PDT |
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CHIZUBAGA:
I CAN HAZ CHIZUBAGA!!!!!!! Wed January 20th, 2010 at 12:58 PM PST |
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Not Jeremy:
o hai remember when i threw hot sauz in yer eye. lulz Thu January 28th, 2010 at 11:28 AM PST |
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JEREMY:
MOAR NAPKINS DURR HURR Thu February 11th, 2010 at 9:33 AM PST |
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Shoutbox:
I wuz on a DAtZ.. haffing chizubaga!! Om nom nom nom!! Wed May 26th, 2010 at 1:04 PM PDT |
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Totally not anyone you know:
Problem? Thu June 3rd, 2010 at 2:09 PM PDT |
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Random Randomstein:
Shitpickle. Fri June 11th, 2010 at 6:04 PM PDT |
