musing

I've been dabbling with computer game design for half a decade (I had crazy dreams about making games way before that, but didn't write code back then). It's been strictly a part-time hobby, but for the amount of time I've spent I don't have much visual evidence of my work.

Compared to coders who churn out games in a couple weeks, it's fairly embarrassing. This seems to be a common joke among game creators, as everyone on the net claims to have the "best" idea for their game and none are ever produced. I'd bet most game ideas don't even turn into a single line of code, and those that do are soon abandoned. I'm trying to rationalize how this doesn't apply to me...   read more >>

When working on high performance supercomputers, network latency and bandwidth are of utmost importance. If messages cannot be sent quickly enough between compute nodes, a supercomputer may actually perform more poorly than a standard server or workstation. So much time is spent waiting for input from other locations that nothing is actually accomplished. These days, more time is spent optimizing latency than bandwidth since most clusters have all the bandwidth they need (2-4GB/sec).

I've discovered that an analogy can be made with traffic on the highway. Computers keep getting faster, and now maybe traffic can too. I promise you'll notice this the next time you head out on the road.   read more >>

I definitely behave like a pack-rat on occasion. Particularly when it comes to digital content, which is painless to store and relatively easy to organize, there is a great temptation to keep everything. But at the same time, I recognize that our brain's capability to forget is actually beneficial - unimportant/unimpressive things shouldn't take up space or waste our time.

I seriously suspect this will come back to haunt a lot of us in the future, as we accumulate unprecedented quantities of digital goods we can't bear to let go of. Imagine having to wade through 100,000 photos your parents took during the course of their lives. Would you ever bother to do it? How many would you actually care to keep? What if each branch on your family tree had that many photos?

In that spirit, I am revisiting the content of my site. The good and useful will stay - all else will fade...