Mar. 14th, 2005

talarubi: (Default)
Wish I could remember them. They all centered in the future, somewhere around 2080-2160.

Evidently some freak accident had sent me there. Don't remember a lick of what it was. There was clearly an intake phase--much like immigrating to the United States, you got to go through some introductory classes. The whole solar system was populated and steeped, as others have put it, in some pretty daunting technology. These intake classes seemed divided into four groups, I don't remember much about them, save for the style being old wooden schoolhouse, dead-tree books (and trying to snitch some), having some daunting first-day quizzes, being shown where to look for more education/work, being tossed into one of four groups or class houses... hmm.

Paradoxically, said tech included messages going back in time. I was able to grab a cell phone and dial "home" to 2005--but the taxi driver reprimanded me for disclosing where I was, etc. I had not yet discovered the statutes against sharing things like that; there was concern over things that would in the past have been government secrets, if not simply borking the chronology to hell and back. I don't know how they enforced this.

My first residence was part of a huge three-dimensional city, stacked vertically as well as laterally (and hence less crammed than you would think); I imagine it must have been rather anarchist or socialist in nature (at least in the notion of communal cooperation), as dinner, etc. was always at the same time and the tables were filled with a breathtaking variety of dishes. People took whatever they liked...

I briefly caught the distant cousin of the History Channel showing a retrospective news brief. The narrator described September 11th as affecting international politics for at least the next decade.

Gods dammit, there was lots more, sighh. I think some Zelda got mixed into the earlier parts, too (partly as a visual design class), and I remember playing a Metroid GBA release on a bus or taxi.
talarubi: (16-bit dracus)
So I was poking around, grumping at the navigation, and wondered if I could print parts of the PHP manual. Hmm, I thought. Just how big is the thing? I grab the single-file HTML version, 10MB. Load in Firefox. Rattle talons.

Hmmmmm. FF's memusage shoots up at least 150mb. Bad sign. Print preview must be trying to use that much MORE, and thrashes so bad that it's allocating memory at modem speeds. It wasn't really going to finish. (Ed: It may have actually been a CPU issue, or even FF's allocator choking, I don't remember seeing a lot of disk activity... but that's anyone's guess.)

IE for once fares better, capping around 180mb--which is to say it actually finished. But for every page it seems to be touching all previous pages (disabling headers/footers speeds it up), leading to some alarming O(kn) runtimes! With the smallest font size and minimal margins, the manual, without annotations, comes to 2858 pages. The preview took about a half hour... by the end it had slowed to a >1sec/page crawl. o..o

Well so much for that idea. :) Things like this are an interesting comment on code scalability... a mere 10mb file becomes a problem when you use so much memory per tag that the internal representation is 15..20x larger. Since most of the document is plain text one must assume the tags are using hundreds of bytes, not 4chars*(15..20)=60..80! (While such files are unwieldy to be sure, I've wanted to edit them on occasion and found even Wordpad et al to have similar problems.)

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Talarubi

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