Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Edit: I just noticed that the photos’ aspect ratio is getting messed up by Wordpress. I am going to change the design soon to something that stretches from side to side in a browser window. Sorry for the (temporary) inconvenience.

Today my family and I, went to see an ice scating show, starring  Sarah Hughes and some other people:  Alexei Yagudin,  Todd Eldredge,  Stéphane Lambiel, Shae-Lynn Bourne, Caryn Kadavy,  Anton Sikharulidze & Elena Berezhnaya, and Kyoko Ina & John Zimmerman. There was also (so called singer)  Ashanti who “sang” some “songs.”

Of course, I had my camera, so I took a bunch of photos during the show (note: I didn’t actually do much to the photos, they are mostly cropped and resized, I will most likely fix them up to look better):

After the show itself, since we had VIP passes, we went to the party where we could get the skaters’ signatures. There I noticed one thing, the VIP passes looked exactly like the Media passes, except for a different color stipe and word Media instead of VIP, and both types had the tendency to flip over, showing the completely white side. So, I flipped mine over, took out my Nikon D70

and Nikon SB-800 (which when mounted on any SLR makes the whole thing look really serious)

and went to shoot some photos. Most people there were rather nice when they noticed the camera as I said “excuse me,” and passed them by. I don’t have any autographs, but some interesting photos - as I mentioned above, I should spend more time on these.

Going back to the what happened during the show…since when one skates, he destroys the ice and in a stadium setting the Zamboni is called in to fix things up:

There were TV cameras (the thing will air some time late January), the operator of the one closest to us, was just sitting there during the intermission, but the lighting behind him was intriguing, so I took a photo as well.

A while back, I wrote about how cool Lex is, well it is about time to write how cool, but painful if you don’t know it already, Yacc is. Yacc, or Yet Another Compiler-Compiler, takes tokens as input, and based on  BNF rules you specify it executes bits of code. So the idea is, you give it:

• Grammar
• Code to execute when a match occurs

The code that gets executed can do anything and (almost) everything. So, one would probably want to create some kind of abstract syntax tree, which gets translated into intermediate representation, which in turn gets translated into assembly, which gets assembled by (usually) outside assembler. So, from 0 to full compiler in no time.

The thing that is painful about yacc is just the strangeness with which some things appear to be done. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to give yacc up for anything.

Thanks Henry for giving me free hosting for my site/blog/whatever else I put up. I shall reward you, like all other readers with wonderful content that everyone will enjoy. :-)

I finally decided to move away from Blogspot to something which can in infinitely customized. So, bear with me, I will be making sure everything migrated over nicely. So, change you bookmarks, Atom/RSS feeds!

Today, I found out that there will be a leap second on December 31, 2005. So the time will flow like this:

2005-12-31 23:59:58
2005-12-31 23:59:59
2005-12-31 23:59:60
2006-01-01 00:00:00

Apparently, there are only two possible places for a leap second in a year, June 30 and December 31. Of course these are UTC times, so the leap second will be inserted as 18:59:60 EST in New York, etc.

If you want can’t get to the official annoucement, you can try my mirrored copy.

Let’s leap! Is there a Samuel Beckett around here? :-)

It has been a while since I heard the czech saying which would roughly translate into english as: “The more languages you know, the more human you are.” Or little more accurately…

Let $n$ = the number of languages you know
Let $s$ = the amount of humanity in you

Then, we can express the realationship as: $s\propto n$

Why am I talking about this? Simple… I have decided to write an assembler for a very strange piece of hardware (which I don’t own, unfortunately) so emulator is the only way to go. I am not going to say exactly what it is, since I want to finish few more things, and release the whole thing under GPL. Those of you who know what I am working on, try not to divulge it for now…hopefully the public annoucement will be by the end of October.

So, back on topic…I decided to use Lex as the tokenizer. I must say, I am very pleased with it. I give it a bunch of regular expressions, and it (almost) magically generates most of a C program for me, that lexes (as in lexical analysis) standard input, and outputs a more parser-friendly data. For the parser, I will probably use yacc, since they almost always are used together.

Today, my family and I went to see a concert. Nothing major, just a czech “folk song” singer (his style is folk-ish, but the really interesting part are the lyrics — they are simply hilarious.) I had my camera with me, so I took a few crappy shots of him:

Anyway, it was quite good in my opinion - lots of wacky stuff. I’m not going to go into great detail about the lyrics, because they simply cannot be translated.

P.S. I do realize he looks a lot like Eric Raymond (photo, not by me.)