It's training time - my general fitness took a proverbial beating from the demons of stress, work, and take-out cuisine last term, and I'm just now starting to rectify that. (Of course, there's no snow here, so I'll have to settle for Cali sun and SF fog. Woe is me.) To that end, I'm making a commitment to hit the gym at least tri-weekly; encouragement (and light berating, if that's more your style) is, er, encouraged. I'm hoping to make it out to some of the SFPK meets as well. Naturally, I'll be concocting my own personal brand of inspiration - if this cryptic remark has you puzzled (as well it should) you'll just have to keep posted for more details!

Had the chance to wine and dine in the famed wine-producing region of Napa Valley this last Saturday. I decided to don my only suit jacket (and no socks - hey, it's laundry day) for the occasion so as to meet the requisite minimum standard of pomposity. (I should really source a monocle, kerchief, pocket watch, and top hat. As a general rule, you don't argue with anyone who is actively employing all these objects in the service of highbrowdom.)

The Stanford Canadian Club Thanksgiving dinner was a resounding success as measured by the excess of available foodstuffs; there was turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie in abundance. Yum. Maybe this whole gastronomic shindig should be a weekly affair (or fortnightly, at the very least.) In true seasonal fashion, the leaves are Monty-Python-style suicide-diving off the trees in droves; the air is crisp with that familiar decay-scent, something I had not expected to find this far south.

Important news flash: I just saw a rainbow out the shuttle window. If I were inclined to believe in such nonsense, I'd say that was a good omen for the day.

Yeah, it's been that long. 28 Days Later, stuffs and things at varying orbitals of excitement have been happening with acceptable regularity:

• Not only am I the proud owner of a longboard, but this particular plank of my comprehensive transportation platform now bears the inimitable insignia of one Randall Munroe. (I can only wonder what joyous blasphemies #666 will bring.)
  
• Finally made it out to the infamous DNA Lounge; this SF institution has the peculiar distinction of being owned by ex-Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
• Canadian Thanksgiving shindig, complete with full turkey and pumpkin pie. Need I say more? (No, but I should probably add this: there's another Canadian Thanksgiving dinner this Sunday hosted by the Stanford Canadian Club; despite what their (apparently infrequently updated) site says, it really is this weekend.)
  
• Pretty Lights at The Independent last night. If you haven't seen them, you really should.

How's Facebook? (Come on - if you care enough about me to read my pithy musings, you're probably expecting an answer to this question.) Intense. It pains me to say it, but Facebook has so far provided much more in the way of personal development and work-related awesomeness than Google ever did. How can that be? It comes down to recruiting strategy: Google casts as wide a net as possible, hoping to grab what it considers to be the best of the best before someone else does. In my opinion, this strategy is bound to backfire. You end up with a zillion interns and, well, less than a zillion interesting and/or useful projects; it doesn't take a math major to see that you can't pair each intern up with something worthwhile to work on. (It does take a math major, however, to look at the whole situation and start rambling about bijections.) Here's the point: half of the interns coming out of Google are extremely wary of returning, and that can't be good. ("Half" here is an extremely unscientific guesstimate, but several co-interns (who will obviously remain nameless in such a public forum as The Internet) have expressed similar sentiments.)

Congratulations, Facebook! Now for the other 6.4 billion.

(Side note: looks like Google's playing Wolfram Alpha's game. Round Two: fight!)

Shelled out a wad of cash today for a longboard, which I've been (painlessly (so far, at least)) riding around SF on. My goal is to cut door-to-door times in the city core by 60-75% compared to the estimated walking time on Google Maps. (I'd estimate 80-90% for cycling, but this is immeasurably cooler - not to mention far more prone to catastrophic failure.)

And, yeah, I promised pics a few days back. I have yet to deliver on that promise, but I'll definitely post here when I do!

Where "you" is TechCrunch. Long live engineer humour!

(Note: I promise that I'll post something more generally interesting before this day draws to a close, for non-technical values of generally interesting.)

Let's say that you have two large unsorted files, each of which is essentially a long list of strings, and you want to find their intersection. There's the simple brute-force way:


There's a problem - this is quadratic! Fortunately, we can cut this down pretty easily with the old time-memory tradeoff: