Greymeister.net

Fighting With Filenames

I was playing a little Sega CD the other day (actually a CDX but who’s keeping track), but I was having some problems with a disc which was a bit scuffed up. I figured now that it is mostly readable I’d better back it up while I had the chance. Sega CD discs were sort of tricky for noobs like me back in the day because they are multi-track discs, with one data track and a number of audio tracks. Usually, even today, I resort to something like Nero Burning ROM when simple programs like Disk Utility do not properly handle these discs. If you back them up as MP3s and ISO you get the benefit of data compression, as well as playability with emulators. I prefer to play games that way sometimes because I don’t have to mess with component/composite cables on a receiver that isn’t easy to get to.

Moving to Oregon

Just got done with my cross-country move from Kentucky to Oregon. I’ll be posting my GoPro footage from my trip once I get the raw video edited down to something a bit more consumable.

Sometimes C-ing Is Believing

I sometimes forget how fast C is. Until I am working on a problem with reading thousands of numbers from one file, sorting them, and writing the results into another file.

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$ time groovy PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 0 250000  
groovy PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 0 250000  15.88s user 5.67s system 123% cpu 17.413 total
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$ time ./a.out phonelist.dat sorted.dat 0 250000
./a.out phonelist.dat sorted.dat 0 250000  0.13s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 0.141 total

Touche´ sir. Touche´. But then again…

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$ wc -l < PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 
    29
    
$ wc -l < phonefilesort.c 
    74