Recent content in Matt Nakama's Blog on Matt Nakama
It’s been a long time since I played around with IPv6. I haven’t really messed with it since 2016 or so. Moving from one fastlane dev job to another, it was enough to just keep my home network working, let alone experiment. But now that I finally found time to play around, I figured it’s time to see how far IPv6 has come. Also, a warning: This is more 'how it feels' than a guide.
Well, it’s been a while. After leaving my previous employer, I decided to take a one-month sabbatical and try to think things out, and find myself again. I learned a lot. I learned a bunch of ways to deal with my ADHD. I learned that I really need to adjust my heading, because the way I’ve been going is just not sustainable. I tend to work too hard, play too much, and the weeks just breeze by, and…
I’ve been rewriting this one in my mind for over a month now. At first, this was going to be just my thoughts on the Scheduling chapter of Algorithms to Live By, but I was not content with it. Actually, I was very disappointed with this chapter. Algorithms to Live By? I hoped that chapter 5 would help me solve some of my longstanding scheduling/priority/focus problems, but there’s just nothing…
Chapter 4: Caching I was going to try to go over the talking points of the chapter, but I feel like I hardly got anything out of it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a computer programmer long enough to know how caching works? I really can’t think of any way to apply this to my daily life. As for what goes in the closet, basement, and storage… Isn’t that obvious?
Chapter 3: Sorting Socks? The chapter starts out talking about how not to sort socks. I’m thinking Oh, good, this one is going to have some practical daily life examples. Nah, it’s just talking about how not to sort socks. There is no ideal algorithm presented for sock sorting. Sports It felt like most of the chapter was talking about how to sort sports teams to find out who’s the best, 2nd-best,…
Chapter 2: Explore vs. Exploit This one I had more trouble applying to real life. It definitely seems useful for clinical trials, but a common real-life example they give in the book is when to try new restaurants. The algorithm sort of works, I think. The example of exploring more when you first move to a new area and exploiting more when you’ve been there a while seems apt, but it seems to…
Updated: 2021-05-10 So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I had an idea: maybe I can unpack/pack bits without using…
This is the first in a series of blog post responses I’m writing about the current book I’m reading as part of book club. This one got me thinking a lot, and I often forget what I come up with, especially when I read through a book too fast. This is my response, not a review, so it’s best to read the book yourself first. Chapter 1: Optimal stopping It’s very interesting…