Jordan and Justice's school is having one of those goofy weeks for the kids.  Crazy clothes day, crazy hair day, hat day.....etc.  It is kind of neat, the kids really like it.  Today was hat day and Justice wore his first had to school today.  It was a little panthers hat and he was pretty stoked about it.  Jordan wore a more unique pink fashion hat.  I am sure that all of the little girls will be comparing who has the better hat.  Not sure what tomorrow is, but I am sure the kids will have fun with it.

    This is probably a post that will make your eyes glaze over but it is something very relevant to everyone since computers are, pretty much, a staple of life.  Whether you use a computer to play games, creating home movies, or even email, moore's law has affected you.  Gordan Moore, Co-Founder of Intel, wrote a paper in 1965 that outlined that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit increase exponentially as time goes on.  That is that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit double approximately every two years.  This is really less of a law and more of an observation made at a boom time of circuit research.  This has driven the industry passionately to yell the battle cry of "We must keep  Moore's law intact".  It is not really a big idea but my personal hypothesis is, the people who conduct the research fear that if Moore's law is broken, even once, that it will forever become a ho hum target that will be followed with less ambition and creativity.  Kind of like a winning streak in sports, once the winning streak is broken... players tend to relax a little more because the goal they were working toward is broken.

   Anyway, this law has produced great things for the evolution of computers because a side effect is that as the price per transistor also has to decrease as the number on chip increases.  This creates a crazy value for the consumer.  As a side effect, we now have enormouse power at our disposal and the bottlenecks in the system are no longer the crunching of the numbers but the transport of data back and forth.  A processor works in very short bursts and for the most part it is so fast.... processors are continually waiting on hardware to do its part in transitioning data back and forth.  

 Ok, to the point of the post.  While I attended classes, a big emphasis was placed on code efficiency as is traditionally taught in computer science.  This is because not too long ago, the processor was a bottleneck in the system.  Now we have so much memory and processing power, the difference between optimized code and innefficient code is neglegable to the user.  Only high performance graphics processing and extremely cost reduced electronics components rely on really efficient code.  So the new thought that seems to gravitate around the coding forums are "Who cares which algorithm runs faster..... whichever is easier".  To a point this is true, but in this thinking we are losing the habits taught in school that in everything you do, you should think of efficiency.  For the work I do, my bottleneck is getting data from the database.  Because of scaling issues, I try to create the most efficient sql calls that can even if it is for trivial issues.  As databases grow, a seemingly innocuous "SELECT"  statement can wreak havoc on the web applications performance.

 Anywho, Hope you learned something, and next time your program crashes.... you can probably blame it on a lazy programmer trying to brute force the code through the system! ;)

     Justice had a bout with pneumonia last week.  He was weezing pretty badly and had 102.5 fever on wednesday.  I took him to urgent care and got  a work up done.  It was determined that he had a little bit of pneumonia brewing in his lungs and we were sent home with a breathing machine and some antibiotics.   The little guy has gotten a pretty raw deal compared to Jordan.  He is starting to show signs that his soy allergy is lifting, so we can only hope that it continues to subside.  We are going to get another allergy test conducted in July that will let us know if his allergies are present.  Losing the soy allergy would be huge, since almost everything has soy in it.  It would make our dining out a little more exciting for him.  Right now we bring him food where ever we go.  Today, both kids are healthy, though I feel like I have a touch of something.... surprise surprise.

 

Keep an open mind, so you don't end up like these people! 

clicky clicky! 

Have a good week everyone!

     When you have kids, little holidays like Easter become much grander events.  Much like Christmas, it is a commercial holiday that does more for driving the economy then spreading the particular message that was originally intended.  That is fine, as most holidays exists more for the gradification of a particular group then spun so the masses can digest it.  The masses in this case are children because they don't understand the deep undertones of the original idea to begin with.  The winners in most of these endeavors are the retailers who make bundles on the unconcious need to purchase little nick nacks and so forth to mark the occasion.  Back to my original point.

    Now that we have little ones, it is not just a day in which candy is given and maybe the occasion egg coloring party.  Now it is a full time production of how many easter egg hunts can the kids participate in and to what degree of success will be found.  You spend hours getting ready and waiting for the hunt to begin where a full minute later, the festivities have climaxed and the kids have finished claiming all of the eggs in the hunt area.  Of course this year, Jordan was pretty amped up about it and Justice seemed pretty interested until the buzzer sounds and the masses of children and herds of parents rush upon the field in search of the prize egg. Because that is what keeps the parents interested.... finding the prize egg for their child.  So much they gallop across the field searching with their kids in tow, missing the point of the exercise entirely.  For what? A stuffed duck?  

   I guess it does have its merits, Jordan likes it and after the initial onslaught of prize minded parents and giddy kids, Justice likes to slowly pick up what ever was missed.  At the end, Jordan shares some of her plunder so that he can pick up a few more on the ground and feel apart of the fun.  Then it is on to the next easter egg hunt!

 

Hope everyone had a nice Easter!