Author: victordion

Today I rented a carpet cleaner machine to do a thorough cleaning of my apartment carpet which was moderately stained with 9 months of use. The price for rental is quite good, $25 for a machine selling at $400+. yet the detergent is somewhat expensive.

The machine is bulky (not that bulky as I originally thought), sturdy, and very delicately made. I was so amazed at its ability to clean – it really worked! Quite interesting is that, although made in China, this masterpiece of modern industry finds its widest presence in the US. Another proof that China is making so many kinds of products that its people almost never use.

Just watched “The Life of David Gale”, was originally attracted to watch because of Kate Winslet, really impressed by the plot in the end.

Not quite sure about the advocacy of this movie. Is it a pro-death-penalty-abolition one because of the praise to these caring activists? Or the contrary because the reveal of their deceit to the judicial system in order to spread their ideology (even though at the cost of their own lives)?

It is interesting that David Gale sacrificed his life to as a wrap-up for his unfinished (failed?) television debate against the governor, seemingly a rebuttal to “can you tell me any example of innocent prisoner being executed?”, but actually it is a fallacy one, if not a non-sense: it is so hard to find one that he has to fake a murder case in order to prove there are indeed innocents. How can you expect the judicial system to find out the sheer truth and bail you out when you act so sophisticated (framing-up a case against yourself)?

A movie full of exaggeration, yet with perfectly logical and enchanting plot. I give it a rating of 5 stars. It came out in 2003, and I wish I had watched it earlier.

In main, I have

x = (float *)  malloc(ncols * sizeof(float));
randomizeFloatVector(x, ncols * sizeof(float) );

The function randomFloatVector is defined as

void randomizeFloatVector(float * vec, int size){
    for(int i = 0; i < size; i++){
        float r = ((float) rand()) /  (RAND_MAX);
        *(vec+i) = r;
    }
}

It kept (randomly) showing “segment fault” for hours, until I found the very subtle size issue.

In order to excuse myself, I have to say… malloc is evil!

BTW, is Tesla 2075 that legacy? Even cuda 6.5 cannot produce legit code for it (had to switch to cude 5.5’s nvcc). Stranded by “cudaErrorInvalidDeviceFunction” for another couple of hours.

 

Torch needs QT, which takes forever to compile. And to build BLAS is also pain in the ass! Tried Amazon AWS cloud server with GPU, feels better than the reviews said. But the price at $0.6/hr is really frustrating.

Caffe is completely written in C++, but relies heavily on multiple Google produced libraries.

Cannot help pondering how much energy there is to waste for the world’s people to try these things out, just like couldn’t help thinking how much gas people had wasted learning to drive when I was learning to drive, years ago.