A Good Holiday

Even though the building was officially closed, I (along with a disturbingly large number of people from my group) chose to work today. This is primarily because I am going to be gone for the next week, and I don’t want our 200 processor batch queue sitting there idly while I’m gone.

Today I successfully preprocessed my batch, completed some bug fixes to a utility I helped write that will allow us to run some algorithms within the 32-bit address space (several hundred megabytes of models in memory instead of several gigabytes). Since we have many more 32-bit machines than 64-bit machines, this makes complete processing of the data I need to get ready feasible within a week as opposed to a month or more. This is the sort of thing that makes Nick happy.

Jared, an expert on the systems involved, really helped bootstrap me into writing this code. As it turns out, my big processing task is just the kick in the pants needed to get a bunch of their code ready for handling large amounts of data in decent timeframes. So I get something useful in the short term (I won’t have to watch machines process data for the next two months), and they get something useful in the long term (they know their system can handle gigabytes of test set at once). Synergy, my friends, synergy.

Since it was nominally a holiday, I actually had gaim running at work (which I only do when I’m working on holidays or weekends), and chatted with people including and Dan. There is very little more satisfying than a work day in which many important things are achieved, and time flies, and you have great conversations with coworkers and others!

So, if you’re worried that I work too much (::cough:: Mom! ::cough::), I reassure you again that I love what I do. And the filthy lucre.