We had a pretty good snow on Thursday. The view out the back at dawn this morning.

Tiny Core Linux provides a basic graphical desktop in on 10 MB, making even Damn Small Linux look fat. Based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk, and Jwm, it is a minimal platform for building a custom desktop or specialized computing appliance that boots and runs quickly on modest hardware.

Extensions include development tools like the Gnu Compiler Collection, Python, and Ruby, but not Emacs, so you have to make do with Vim or another lightweight editor or do your own port. I may just have to install this on an old laptop to check it out.

I just finished reading Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, an entertaining retelling of the Beowulf saga as it might have happened. It was originally published as The 13th Warrior and a movie with that name was based upon it. I feel a kinship to Beowulf as the old king who calls for Beowulf's help is named Rothgar, a name which has evolved into Rogers.

I spent the day at a Highland Games throwing clinic hosted by RMSA and coached by Sean Betz. It was fun and I learned a lot. This was the most throwing I've done in one day, so I was ready for a shower, dinner, and an early night afterward.

Version 2.0 of SimPy came out in January and it's quite nice for systems modeling, but can be a tad slow, so I'm taking a look at speeding it up. For a first pass I tried Psyco, the specializing Python compiler. This gave me a 45% speed improvement wit a similar increase in memory footprint. This is certainly worthwhile, but still a lot slower than the same model coded in C. SimPy depends heavily upon generators which aren't supported by Psyco yet. Cython doesn't support generators yet either, so that doesn't look like an easy speedup either.

PyPy is looking more promising all the time. Holger Krekel has it running on a Nokia 810 handheld device with an reports smaller memory footprints than CPython for most Python data structures. The base interpreter is larger, but is sharable among multiple PyPy processes. An experimental version of the interpreter is running with the Just In Time compiler. This is unstable, but when it doesn't crash it is 30 times faster than CPython. Might be time to try it for a small project.

A friend recently founded ElderThink, a site devoted to Living longer, Living Well for elders and those who care for them. While I still have a hard time thinking of myself as an elder, my beard has become pretty gray. The site is a good source for information on dealing with aging on a day-to-day basis, unlike Fight Aging which focuses on cutting edge longevity research.