I never realized it before, but I have a friend who just confessed to Facebook that he has not paid for a haircut since the 1980's. Maybe he was married to a hair stylist, or perhaps he had that cool as-seen-on-TV vacuum cleaner assisted haircutting styling tool, or maybe he's just been growing dreadedlocks for the last 20 years since I've seen him, I really don't know. With this friend, just about anything is possible...

But I did a little research into this horrific social issue, and I discovered VoiceForTheUnHairCutted.org - Did you know that the average person has 5 million hairs? And as for their pets, a study on Yahoo Answers found that some people had bald cats and that only God could count the true number of hairs on others, however another reliable study on wikianswers calculated that cats have around 40 million hairs, and that dogs have exactly 2,000,078 hairs, although researchers at chacha put the number of hairs on dogs at 15485 hairs per square inch, but they have no idea how many square inches a dog is, so maybe I need to re-read the book Flatland to find out.

And I couldn't find any reliable study of whether my friend has pets with more hair than himself, but that was kind of beside the point, because then I got distracted by the possibility that he has an aquarium with organisms that have flagellum, which are hair like extensions that they use to propel themselves and I started wondering how many thousands or millions might be in his aquarium, and wondering how they groom themselves, and then discovered that creatures with hair extensions could even be dispersed in his subgingival dental plaque, and which according to other resources, bacterial extracellular appendages are common components of plaque. I started wondering about bacterial extracellular appendages in orange juice, and google has 17,600 results for me to read about that, and then while researching that issue, some website sent me a popup that I was the millionth visitor today and the winner of some underarm deodorant pads, and while I was trying to register for the prize, a click bomb from some other site suddenly rebooted my computer. After I got back online, I tried again to claim my prize, but I couldn't find the website, but I am getting all kinds of cool popups now, and then I remembered about what had raised my concerns in the first place, but my computer was busy rebooting again, so then I went over to my neighbor to borrow his computer, but he refused to risk his own computer on my web wanderings, or enable a condition he says I have that he calls add (he always says this and he always spells it out like this "aye dee dee", why can't he just say add like normal people, I'm going to have look into that, there is probably a name for his condition), so I got mad and told him all he does is subtract and divide what does he know about adding things, so then I had to go to the library to use their computers to return to reading the American Hair Association website.

I read stories of the 147 million Naftans who don't have access to proper hair cuts. I learned that 79% come from working families, and 28% are children, and 47% are cats and dogs. (Yeah, I know that math seems a little odd, but hey, I support their right to be entitled to their own set of facts, even their own system of math if necessary to support the facts.) My own back of the bill collectors envelope calculations say this means there could be quadrillion's, or maybe even quintillions, of hairs needing to be maintained. Those are certainly bigger numbers than I hear about for most issues, this must be really serious. I learned that if big corporations would do their part to provide hair cuts for their workers, dependents, and companion animals, and ensure access to such services even when workers get fed up and decide to just drop out of the work force for a while, we wouldn't be in the situation where a precarious job situation would lead to precarious access to salon services.

Two in five adults age 19 to 64 have trouble paying for Hollywood style grooming for themselves and their pets. We need to make sure people are not denied access to haircuts because of a prior bad hair day. We need to support direct subsidies to enable even those with high risk of frizzing, dandruff, split ends, and dry limp and fly away hair, can purchase affordable hair cuts.

In short, grooming America's unhaircutted should concern all presidential candidates, all members of Congress and every American.

A friend on Facebook talked about starting the lemons - cayenne pepper - maple syrup master cleanse diet for ten days. I have been studying about fruit and juice fasting. I tried it for a couple of days, but I found the cayenne to be a bit harsh, and I have some reservations about the glycemic blood sugar issues with the maple syrup.

However, it is very easy to have a more nutritionally balanced fast. I gave the following comments:

You would not hurt your diet at all to give yourself one meal a day of some other fruits like:

• bananas (potassium for the heart),
• apricots (iron),
• blueberries (antioxidants),
• pineapple (also very good for fasts)
• cherries (protein and feeling satisfied).

Just eat them entirely natural for the benefits of the fiber to help cleanse your system.

Brushing teeth or at least rinsing mouth after the lemon juice is a good idea for keeping the enamel on your teeth safe.....

And eat the fruit as slowly and as relaxed as you can. Lots of chewing to really savor and liquify it.

• source

Seen on Facebook: Romney does not have a clue on how to relate to those of us in the lower to middle class so chances are he isn't going to pass legislation that will improve our qualities of life.

Honestly, I really dont know what the president can actually do to "improve [lower to middle class] qualities of life".

In the colonial days, and at least until the mid-1950's people came to this country with less on their back than any of us have, much fewer advantages and special programs to help them. They came here to be part of America for an opportunity to work hard and make something for themselves.

I am not sure what any of those presidents in those days "did" to help them in that, other than preserve this as a land of opportunity for people to pursue whatever dream they have for themselves and their family.

• Should the poor and middle class wait for a president who will help them

I dont have to accept being poor with nothing, this country has plenty of opportunity still, I dont see how waiting for a president to "do something" will help me. I could wait a long time. I would rather take control of my own life and be in control of doing something for me, not waiting for politicians to get their act together to do something...

If we don't believe more in our own abilities to help ourselves rise on the social ladder than we do in the governments ability to "help" us, then I fear that this country is already lost no matter who is elected...

More in Politics:

• Lets just really Tax the Rick
• Santorum comments on women and birth control

Posted today on my facebook page:

What if computer programming was treated like competitive sports?

Commentator speaking in a hushed voice as the camera pans from a wideshot of Garnet's desk to a closeup of his screen:

OK, Garnet Chaney's setup the method with a proper set of error checks, he has made sure that all the inputs are legal, and now he's getting into the meat of the method. Is he going to use a FOR loop or a WHILE loop with a local variable? His concentration is intense, he appears like he's hesitating at the keyboard.... Oh look at that, he went for a FOR EACH loop!

(Crowd cheering!)

Jack, that's looking just like the method subroutine he wrote 28 minutes ago where he used an iterator on a hash object... Oh look at that, (the crowd roars!) he's going for the refactor to combine the two routines, and he's going to use the mediator pattern with a static method... Wow, what a masterful set of keystrokes....

And now a word from our sponsor, "Accucream Typing Balm". After the break we'll visit Nik Page as he tries to reproduce a crash bug in Garnet's code, and watch as Ivaylo Lenkov's team discovers whether or not they can extend Garnet's code or if it is more fun to just rewrite it, and then we'll hear from Garnet's boss as he lectures Garnet on how they company could be worth a BILLION dollars if only Garnet would work harder, and does he understand how much his ten percent ownership share of a BILLION dollar company would be worth.... Stay tuned to the Wide World of Programming..... (cut to upbeat network program music....)

Garnet sees the on air light turn off, quickly checks Facebook....

http://www.bobsgear.com/dashboard.action?maxRecentlyUpdatedPageCount=40  
Recently Updated

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Finally found the memory leak problem with my wikipedia parsing. It was a quirk of the LINQ database stuff keeping things in memory. The program is now happily processing 100 articles every 0.4 seconds, which is amazingly better than the 10 seconds it was taking to process 100 articles yesterday morning. Occassionally it speeds up and processes 100 articles in only 0.1 seconds.... And not having all the extra memory sitting around being held means the program is not gradually slowing down either.

How I structured the program:

• There is now one thread parsing the XML file, sending its results to a background thread
• The backgroudn thread does some extra parsing, and then background thread queues the objects ready for the database insert
• two database insert threads grab 250 articles at a time from the queue and batch insert them into the SQL Express database.

The XML parsing thread occassionally sleeps because it is much faster than the database threads, I dont want more than about 2500 articles sitting in memory waiting to be dumped into the database....

With the program current speed, it might take maybe 400 minutes to process entire wikipedia dump, down from maybe 6 days for the version of the program yesterday morning.

Some lessons learned:

• It is cheap to dispose of DataContexts with LINQ and create new datacontexts for each batch of database access. This gets rid of memory hanging around. This might not be the case for connecting with a remote database, the time to establish a new SQL Server connection to a remote server might be significant, this needs to be tested. But it is possible that multiple database threads could make up for this.
• Creating Regex objects takes a lot of time. Once a regular expression Regex is proven, move it outside of loops to be a global variable with the RegexOptions Compiled set. This alone resulted in a 50% speedup of my program.
• Despite using four threads, this program still only uses 12%-20% of an I7 processor. But now the disk drive light is on solid from all the database inserts. Occassionally the CPU usage jumps to 36% for short bursts, and the program seems to process records faster. Not sure why can't get the speed consistently up. More analysis could be done on the XML file parsing thread, but extra analysis results would increase the amount of stuff needing to be sent to the database, so it is a tradeoff.
• Having background threads for long running processing allows the UI to stay responsive.

A couple of useful articles:

• LINQ - My various notes on linq, such as Answers to Miscellaneous questions about LINQ, Troubleshooting memory leaks in LINQ
  • My experience 6/26/2010: Noticed in WikipediaToConfluence application: Written with background threads creating their own SQLMetal generated DataContext, and recreating a new DataContext every hundred records or so. Even without ever increasing memory usage, the Windows Vista system eventually gets very slow, and appears to run out of resources. Things like menus can not be selected in Visual Studio, other things requiring memory allocations fail, eventhough the system says it has 1-2GB of free ram after extended runtime of the application.
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/123057/how-do-i-avoid-a-memory-leak-with-linq-to-sql - DataContext should have short lifetime, and be recreated often.
• Error handling for primary index violations, learn how to rollback for SubmitChanges failure.
  • http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/linqprojectgeneral/thread/b80b1361-977b-4443-87ef-a856feba0c84/

This concerns revision 484 of [wminfra:WikipediaToConfluence] project.

Note: A PC can still become quite unusable over time if a program is running and doing a lot of updates to a database on the same machine. This can resemble a memory leak, but it doesnt show up in task manager. The machine may be almost unusable, unable to popup menus, programs may have strange errors, etc. Stopping and starting, restarting, the SQL Server service will restore the machine to proper operation. If SQL Server is not limited in the amount of memory it can use, it will try to use all the memory in the machine, but it uses it in a way that doesn't show up in task manager.

The other day I was tracking my diet for a couple of days, and discovered some big deficits of certain vitamins.

A friend of mine is a wellness doctor. I asked him for his opinion on vitamin supplements. Does he think vitamin supplements are useful, or are they a bunch of hype?

He said he feels they are very useful. The vitamins we have the most problem not getting enough of are:

• Vitamin A
• Vitamin D
• Vitamin E
• Vitamin C

I asked him what he thinks about the U.S. RDA numbers for vitamins. I've heard that they are set just above the minimum to keep you from getting diseases like scurvy, but not high enough to give real health. He agreed.

What about vitamin B-12? My doctor friend said that is very important for vegetarians and vegans to supplement.

I told him I had some trouble finding a vitamin supplement without extra iron. He asked if I cook with an iron skillet. Cooking with an iron skillet is a great way to end up with extra iron in the diet!

He takes 1000 mg. a day of Vitamin C, 1000 mg. of vitamin D. He said we have a problem with having enough vitamin D because we don't get enough sunlight.

My doctor friend said he had learned about the importance of vitamin supplements from watching a friend of ours, Dr. Merton Shelton who lived into his 90's and was a big believer in taking vitamin supplements.

Related pages:

• Problems with vitamins

Hmmm... Almost a year since my last blog posting in this space. That's the problem with having too many places to post things at.....

What have I been doing in the last year?

• Learning how to make beads and glasswork, lampworking, and when they don't turn out right, melting them down into marbles!
• Doing further development on the Hivewiki software. It's now running on another server also, with a more up to do date version, Webmill.us.
• Reading books:
  • Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich - Working on cliff notes and a wiki version of it
  • Journey Round My Skull - Story of survivor of one of the earliest open brain surgeries
  • Do Cats Think? - Delightful book that answers "Of course they do!"
  • Health Power - Health By Choice, Not Chance

Think I've finished some others recently too, have to come back here and update the list.