Sprinters at the Blue Lagoon

I didn't read the schedule yesterday so didn't realize that this morning we were going to the Blue Lagoon. That's a rather famous spa here in Iceland. It's not a natural spring. The water is part of the nearby geothermal plant which mixes freshwater and saltwater (in a 1:2 ratio) about 2km underground, using the resulting 200C+ mixture for power. We didn't leave until 9:30 which means I could have stayed until the end of tango last night. Oh well.

You can read their home page for details. It was pretty fun. There are two big reasons for me to get contacts or eye surgery in order to not need glasses. One is playing in water, and the other is in-close dancing (especially bad when both are wearing glasses). It is a do it once thing. I don't think it's a do it regularly thing. The place is rather far outside of town.

For pictures of what we've been up to, see flikr, keyword is "pyneedforspeed". For Andrew spotting try here, there, or yon. I took this picture. I'm not a real picture taker though. Got annoyed trying to register with flikr now that yahoo has them.

My string replace case was committed to the code base. I worked on a few more minor changes, and added various tests. Good thing I did since it caught a subtle bug we introduced. Georg Brandl pointed out the basic problem. I worked on some ideas for speeding up string.split for whitespace. Looks like we're memory bandwidth limited because my improvement wasn't. A couple of months ago I looked into the problem. For small splits the problem is the resize algorithm. There are 2 or 3 reallocs to get up to 10 splits. When I prealloc the list to size 10 with a post-facto fixup it goes from 5.2 to 3.9 seconds, which is nice for much of what I do. Tomorrow I'll work on that more and port it to the other cases.

It may also be worthwhile to special case splits with a maxlimit of 1 and 2. Those are the most frequent uses of split in the standard library.

We worked late into the night because we didn't get started until 2pm. There's still a bunch of us here in the sprint room at 23:30. Dusk. I don't think it's sunset yet, except there's a mountain in the way.