Tango in Reykjavík

Dancing is a lot like language, at least for the pair dancing that I do.
Different places have different styles and accents, stressing certain
steps and ways of communicating in the dance. There are different
teaching styles. Some focus on steps, like memorizing sentences from
a quick Berlitz guide. Others on movements, perhaps akin to learning
to read by phonics. Learning either one has the problem of learning
with other people who aren't good, so you don't know what's right.

I went tango dancing here in Reykjavík this evening. It was at the
Intercultural Centre about 30 minutes walk from the hotel. I didn't
think it was quite that far away and asked for clarification from some
guy walking out of a grocery store. Like Sweden, nearly everyone here
speaks English.

The man/woman ratio at the event was about 6/15, which I think is
worse than Santa Fe. Good for me though. It usually took a few
dances for them to understand my tango accent. Some of the women were
quite good. I might even meet a couple of them again at an upcoming
tango event. There's one in Copenhagen and another in Sweden near
Gothenborg. I'll be at the one at the end of next week.

The Swedish tango site tangoportalen is much more popular, and more featureful, than I thought. A few of the women have pages on the site. Perhaps I should register there too.

I went dancing tonight instead of participating in the group event.
The rest of the people went to a "Viking feast" and got to try some of
the traditional foods. As well as a bunch of drinking. I had a
viking-ish meal at the Tivoli in Copenhagen and I'm not much into
fish, so I think I made the right decision.

Yesterday was a long work day. I did a code review of Python's
stringobject.c. The "replace" function was the worst. It made an
intermediate string before making the actual Python string, so every
replace called for two string copies. It didn't handle various
special cases that I thought were important. Today I rewrote the code
and added support for those cases. Some 600+ lines later and the
results in stringbench timings range from 17% to 65% faster. The
biggest improvement is in replace where the 'from' and 'to' strings
are the same size.

There are still improvements to make as I only looked at a single
function. Fredrick worked on the unicode module and managed almost
4-fold performance boost there, in part by using a smarter string
search. Tomorrow we'll migrate some of those to 8-bit strings. I
wrote some test cases which found a few bugs. Guido decreed a
solution to one, and the others were overflow/segfault errors.

Yesterday we all got a gift from EWT, the sponsers of this conference.
It's a Nokia 770, which is a cross between a PDA and a palmtop. Now I
need to figure out if I'll use the thing. I've had 2 Palm devices
(okay, "Palm Pilot", before they got sued by the maker of Pilot pens)
and managed to loose both within a month or two. The Nokia isn't a
PDA. It's does have a decent web browser and connects to bluetooth
and wireless. I'll see if it proves useful. I can't belive it
doesn't have an alarm clock on it.

By the end of yesterday I was so tired I slept for about 10 hours, 5
hours at a time. This room is only so-so. It's a big room, but the
bed is a bit saggy and the tub clogs up so while I'm taking a shower I
end up with several inches of bath. The towels are skimpy thin too.

Off to bed. Workshop starts at 9am promptly. I'll post this in the
morning. Not that it's more than medium dusk at 1:15 am here.
There's still a month until the summer solstice here at 64 or so
degrees north.