From "Fatal Revenant", I list a couple of more fascinating words:

• innominate - having no name, nameless
• surquedry - arrogance, presumption, insolence

Where does the author find these words?  It must be an old and wonderous thesaurus filled with obsolete words.

Wow!  It finally happened.  I managed to compute a covariance matrix from "real world" data that was singular. The good news is that I found a failure in my row swapping logic for inverting a matrix.  The bad news is that no matter how I rearranged the rows of data, the determinant was always zero.

This just goes to show that singlular matrices may be rare in the "real world", but they do exist.  It also points out that my well thought out unit test wasn't.   The term "failed spectacularly" comes to mind.

This problem goes back to the drawing board for further analysis.

I am still slogging through "Fatal Revenant: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" by Stephen R. Donaldson.  My reading has slowed considerably over the last few days.  Why?  I am scanning earlier passages, making lists of words I've had to look up.  I am also skimming earlier books in the series to add words to my list.  I'll give you an example of why I am doing this.  Look at the title of the book: "Fatal Revenant." What does revenant mean?  Heck, even the Word 2007 dictionary doesn't seem to know.  Dictionary.com gives the following meanings:

1. a person who returns.
2. a person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost.

I've taken some time off from my internet life to work on my palpable life.  There have been some events in my personal life which have caused me to rethink the amount of time I spend working on blog postings, wiki articles and generally sitting in front of a computer until 12 AM.  So, I've filled my life with yard work and cooking these past two weeks, enjoying my brother's company.  Instead of spending every night glued to my LCD panels, I am walking and engaging in physical activities with friends and family.

For those of you that notice, there are no advertisements on my blog anymore.  I've also removed Google analytics tracking from all of my web code.  It's just my writing and observations, and I'll write when I have something worth saying, which isn't very often.

I am currently waiting on the final book in the trilogy "The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" by Stephen R. Donaldson.  There is an interesting story behind this trilogy.  It completes a cycle of books that I started reading in 1977.  Mr. Donaldson's story languished for nearly two and a half decades and will be completed in October of this year with the release of the final book.  His books are difficult reading.  (I tend to keep a dictionary available, as Mr. Donaldson is an expert explorer of little used words in the English language.  e.g. Use puissance, exigent, palpable, chrism, tor and penumbra in various sentences.)

I am currently working on completing the port and modernization of DCDFLIB to managed C++ and eventually to C#.  I hope to return to the port of WinROTT later this year.  My real goal is to lose many pounds, the unfortunate accumulation of two and a half decades of inactive living.  I am still working on my schedule and attempting to reach some balance in my life, which is causing me some difficulties.  I've allowed competing inclinations to creep into my life, confusing important versus superfulous activities.  (I am admitting that I am an abject slave to "Shiny Things."  This has caused me to spend too many nights not getting enough sleep.)

And here's a link to a combination of lot's of personal advice.  The context of why these quotes were made is hidden to me.  However, many of the quotes sum what I am trying to do: "Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before..."

Release 1.6.9.11 of DCDFlib.  Minor clean up.  I am a little over the halfway mark for removing labels and general code modernization.