make -j, when you meant make -j2.

Are you like me? Do you like games that feel like work? Then maybe this game is for you. Конструктор (constructor) has been my obsession since it appeared on Sunday. I’ve had Zachtronics Industries subscribed for a while, after stumbling across some of his older games “for engineers”. But this one is my favorite so far. In it, you create chips that meet certain specifications using metal wires and two types of silicon. The red silicon, when powered, can stop the flow of electricity when drawn on top of the yellow. And the yellow, when drawn on the red, stops the flow unless it is powered. That is all you have to work with! Did you ever take a class in “Digital Logic” where you sketched out designs for things like an an adder using simple gates, like NOT or AND or NOR? This game is like the ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE of that. You don’t even have a NOT gate. In fact, your first challenge is to make one! The levels ramp up in difficultly quite quickly from there, and many seem simply impossible at first. I’m now to the point in the game with timing glitches and space to lay out circuits is becoming an issue, and loving it. The last few levels are “Confidential” but I have high hopes given that in the levels leading up to them you implement a shift register, RAM, and a rudimentary ALU.

If I stop showing up to work for the next few days this game is the reason why.

(by the way: the author of the game seems to have neglected to point out one important fact: you hold down the shift key to toggle between paining the two types of silicon. this took me a while to figure out the first time.)

Sharena is making a mockery of the lion dance and eventually her great grandfather can’t take it any more.

I’ve started to post a few pictures from Taiwan and also some shaaaaaky videos.

Remember this famous picture of Sharena from the first trip? I took an almost identical one of Mira this time around, and not even on purpose! For reference, here’s what Sharena looks like now.

Today we’re in Hualien and tomorrow we continue our bus ride around the country. The bus ride today was pretty long, but it was no problem because there was “entertainment”.

We have arrived in Taiwan and in typical Taiwanese fashion we found that Jenny’s relatives actually rented a TOUR BUS to pick us up from the airport. It brought us to her Uncle’s place (only saw one bing lang girl on the way) where every relative ever had gathered for food and drink. They finally let us go and now they’ve distributed us out to houses with spare rooms for sleeping. We have big plans to get up early tomorrow and get breakfast and check out the area, but I’m pretty sure we owe like 2 or 3 night’s sleep at this point so we’ll see what actually happens.

Tomorrow is a day of relative rest (other than the inevitable banquet-grade dinner) and then the next day we start a 5 day bus trip around the island, to some places we’ve been before, and some we haven’t.

This story of the recent technical happenings of Muxtape has three points that resonate with me:

1. How to deal with tools that suck. (And what it means when a geek says something sucks.)
2. How much better tools that don’t suck are!
3. And the best part: how to change those tools, from suck to not suck, even when you aren’t “the boss”.

We’ve got trips! And this time they’re for reals.

This weekend: Palo Alto! I’ve been casually talking to somebody out there for a while, and now that our conversations are getting more serious (O(lg n) and the like) we’ve decided to meet up in person and see where things lead.

End of February: Taiwan, again! This time with all of them, plus ALL their kids, which will definitely be either fun or “fun”. Hoping for mostly the former.

I’m having a hard time figuring out if this is an extremely advanced form of sarcasm, or if he’s actually serious.

Can the waterfall method be added to the list of things where the real thing cannot be distinguished from the parody?

• Flat Earthers
• Conservapedia
• PETA
• Sarah Palin

You meet some interesting people playing Dr. Mario online…

I like to occasionally revisit how far fan-made versions of video game music have progressed. This, as far as I’m concerned, is as good as it gets as of 2008:

Here is an interview with him about this incredible video.

Remember how I was all “Is there available, on planet Earth, REALLY good C++ training?” The answer turns out to be YES! We (the place where I work) just finished a week of training provided by DevelopMentor, using materials created by Scott Meyers, and presented by Steve Dewhurst. It was absolutely excellent! I had recently been in a phase where there more I learned about C++ the less I liked it, but during the course I think I hit some sort of Tipping Point™ where I started to like it again. You can (and should) complain about a lot of things in C++, but no other language spans a greater range of the abstraction spectrum from the lofty and metaphysical down to gritty opcodes and registers.

Oh yeah, remember this one? Here’s an update:

WAY old and busted:

NEW OLD HOTNESS:

NEW NEW HOTNESS:

Probably by two years from now it’ll be a holographic phone that is projected directly on your retina or something.

Here are two statements from ICANN’s announcement that they will be opening up registration of top-level domains:

“The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey.

Yay! I would love to be able to “express myself!” http://messy.78/ here we come!

There will be a limited application period where any established entity from anywhere in the world can submit an application that will go through an evaluation process.

Oh.

Another thing I realized while reading this is that some day very soon “.com” will be passe… and then shortly afterwards extremely cool and retro.

Nice to see that ancient Chinese scholars had the same sense of humor as modern stand-up hacks:

Reading Laozi, by Bai Juyi

Those who speak do not know, those who know are silent,
I heard this saying from the old gentleman.
If the old gentleman was one who knew the way,
Why did he feel able to write five thousand words?

I am dumbfounded. And they even have competition.

Answer: up until yesterday, it was the current date. But starting today, it is AN ERROR MESSAGE! Why? DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!!! This wasted about 1 hour of my time today.

I have determined the top two Street Fighter videos on the ENTIRE INTERNET, but I just can’t quite tell which is the absolute champion:

We’ll be going back to Taiwan this year, in April! Highlights will be Jenny’s grandfather’s ∞^th birthday (and other family type functions), a visit to Sandwich Lady, and going up to the top of the Taipei 101 while it still holds on to the “tallest” title. (The last time I saw the 101 it looked like this!)

Update: no we aren’t! more like TaiWRONG 2008!

Updated!

This word count bookmarklet searches through the page you’re on, and attempts to report the word count of the selection. It will first look for the text selection, and if there is none, it will search for a textarea that has a selection. It should be working in Safari and Firefox, and possibly even IE and Opera.

• Brokeolated
• Funktified
• Borkonated
• Screwzored
• Bustacular

OK, so you actually expect me to believe that ON THE SAME DAY we got actual evidence that Duke Nukem Forever is going to come out, like, ever, AND news that the next version of IE is going to pass the ACID2 web standards test? Just how gullible do you think I am? The next thing you’re gonna try and tell me is that a new version of Feed on Feeds has been released.

Do not, under any circumstances, click this link. And if you accidentally do, ABSOLUTELY DO NOT CROSS YOUR EYES.

(for more things you should never click on don’t click here)

The new Futurama DVD has the best special feature of any DVD ever in the history of human achievement: an entire episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad!

And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a lecture on the math of Futurama by Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald. a²+b²=c² ? THINK AGAIN!!!!!

Great. I am now completely obsessed with the squishy left side of my MacBook.

Remember this? Scientists are now beginning to unlock the secrets of cockroach zombification:

Researchers have worked out the neurological trick used by a species of wasp to turn cockroaches into ‘zombie slaves’. The discovery explains why, once stung, cockroaches can be led by a much smaller master towards certain death. Researchers have proven their theory by replicating the effect, and by using an antidote injection to release the cockroaches from their zombie state.

This YouTube video (embedding disabled) shows the view from the cockpit (with HUD) of the last 7 minutes or so of the Space Shuttle Atlantis landing. You can also hear the running chatter back and forth from the shuttle to ground control. The pilot is enjoying himself exactly as much as you would expect, I mean, he’s ACTUALLY FLYING THE SPACE SHUTTLE.

The video seemed to originate from this somewhat broken site which has some other videos, but I haven’t found any that are as good.

And if you want to try this landing for yourself, you can! Just install X-Plane.

Please get like 50 of your PhDs together and have them figure out how to automatically provide subtitles for all your YouTube videos.

Love, the Internet.

OK, apparently we totally missed the boat the two times Jenny and I have been to Japan. RAMEN MUSEUM? Are you serious? Why were we not informed!!! At least now I have a way to try to convince Jenny to spend 13 hours on a plane if I ever find myself going back.

Random information for Vietmanese food seekers in Montreal:

• For some reason, “Pho” is called “Tonkinese Soup” here.
• There is another soupish dish that called “Mytho” which is ubiquitous and very good. Maybe named after the place Mỹ Tho? Anyway, it was pretty much like this, minus the quail eggs. I had it with the broth on the side and was recommended (twice!) to put some sweet vinegar on top which turned out to be a very good idea.
• Our favorite Vietmanese restaurant here is Cafe Saigon in “Le Village”. Like the review says, “so out it’s in”.

A free lifetime subscription to messy-78 to the first person to guess where we are now!

So here we are in Colorado, with a rental car that is sure to make somebody jealous.

In other news, did I mention that we’re going on vacation to Colorado?

This is only a test Originally uploaded by minutillo

Sunshine buddy!

We went to the finals of the Pilot Pen tennis tournament yesterday. It was fun, even though we didn’t get to see any really good matches. In the women’s final, Svetlana Kuznetsova lost the first set to Ágnes Szávay, and then just as it was getting interesting Szávay had to give up because of an injury. Too bad.

James Blake beat his friend Mardy Fish in straight sets. We were sitting right next to one of the few Fish fans in the crowd which made the match a little more exciting. “COME ON FISH! SHAKE IT OFF!!!!”

We even hung around to see the women’s doubles championship match, which was a complete blowout: somehow the world’s top women’s doubles team lost 6-1 6-2! On the winning team was Sania Mirza, originally from India, who had attracted a respectable number of Indian fans who we watched filming and taking pictures of her somewhat obsessively and quickly scurring to try to get autographs after the game.

Just out of curiosity I checked today to see how much it would cost us to see the US Open. Tickets for seats at the finals as good as the ones we had are around FIVE THOUSAND BUCKS! Yowza!!! Jenny would like to see Federer play a whole lot… but not that much.

Today: Brookhaven National Lab! During the summer they give tours on Sundays and they saved the best for last: RELATIVISITC HEAVY ION COLLIDER!!!! What is that? Well, just like the name, it takes heavy ions (gold, specifically) and collides them…. relativistically! See the tiny circle in the middle of this map? Zoom in and take a closer look, that’s RHIC.

There were way, way more people out there than I had imagined! Who knew particle physics drew the crowds. They split the tours up into different groups, and first we took this bus and listened to this Actual Research Scientist™ describe a few of the buildings on the BNL campus and the basics of the RHIC experiments. Our first stop was the PHENIX experiment.

This is, if I’m not mistaken Stefen Bathe, (more publications here) standing in front of the PHENIX detector. He’s explaining the experiment, which among other things is creating a Quark-gluon plasma, and fielding questions from other people on the tour (can this be used to generate energy? no. how loud are the collisions? silent. what practical benefit will this research have? possibly none. how do you turn it on? a team of scientists and engineers go in that control room over there and work for a few weeks. are you sure it’s completely silent? well, the air conditioners do make some noise).

PHENIX has lots of interesting stuff on its website, including this Java applet that lets you visualize the results of collisions (although one of the scientists seemed to imply that these visualizations are for PR purposes only and she really is only interested in crunching the raw data - “I’ve never looked at one of my collisions, actually”). Also, here are a series of games where you can try to run the collider yourself. If you get a high enough score, the results of your experiements enable time travel.

We spent a little more time at the STAR experiment. The goal of this experiement is… exactly the same as PHENIX! The two teams are in competition and are trying to beat each other to results, and also create the same findings with two different methods.

Here’s one of STAR’s gigantic detectors. I’m not sure but this may be part of the FORWARD TIME PROJECTION CHAMBER, which sounds really cool.

We also got to see the control room for STAR. It was full of racks of computers, which of course drew my interest. By the way if I’m not mistaken this is STAR’s entire CVS repository: here’s a commit somebody made just a few days ago. I guess this is the real stuff. Also, STAR: the weblog. Subscribed!

Science runs on Linux!

OK, also sometimes on Solaris. And Love.

A chilling sign. Toto asked the obvious question: “What do you think happened to Dennis?!?!?!” By the way, RHIC is the collider that was in the news a few years ago… remember BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH? The article stated that some crazy scientists were doing an expierment that could bring about the destruction of the Earth, or possibly even the ENTIRE UNIVERSE! I asked about this and yes, it was RHIC. I then asked if any of these events have occurred and was assured that no, they have not. I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up question involving the anthropomorphic principle and the many-worlds hypothesis. Here’s the report the lab issued: RHIC Speculative Disaster Scenarios.

I did resist the urge to try to turn it on myself.

I’m guessing that a magnet crash would be…. bad?

More serious looking stuff. I love switches behind doors, which is why I was never any good at Steel Battalion. That self-destruct switch was irresistable. (by the way, don’t bother with that IP address - it’s not pingable and a traceroute dies somewhere inside es.net.)

Posted in the control room.

The final stop on the tour took us into the accelerator tunnel. This tunnel contains two “pipes”, one with particles moving clockwise around the RHIC, the other counterclockwise. At six positions around the ring these pipes cross over, so that collisions (at 99.995% the speed of light!) are possible. At this point of the tour we got an extremely enthusiastic and technical description of exactly how the superconducting magnets guide the beam, and the various safety systems that keep the collider from destroying itself if anything goes wrong.

All in all, it was a great trip and completely worth the two hour drive out to long island. And the icing on the cake was that Jenny got to cross another resaurant off her TODO list, Momofuku. Nano-review: good!