Things to “accidentally” type when you need a break
Geekism
make -j, when you meant make -j2.
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31.03.09
Things to “accidentally” type when you need a breakGeekism
25.03.09
Communist LogicGeekism![]() 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.) 19.02.09
You’re doing it wrongOtherwhereSharena is making a mockery of the lion dance and eventually her great grandfather can’t take it any more. 18.02.09
Taiwan updatesOtherwhereI’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”. 16.02.09
Got hereOtherwhereWe 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. 03.02.09
Sharp tools, and subverting the paradigmGeekismThis story of the recent technical happenings of Muxtape has three points that resonate with me:
23.01.09
Taiwan + Palo AltoOtherwhereWe’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. 11.01.09
WaterfailGeekismI’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? 30.12.08
Fredrik Larsson’s “Wind Waker Unplugged”Video GamesI 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. 13.09.08
Good C++ training… really!GeekismRemember 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. 26.06.08
EXPIRED, Tired, WiredRegularOh yeah, remember this one? Here’s an update:
Probably by two years from now it’ll be a holographic phone that is projected directly on your retina or something. 26.06.08
What about unestablished entities? Or what if I’m established, but not an entity?GeekismHere are two statements from ICANN’s announcement that they will be opening up registration of top-level domains:
Yay! I would love to be able to “express myself!” http://messy.78/ here we come!
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. 19.05.08
What’s up with that?OtherwhereNice to see that ancient Chinese scholars had the same sense of humor as modern stand-up hacks:
09.03.08
What is the output of date -d “”?GeekismAnswer: 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. 07.02.08
Vs.Video GamesI have determined the top two Street Fighter videos on the ENTIRE INTERNET, but I just can’t quite tell which is the absolute champion: VS. 30.01.08
Taiwan 2008Otherwhere
Update: no we aren’t! more like TaiWRONG 2008! 27.12.07
Word count bookmarkletGeekismUpdated! 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. 19.12.07
The weird thing is it’s not in the dictionaryGeekismOK, 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. 13.12.07
WARNINGRegularDo 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) 02.12.07
Everybody Loves Hypnotoad!RegularThe 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!!!!! 02.12.07
The Legend of the Squishy MacBookGeekismGreat. I am now completely obsessed with the squishy left side of my MacBook. 30.11.07
ZOMBIE COCKROACHES: updateRegularRemember this? Scientists are now beginning to unlock the secrets of cockroach zombification:
28.11.07
Space Shuttle landing - view from cockpit!RegularThis 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. 25.10.07
Dear Google:GeekismPlease 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. 06.10.07
RAMEN MUSEUM?!!?OtherwhereOK, 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. 26.09.07
Tonkinese = Pho, Mytho = ???OtherwhereRandom information for Vietmanese food seekers in Montreal:
25.09.07
Anotherwhere!!?!Otherwhere
A free lifetime subscription to messy-78 to the first person to guess where we are now! 15.09.07
Colorado?Otherwhere
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? 01.09.07
This is only a testRegular 26.08.07
Pilot Pen TennisOtherwhere![]() 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. 19.08.07
BNL.govOtherwhereToday: 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! ![]() 29.07.07
I have discovered Korean emoticon biscuits.GeekismSaw these at the local asian grocery: ![]() After doing a double take I realized that yes, those were emoticons on the cookies! (or biscuits, I guess) I bought them, and just as advertised: ![]() I couldn’t find a page dedicated to this product, but this is the manufacturer and here’s some Japanese guy blogging about them. How do they taste? Sort of Pocky-esque, but not as good. But hey, EMOTICONS! *^^* 25.07.07
AnarchaiaGeekismI don’t remember where I picked it up, but Anarchaia by Christian Neukirchen is one of my current favorite feeds. It’s an incredibly eclectic combination of deep geekism, pictures, random links, IRC chat snippets, and occasional poetry (which I skip - especially when it’s in German!). trivia: it’s also the site that caused the mysterious _why to coin the term “tumblelog”) Word of the Day
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