Steve Minutillo :: messy-78messy things

Oh how quickly things change. Remember this post? It’s SO FOUR MONTHS AGO. First they announce that you can no longer feed your posts to your book as notes. Great. And streaming your buzzes to your circles? HA! WHAT buzzes?

So what to do now. Make a pipe that firehoses everything to a planet? Kind of old fashioned. Tweet shortlinks to pinboard? Two more services I’d have to sign up for. Maybe what I need to do is make my own plugin that can push each post to my plus… of course I’d have to use the graph to post notes to my wall for friends who aren’t in my circles. Bah, too much work.

BEST IF READ BY:
DECEMBER 1 2011
12:00 AM

My blog connects to my book, so every post becomes a note, eventually. Also, my blog connects to my buzz! So every post I blog is automatically buzzed! Finally, as of today, my buzz is even connected to my plus. So the question is: when I blog a post, and it is buzzed, will plus stream it to my circles?

note: if you do not understand this it may not yet be 2011 where you are

I was shocked today to find out that http://ac/ actually works. I found some other working two letter domain names, here is the whole list:

http://ac/
http://ai/
http://bi/ (looks like whoever put this up is as surprised as me)
http://dk/
http://hk/
http://io/
http://tm/
http://uz/

And as if that wasn’t enough, here is the grand prize winning crazy domain name that actually works:

http://xn--o3cw4h/

Of course you can’t publish a top 9 list, nobody wants to read a top 9 list, so to make it an even ten I add this gem:

http://nyan.cat/

This post by bunnie gets my vote for blog post of the year. First he shows you where to download the genetic code for the super-resitant form of E. coli found on German bean sprouts. Then he shows you where to download a database of genes known to code for drug resistance. And then:

Now that we have this list, we can answer some interesting questions, such as “How many of the known drug resistance genes are inside O141:H4?” I find it fascinating that this question is answered with a shell script:

cat uniprot_search_m9 | awk '{if ($3 > 99) { print;}}' | cut -f2 |grep -v ^# | cut -f1 -d"_" | cut -f3 -d"|" | sort | uniq | wc -l

This is completely insane. I mean I get the whole “Turing Equivalence” thing, but still. Fabrice Bellard, who has written some pretty important bits of computing infrastructure, has created a fully functional x86 emulator in JavaScript! It boots up Linux and lands you at a root prompt. There’s even a compiler – and Emacs! It runs pretty well for me, with Chrome 11 on a Windows i7 laptop.

Does that sequence of letters, numbers, and plus signs mean nothing to you? Then don’t click here.

OK, Vi Hart is my new favorite person. Her mission: to reveal the inherent awesomeness of math. Her video series Doodling in Math Class is incredible. This episode even sneaks in a Dinosaur Comics reference. Not convinced yet? How about a paper on Computational Balloon Twisting? Or how to slice an apple into a cube… and then slice that cube into hexagons with star shapes inside? Musical instruments made of paper and fire? A Möbius Music Box? She has even been covered by The New York Times. The list of things she has produced seems to just go on and on to infinity, filling in all the space between math and art.

Remember back when IE was dead and Microsoft said IE6 was going to be the final version ever? Oh, how times have changed. Now they are on a campaign to try to get users to please, PLEASE upgrade away from IE6! The site has all the modern “tweet this” and “like this” buttons and even has a snippet of code you can put on your site to show IE6 users an “error message”.

(OT: I wonder if that map will be quietly updated in a few days to stop referring to Taiwan as a country)

These guys now have an app that lets you translate spoken words and phrases between different languages! Universal Translator in your pocket, right? Not quite. We tried it out and it does a decent job translating English to Chinese, but the results translating Chinese to English are just so hilariously wrong as to make the app useless. Jenny was trying to speak slower and slower and more carefully to get it to be able to translate ANYTHING and eventually got frustrated and told it (in Chinese) “Talking to you is like talking to a wall!” the app dutifully translated:

"THUNDERBIRD. RESTAURANT. POWER CONVERTER."

I am going to C++ and Beyond in December! If you’re not an ultra-nerd, this is kind of like going to a Jersey Shore meetup where JWoww, Snooki and The Situation will ALL BE THERE IN PERSON.

Ludum Dare is a game making competition, where programmers are invited to make a game based on a certain theme. The catch is you have to do it in just 48 hours! In the latest competition, the theme was “enemies as weapons”.

A guy named Markus Persson, of Minecraft fame (Minecraft being a game only ultra-nerds can understand or even recognize as a game, kind of like Dwarf Fortress) entered with a game called Metagun. In this game you are a guy who has a gun that shoots out little guys who then shoot back at you. Meta enough? Not yet!

The really Meta thing is that Markus, AKA “Notch”, recorded his computer screen for the 48 hours of making the game, and put the result up on Youtube! You can see him writing code, creating graphics, designing levels and testing the game out all at 500x speed. It’s sometimes almost unbelievable how much stuff can be cranked out by guys in these competitions, but now you can see it yourself.

…running top, pressing 1, and seeing this message:

Sorry, terminal is not big enough.

Heard of Scratch? My nephew Dante introduced me to it. It’s a really nice visual programming environment, aimed at kids. You create programs that control the movement of sprites by snapping blocks together. There’s an “IDE” (written in Squeak Smalltalk) that you download and install and use to develop your programs, and then you are encouraged to share your programs by uploading them to the Scratch site. On the site, your Scratch program is run in a Java applet. Other users can then download the “source” to your programs, “remix”, and repost them. The people behind it have put a lot of work into both the technology and the community, and it ends up being really fun all around.

I made a few small programs to get the feel of it, like this Mars Lander game, but wanted to see how far I could push Scratch. So I set out to make a LOGO interpreter! It was pretty difficult, since Scratch doesn’t have subroutines, and the only data structure is the array. I ended up with something that supports a small subset of LOGO, including basic turtle graphics, user defined subroutines, and global variables. I also spent quite a lot of effort optimizing it to be as fast as possible within the limitations of Scratch. At first I just wanted to get the simple LOGO program to draw a circle, REPEAT 360 [ FD 1 RT 1 ], to run as fast as a “native” Scratch program to do the same thing. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and actually made my interpreter run faster than native Scratch. How I did that is another story, but to give you a hint, -funroll-loops.

Anyway the point of all this is while poking around at how to speed things up in Scratch, I decompiled the Java player that runs Scratch programs on the web. I was at first very confused by the output, because it looked like the source code to a… LOGO interpreter…??!?! I looked harder and found enclosed in the JAR file a LOGO program to run Scratch programs! For whatever reason, maybe because they had a LOGO interpreter in Java lying around, the Scratch team implemented the online player as a LOGO program that runs on Java. So that means when my Scratch LOGO interpreter is running, it’s LOGO, on Scratch, on LOGO, on Java. Neat!

This:

Made me immediately think of this:

I just launched an automated build, and the log file timestamp ends with ‘1337′. If that’s not a good omen for a programmer I don’t know what is.

Here are a bunch of stories of really great last minute hacks that were needed to get a game out the door. I have perpetrated my share of these as well. On one project I worked on, we had an upcoming very high profile marketing launch. (how high profile? we rented this room at Lincoln Center – the same one used as the meeting room in the recently canceled bad show Kings) Anyway, just before that launch, we realized that due to some very low level bugs in our messaging infrastructure, some small percentage of messages were being lost. The cause was unknown, and the “real” fix would have taken more time than we had. So instead, I put in a small change. Send every message… no, not twice, that wouldn’t be quite awesome enough… no, I sent every message in TRIPLICATE! Worked like a charm.

make -j, when you meant make -j2.