January 2008
22 posts
The Album Art Meme
Here’s a fun way to come up with a piece of album art that, despite first impressions, works surprisingly well. It comes from The Fishbowl, and here’s how it works: “How to create your album cover: Your band name is the title of your first hit on Wikipedia’s random page Your album name is taken from the end of the last quote on this random quotes page Your album cover...
Great post on what Computer Science is and is not →
Lost: Season 4, Starting Thursday! →
SmugMug
It’s official, my family has moved away from PBase and on to SmugMug. So far, it’s a nice change. Overall, I was happy with PBase, but there were two nagging issues with it. First, they seemed to dynamically change picture URLs so a direct link to an image may not persist forever. But more importantly, their pricing structure is still based on upload amounts, so I have to pay more...
XMPP for Tivo and Other Services? →
“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they...”
– W.H. Auden
“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
– How do you pray in the middle of the day? For me the simplest answer is a humble Act of Contrition.
“I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition,...”
– Shakespeare, MacBeth
Scraping PBase
While I’ve liked having PBase, my family has decided to move to SmugMug. This was for a number of reasons, but the biggest is simply that PBase works on bandwidth, while SmugMug is a flat annual fee for unlimited storage (I’m not a huge fan of Flickr’s interface). Unfortunately though, this presented a problem. I’ve got a lot (* GB) of photos on PBase that I don’t...
Tufte on the iPhone →
Radix Trie in Ruby →
“Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the...”
– Geoffrey Pullum
1 tag
A quick Project Euler update
Been toying with Ruby and PE for a couple of weeks now, and so far I’ve completed 27 problems. Doesn’t sound terribly impressive, but I’ve been taking my time and trying to learn how to do things the Ruby way. It’s easy to stay interested, especially when I rewrite my typical code and it shrinks tenfold. Problems 36, 37, and 112 have been the most interesting.
Enumerable is the best thing ever →
A plug for Project Euler
I’ve been learning Ruby fairly intensively (at least as intensively as my life will allow), and Project Euler has become a fairly invaluable resource in the process. It’s a ridiculously simple site, providing a series of math problems of relative difficulty that require, no matter how easy, some level of programming. For example the first problem is simply adding up all the numbers...
A 3-d printer that can print a 3-d printer →