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8 May 2008, 3:12 UTChiff: hashing diff
This is an idea that floated around in my head long ago, and I took the time to write it. I doubt it's of practical use to anybody.

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8 May 2008, 2:28 UTCTyler Wong's Possibly Optimal Hangman Strategy
I always like it when a computer is able to establish an optimal strategy for a game; that forever frees human beings from spending their time playing it.

Toward that end, here's an effort from 2001: http://www.sharkfeeder.com/hangman/. I wonder if a modern computer runs much faster than the reported 15 hours on a P3/600 -- let's hope it does. Perhaps this can be used to push the search deeper than choosing one of the 4 most likely letters at each junction, though for each one-letter increase I imagine there's a pretty steep runtime increase.

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6 May 2008, 3:02 UTCBah, it's garbage
Back in 2006, I got a PCI card from Futurlec with 3 8255 chips on it. I finally gave a serious effort at getting it to work, but as you'll read in the updated original article the board seems to simply be broken. Too bad!

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1 May 2008, 21:33 UTCmailpie: updated to version 0.2
I love this little program and now I don't know how I lived without it.

Aside from bugs fixed, the main improvement is a double-level indexing scheme that makes it fast to add messages just one or a few at a time.

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29 April 2008, 16:13 UTCNew Laptop
I recently got a Dell D830 laptop. I'm reasonably satisfied with it so far. Read the link for more of my impressions.

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26 April 2008, 17:03 UTC in softwaremailpie 0.1: full-text search of large e-mail archives
mailpie is a suite of programs for commandline full-text search of large e-mail archives.

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24 March 2008, 23:40 UTCturd: Tape Usage of Real Disk
With sub-$100 half-terabyte hard disks but without inexpensive backup media and drives, it is often necessary to mark parts of a filesystem 'nodump' to get useful backups on a reasonable number of pieces of media.

turd is a program I cooked up to help with this: it is like the standard du utility, except that it consults the filesystem nodump flag. This means the output of turd approximates the amount of tape space required to dump the named directory. Like du -x, turd never recurses into a different filesystem.

turd is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

Files currently attached to this page:

turd5.5kB

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23 January 2008, 16:36 UTCMath is hard (even for google)!
Breaking down 47.000000 degrees into degrees, minutes, and seconds, google comes up with the bizarre "59 minute and 60 seconds of a degree". Floating-point round-off somewhere? Probably. Update, March 24, 2008: The bug is half-fixed. Today, Google displays +47° 0' 0.00", -119° 59' 60.00" as the coordinates of this location.

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28 December 2007, 21:24 UTCCollate this!
Turns out that when you don't LC_COLLATE=C; export LC_COLLATE, you'll eventually get bitten in the ass by the way character ranges in shell globs are treated:

$ (unset LC_COLLATE; bash)
$ touch A a B b Z z; echo [A-Z]; echo [a-z]
A b B z Z
a A b B z
In this case, my friend discovered the interesting behavior after executing 'rm [a-z]*', apparently hoping to keep files which started with uppercase letters. Whoops!

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21 December 2007, 21:28 UTCAs seen in hell....
At the office, we have a saying: If your function takes more than 5 arguments, you forgot one. You can see the results of that mindset in this error message:

trade_secret.c: In function 'void f()':
trade_secret.h:187: error: too few arguments to function
    'void trade_secret(int, int, int, double, double, int, int, int,
        int, double, double, double, double, int, double, double,
        double, double, double, double, double, double, double, double,
        double, double, double, double, double, int, double, double*,
        double*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int*, double*, int*, int*,
        double*, double*, double*, int*, double*, double*, double*,
        double*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int*, int)'
trade_secret.c:9: error: at this point in file

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26 November 2007, 19:29 UTCMaking a YouTube video of X program
19 November 2007, 16:38 UTCAs seen on the internet
7 October 2007, 13:20 UTC in softwarel2h: A new converter from LyX to HTML (updated)
28 August 2007, 1:44 UTCBye Bye Gamefly
6 August 2007, 13:34 UTCBreezy Apt Repository / Deb Mirror
26 July 2007, 16:23 UTCgamefly: it's no netflix
23 July 2007, 15:49 UTCMontréal Botanical Garden
19 July 2007, 11:30 UTCCanada Trip 2007
10 July 2007, 1:28 UTCpincompare.py: compare pin assignments from two Quartus II .qsf files
25 April 2007, 1:31 UTCEurope 2007: First days
27 February 2007, 22:56 UTCfuzzbuzz in terrible ways
24 December 2006, 21:08 UTCPluto_Servo has landed
18 December 2006, 3:20 UTCPluto-Servo: EMC2 Servo Controller
6 December 2006, 19:36 UTCNew Toy: PCI-8255
6 December 2006, 16:00 UTCAcronym of the day: STEWD
4 December 2006, 2:39 UTCPluto_servo progress: It's running cradek's lathe!
2 December 2006, 17:43 UTCMore on the pluto-p (including FPGA pin numbers for the "JTAG" connector
24 November 2006, 22:46 UTCSoftware Uploader for Pluto-P board
23 October 2006, 18:15 UTCThe Bayer sensor vs the Foveon sensor (part 2 of 2)
23 October 2006, 2:16 UTCThe Bayer sensor vs the Foveon sensor (part 1 of 2)

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