Someone should make a blog based on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Each week (or twice a week, or daily, or something), there’d be a post which would discuss a single sequence. It’d give some glance at the theory and some history behind the concepts, be they Turing machines, prime numbers, set theory, or bi-directional graphs.
I’m adding this to my “to do when I retire” list.
I’m still a little too tired to intelligently compose all of my thoughts about this weekend’s PAX East, but I’m going to do my best.
As everyone who cares already knows, the health care reform bill passed the House late last night. From a policy point of view, it’s a really great thing. The individual insurance mandate combined with the ban of dropping insurees or excluding care for “pre-existing conditions” will be big. In fact, the individual changes that the reform puts in place are widely supported.
But there are a lot of mitigating circumstances that are keeping me from celebrating today. The accounting hand-wave tricks that are in the bill to make it look like a budgetary winner are disgusting. The complete inability for the Democrats to get any moderate Republicans on board with what is a very centrist bill (not to mention the couple dozen moderate Democrats that voted against it) is a real shame. And as a pro-choice liberal, I can’t help but feel disappointed that anti-choice conservatives get to keep any of us from helping poor women get abortions, but I couldn’t keep my money from being used to invade Iraq.
In the end, I simply hope the administration learned a couple of important lessons. Most importantly, if Obama wants something to happen, he needs to be more engaged from day one. I also hope that this reform’s passage helps conservatives realize that the Tea Party’s scorched earth methods aren’t going to work for them and compromise really is a better idea.
I just updated plutor.org to Wordpress 2.9.2 (from the antiquated 2.7). It went smoothly on my end, and it looks like everything’s still up and running, but please let me know if you see any smoke.
The Academy doubled the number of slots for Best Picture nominees (to ten!) but it hasn’t really helped my Oscar scoresheet. Just like past years, I’ll go over the nominees and admit exactly how many movies I haven’t seen this year.
| Category | # seen |
|---|---|
| Best Picture | 0 |
| Best Actor | 0 |
| Best Actress | 0 |
| Best Director | 0 |
| Best Screenplay | 0 |
| Best Adapted Screenplay | 0 |
Goose eggs, across the board. In fact, the only nominated movies I saw this year were Coraline (Best Animated Feature Film), Sherlock Holmes (Art Direction and Score), and Star Trek (four nominations, all FX-related). But like usual, there are a whole bunch of movies that are high on my list: Up, Inglorious Basterds, District 9, and The Blind Side (Best Picture? Wow. I loved the book, so I need to see it.)
If I see all of those before March 7, I’ll finish with 8 points, which would tie with my final score last year.
Update: I did manage to see all of the above-listed movies. Expanding Best Picture from 5 to 10 let some great-but-not-fantastic movies in. District 9? Blind Side? Who really thinks those might deserve Best Picture?
Looking back, 2009 was great year for my reading list. Although I only read three fiction books (not counting the collection of Science Fiction I used as waiting-for-inter-library-loan filler), they were all remarkably good. Next year’s list is likely to be very interesting. Not only am I trying to figure out how to fit my new Kindle (thanks, Mom and Dad!) into my reading habits, but I also hope to get fiction recommendations from other people for 2010 so I can try to divide my time 50/50. Right now there are four books on my nightstand, and they’re all non-fiction. What a bad start to that New Year’s resolution.
Here are the books I read this year, and my thoughts on some of them:
Tomorrow, it will be 2010.
| Ten years ago | Now |
|---|---|
| I was a sophomore at RPI, considering a double-major in Computer Science and Management. | I am a developer/manager for a small company. |
| I lived in a tiny dorm room in the crummiest suburb (Troy) of one of the crummiest capital cities in the country (Albany). | I live in South Boston in a condo I own. I have a patio and a garden. |
| I was dating my High School sweetheart, who went to college almost five hours away. I saw her about once a month. | I'm married to my High School sweetheart. I sleep in a bed with her every night. |
| I stayed in my old bedroom at my parents' house every month or so. | Someone else owns that house, and my parents live in an RV. They're currently in the Florida Keys. |
| I hung out with college friends, and once a month saw friends from High School. | I hang out with college and Boston-area friends. I don't see my Philly-based and California-based High School friends often enough. |
| I'd had a handful of beers (sorry mom, it's true) but was not legally able to purchase alcohol. | I spent a Benjamin on a bunch of champagne for tonight's New Year's Eve party. |
| I was programming mostly in C++ (both for school work and working on Science and Industry) with a little bit of Perl. | I'm programming mostly in Java (work and Android app development) with a little bit of Perl and Python. |
| I ran a community website called WSVW1U.com. | I run a personal website called Plutor.org. |
| I was planning the third iteration of a holiday I invented, called National Vacuum Awareness Day. | NVAD expired after 2001. I still have dozens of shirts in my basement. Buy one? |
| I frequented Slashdot, Ars Technica, and suck.com. | I'm active on MetaFilter, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. |
What I asked for for birthday/Hannukah/Christmas: Freedom from shoe shopping. I hate that all the shoes kinda look the same to me. And I feel like I’m inconveniencing the salesperson every time I want to try on a different style. (Plus my feet are wide, so it’s hard to get the best fit the first size I try.) And you only get like three minutes to decide on a pair of shoes. What I wanted was for someone to go to the store, pick out five or six styles of shoes, buy them in 10½, and bring them to me. I could wear them at home over a weekend, pick out the ones I like the most, and then the giver would bring the others back.
What I got: A ride to the mall to buy shoes. No, wait, I drove. I guess all I got was “Let’s go buy you new shoes”.
Some days, nothing goes right.
mysql> drop table node_details;
ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table ‘node_details’
mysql> create table node_details ( id integer );
ERROR 1050 (42S01): Table ‘node_details’ already exists
mysql> drop database local_nodes;
ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table ‘node_details’
This exercise in un-collapsed waveforms brought to you by this not-a-bug bug.
If you’re lucky, this is the last time you’ll hear me mention Windows 7 for a while. But I’ve received a number of queries about my continued use of it for a while now. I have some very excellent reasons that I figured I should put in writing for easy reference.
Here are some quick reviews of shows I saw at Austin City Limits.
Shows that were really great:
Shows that were disappointing:
I’ll have photos up as soon as CVS gets their act together and develops them. Maybe tonight.
My wife is going to be halfway across the world for essentially all of the month of October. I have a couple of projects that are going to occupy much of my time, but I’m also planning on catching up on a backlog of action movies. I’m looking for suggestions of good action or Sci-Fi movies from the past five years or so. Here’s a list of the ones I came up with off the top of my head that meet the criteria of “oh yeah, she doesn’t want to see that”.
This isn’t a great list. I’m sure some of them aren’t worth seeing, and there are probably 50 that should be added. Give me some suggestions.
Last week, Representative John Boehner released a chart intended to show the complexity of the proposed health reform bill. The magazine New Republic shot back with a chart of their own of the current system. A graphic designer on Flickr redesigned Rep. Boehner’s chart to be actually informative, and it is spectacular.
What follows is my recipe for delicious summer gazpacho. In my opinion, it’s the bread and the oil and the wider variety of veggies than usually found that does the trick. Also, the lack of cilantro prevents potential seasoning woes.
(If you put the cans of tomatoes in the fridge the day before making, your gazpacho will be ready for eating faster.) Remove the seeds from the cucumber, peppers, and jalapeño. Coarsely chop half of the tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, onion, and all of the jalapeño. Put them in the blender. Add the bread, oil, and juice from the second can of tomatoes. Puree until smooth. (You might have to blend in two batches. This is okay.) Chop the rest of the vegetables very tiny. Mix, and put it in the fridge. Enjoy cold.
I never saw the first Transformers movie, and I never had any plans to see the second one, but I’ve come across three separate reviews for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that have left me somewhat breathless. I can’t think of another movie that was so thoroughly reviled as completely worthless:
Now the only question is: Does this clinch my plans to never see this movie? Or do I need to rent something this hideous, just to be able to say I looked at the face of cinematic death and didn’t blink?
I’m not a huge fan of karma-accumulation websites. You know what kind of site I mean: Other people can vote up or down your stories and comments, and you get points when you’re voted up, and lose points when you’re voted down. There are lots of these, each with their own scoring foibles: Digg and Reddit are two of the most well-known. Slashdot has done it for a while (in fact, I think they’re why I still call this concept “karma”). The concept is good: You limit the requirements for moderators by allowing users to essentially moderate each other. If a post or comment gets enough down votes, it might vanish. If a post gets a lot of up votes, it becomes more prominent. Fewer dedicated moderators generally means lower overhead costs and, in theory, a “fairer” moderation policy.
In practice, though, there are a lot of things to not like about these schemes. Accumulating points becomes an end in itself, which leads to posting a lot of simple or purposely-misrepresented posts (“whoring”). When points are used to control if your posts are seen at all, creating multiple sockpuppet accounts to vote up your own contributions (“gaming”) is inevitable. On the larger sites, an above-the-fold link can mean tens of thousands of hits; gaming then becomes a lucrative business. Preventing whoring and gaming through algorithms can work, but search engine optimizers are smart and tenacious. It’s a continuous arms-race.
Stack Overflow is a point (“reputation”) accumulating site that somehow works extremely well. At first glance, it is a simple programming question-and-answer forum where you gain reputation for answering questions and having those answers voted up or chosen as “correct” by the asker. But there’s a number of things I haven’t seen anywhere else that makes Stack Overflow excel where other sites struggle. The most obvious difference is that you are able to do more things as you gain reputation. You can’t even vote up questions or answers until you’ve received a couple of votes of your own, increasing the burden to entry for sockpuppets and gaming. Maybe more importantly, points accumulation isn’t single dimensional. Stack Overflow gives you badges for activities that are difficult to game, and displays your badge count right next to your reputation.
But there’s a bigger reason why this works on Stack Overflow. There’s no real benefit to gaming or whoring. Since the focus of the website is question-and-answer, instead of directing traffic to other websites, there’s almost no way to make a profit from having a question voted way up. And the relative smallness of the audience compared to some of the giants out there means that even if there was a way to turn a profit, focusing on other sites would still give you a better return. What’s left to be seen is if Stack Overflow can keep such a high signal-to-noise ratio as it continues to grow.
My parents made a censored version of Raiders of the Lost Ark for me when I was young. Indiana Jones escapes from the tomb, blows up the plane, steals the ark back from the Nazis in the desert, gets on the ship with Marion, THE END. I was probably in my teens before I saw the whole version on television. I had never even questioned it.
Someone’s going to bring it up, so here’s another anecdote: When I was very young, my parents called the ice cream truck the “music truck” to keep me from screaming every time I heard it. I don’t know how long that one lasted, because I have no memory of it.
Just over a year ago, I was sitting in a classroom at Sun’s virtually deserted Burlington campus, learning a new programming language from a living human in person for possibly the first time in my whole life. The class itself was a little slow; it definitely wasn’t geared towards experienced developers. But it was more effective learning than fiddling at work had been, since it successfully prevented all distractions. Now that I’ve had a year to work with the language (and have gone back and forth to programming in Perl), there’s several reasons why I’m still using Java.
I could probably come up with a dozen other reasons that I enjoy programming in Java, but those are the big ones that make my life easy.
After doing yet more research on benchmarks and prices, I’ve backed away from my revolutionary stance on Intel processors. The Athlon 64 X2 represents a fair approximation, and the CPU and motherboard combo I’ve chosen will save me about $150 off of the Intel alternative. Here’s what I’m ordering tonight:
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA780G-UD3H (780G chipset, ATI Radeon HD 3200 on-board, although I won’t be using it) CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600 (Dual 2.9GHz cores, 2x512K L2, 65W) Video card: Radeon HD 4870 1GB (My first PCIe x16 card! Note that this is actually a bump over the previous plan) Memory: G.SKILL 4GB DDR2 (1066 MHz, dual-channel, CAS 5. A tiny upgrade in speed) Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar WD6400AAKS (640GB, 7200 RPM, this hasn’t changed)
Add in an HDMI cable (my screen and current video card support it, but for some reason I never got around to buying one) and one of the best reviewed AM2 heatsinks on the market, and it all adds up to just over $550 including shipping. Even cheaper than I was expecting.
The savings will probably go towards an HTPC build from the old hardware. Details to come! Maybe!
The first five news events I actually remember (and my corresponding ages) were:
One of the most interesting things I learned while looking up these events is how close together the Challenger disaster and the Halley’s Comet perihelion were. In fact, the Shuttle mission (STS-51-L) and the following scheduled mission (STS-61-E) had apparently been scheduled to observe the comet up close. In my mind, those two events were far apart. Along the same lines, the Mets won the World Series just a couple of months after my family moved to Connecticut, but somehow I suddenly became a Mets fan.
I’ve got my new desktop birthday gift essentially planned at this point. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Tom’s Hardware and Ars Technica, and both of them are pointing at Intel for solid mid-range desktops nowadays. There’s some disagreement over whether the Core i7 (Quad-core on one die! Triple-channel DDR3!) is worth the price premium over the Core 2 Duo. I’ve decided that, for me, it’s not. I don’t do enough video gaming anymore for four cores to be effectively utilized. Even two cores feels like a bit of a waste.
We’re still deciding on a case (although I really like everything Lian Li, like the PC-7B plus II) since the case is a part that I feel that M should have a say in. But the guts are going to be as follows:
Update, Mar 3: I just ordered the parts, but not before a whole bunch of stuff changed.
Dear web sites:
Please do not send me my password in plain-text in an email. My email is not necessarily secure. The protocols by which email is sent through the Internet are unencrypted. When you send me an email with my password in it, I delete it immediately. phpBB does it. So does Geni. Movember did it, too. There are only two cases when you should send me a plain-text password in an email:
The fact that you even can tell me my password in plain-text indicates to me that your database is insecure. Anyone with access to it would be able to get everyone’s plain-text usernames and passwords. Please change your database schema to use a one-way hash to store passwords.
It’s that time of year again: Oscar nominations! The 81st Academy Awards nominees were announced today, and here’s my scoresheet:
| Category | # seen |
|---|---|
| Best Picture | |
| Best Actor | |
| Best Actress | 0 |
| Best Director | |
| Best Screenplay | 1 |
| Best Adapted Screenplay |
Another banner year here at Plutor.org for seeing movies in the theaters. I’ve seen the entertaining but overrated Slumdog Millionaire and the fantastic and completely deserving WALL-E. If (as I hope) I see The Wrestler and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the next month, that’ll give me 5 more points.
How’d you do?
Update Jan 26: I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button this weekend. I have to say, neither of the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen have really blown me away. Both this and Slumdog Millionaire were good movies, but I don’t think they’d have made the cut if they were made last year.
Lots of people know about the hidden arrow between the E and the x in the FedEx logo. Did you also know:
Mostly taken from reddit.
On Friday, February 13, at 23:31:30 UTC (6:31:30pm EST), Unix time (the number of seconds since New Year’s 1970) will hit 1,234,567,890. I will be visiting several nerd friends in Philadelphia that evening. What drink should we have to celebrate?
