brainwagon

Well, I’m back. Hope you all didn’t miss me too much. I‘ll try to provide links to some of the papers that I liked, and also some feedback on the conference itself later in the day. Stay tuned. No SIGGRAPH would be complete without a story or two of how I committed horrible social blunders, […]

Keeping in the entire “hacker” theme, I read today on Bruce Schneier’s blog that code reviews of three voting machines that are proposed for use in California elections has been released. I found that (not surprisingly) someone that I knew had worked on one of them, and now that the report is published, he is […]

I proudly accept the label of “hacker”. That word gets tossed around alot, and means different things to different people, but I mean it mostly in the sense that author Steven Levy might have approved of. (I think it is a tremendous shortcoming that Levy’s fine book Hackers is only mentioned in passing on the […]

I’ve written before about my cat Scrappy: the partially feral cat who now bitches at me if I don’t pet him enough. He went through a period where he obviously was getting into fights with other cats in the neighborhood (thankfully, which has not happened much lately). I often wondered why he would fight cats […]

U.S.S. Mariner » Blog Archive » Bugs Bunny, greatest banned player ever The exclusion of non-human players like Bunny is another shameful example of the long history of injustices done by baseball’s racist policies. That black and rabbit players could only play against white players in non-sanctioned exhibition matches deprived the game of some of […]

Bruce Schneier was invited to come to Washington to talk with Kip Hawley, head of the TSA. He’s currently putting up a five part article about those conversations on his blog. Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3. What we see is an agency which is trying to put on a better face without actually […]

I was tired and cranky all day.  My wife is asleep, but I’m hacking on my laptop in the dark.  How lame is that? This is really just a test to make sure I’ve got the feedburner problem ironed out.  Maybe now I can sleep.

I was attempting to upgrade some unrelated packages on my FreeBSD server, with the net result that something truly horrible happened (and which I don’t really understand): apache2 and mysql were essentially deleted from my system. Curse you portupgrade. I’m becoming less enamoured with my old time friend FreeBSD, and more enamoured with Ubuntu, so […]

All this mucking around in the ICFP contest (I decoded the all the gene tables yesterday, woohoo) has sent me back thinking about simple machines which are Turing compatible. A very nice page about such stuff is: John’s Combinatory Logic Playground Which includes papers and implementations of binary combinatory logic. Neat! [tags]Programming Languages, Combinators[/tags]

Well, I didn’t have time to actually do the challenge this year, but I’m trying to work through it here. I made some significant progress, and can now render pictures of Endo’s RNA: There is some minor issue which causes a small y offset between this image and the target. I can’t for the life […]

Today, five years ago, I posted my first message to the newly christened brainwagon.org. Now, a couple of thousand posts and a thousand comments later, I’m still here, boring people with the rather odd and eclectic collection of posts. I hope some of you continue to enjoy it.

have just dropped their 8th game in a row, in truly ugly style. They now are 12 games back of the Angels, and 10 back from the Mariners. Earlier this afternoon, they sent veteran catcher Jason Kendall to the Cubs. It seems to me that Beane is having a sale, and everyone is up for […]

One of my personal pet peeves are companies that try to assert intellectual property rights over material which has entered the public domain. It’s everywhere: museums claiming copyright over photographs and scans of artwork, movie companies that tag public domain movies with copyright warnings, and even in copy centers which refuse to copy books which […]

Why do people think these things are a good idea? I don’t get it. Yesterday, I received an Arduino microcontroller board in the mail. These things use the Atmel AVR microcontroller (specifically, an ATMEGA168) and include a nice little FTDI USB to serial chip and are pre-programmed with a boot loader for easy programming. Neat! […]

Okay, I haven’t posted anything about baseball lately, so I thought I’d remark about the oddest play I’ve heard of this week. No, it wasn’t Ichiro Suzuki’s inside-the-park homerun during the All Star game (although that was bitching), but rather occurred during tonight’s game between the Athletics and Twins. Cuddyer triples off A’s middle reliever […]