brainwagon

One of the mailing lists I’m on pointed out the following project to make a LEGO robot that could solve the Rubik’s cube: JP Brown’s Serious LEGO – CubeSolver Very slick, but it mentioned something I found even more interesting: Herbert Kociemba’s algorithm for quickly solving the Rubik’s cube: Cube Explorer In his testing, he […]

Security is mostly theater: you are forced to take off your shoes or surrender your shampoo, but random testing of airport security checkpoints reveal that their highly trained personnel routinely miss test bombs which are placed in luggage to test the effectiveness of screeners. An alert comes in, and we are supposed to “achieve a […]

I brought up my old Linksys NSLU2 again, after upgrading it to the unslung firmware and installing a 512Mb usb stick to serve as the main storage. Check out the link: it’s served from that little box, which is running an extra copy of the thttpd webserver (the other one runs the box’s configuration webpage). […]

Carry a towel around tomorrow. Why? In the words of the sage: A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you […]

The other cool project that I saw was Bill (sorry, can’t remember his last name, and I couldn’t find it on his webpage) Buzbee’s homebrew cpu: the Magic-1. And by homebrew, we really mean homebrew: he wirewrapped it from piles of conventional TTL logic gates. As I told him: dude, that’s hardcore. Homebrew CPU Home […]

I saw lots of cool stuff at the Makers Faire, but the thing which evoked the greatest “this is a cool idea that I could do” factor was Tom Zimmerman’s video microscope. MAKE: Blog: Maker Faire: Tom Zimmerman and his DIY video microscope for backyard biology The link doesn’t really describe why it’s a good […]

Yep. Despite the fact that I’ve let my exercise program lapse, I’m off for the 7 point something mile race from the Bay to the Breakers, a San Francisco tradition, and the third year in a row that I’ve run it. Wish me luck, and if you see me, throw ibuprofen rather than the traditional […]

Today I’m heading to the Maker’s Faire! Perhaps I’ll see you there!

I have a number of mathematical blogs in my blogroll: one I have found to be reasonably interesting is FoxMaths. Today, he had some idle thoughts about the a sequence of numbers that reminded me of the look and say sequence that John Conway explored. Basically, you begin with a sequence of digits (the “program” […]

John Bentley demonstrates quite adequately in his book Programming Pearls that to write even the simplest program, say, one that does binary search, is frequently fraught with peril and subtle errors. If you try to write a binary search, chances are you’ll get something wrong. Even Bentley’s own binary search contains a potential overflow condition […]

Back when I was in college, there was considerable interest in Prolog and logic programming languages, but you scarcely hear about it at all anymore. I wonder why that is? I mean, I was never a huge fan, but in most respects it just never enters any modern discussion of programming languages. Prolog – Wikipedia, […]

Who knew? Probably every baseball fan on the Internet except me. He actually had some interesting things to say about the signing of Roger Clemens to the Yankees. [tags]Baseball[/tags]

Was at work till midnight last night, and that was the highlight of my day. One remaining shot is kicking my ass, but other than that, work is getting there. Probably won’t be the last late night of the show though.

If all goes well, by Friday I should be done with Ratatouille. If all doesn’t go well, I’ll be more tired and I probably still be done on Friday. Worst comes to worst, I’ll have one more weekend to go. Wish me luck, and go see Ratatouille when it comes to a theater near you.

As I worked on my checkers program, I’ve gone to a number of bookstores looking for books on checkers. Unfortunately, checkers has gone the way of the dodo: you might find a copy of Pike’s book of Checkers problems, or maybe Hopper’s book, but literally nothing else is in print. It’s kind of sad, when […]