holy crap. for sale.

By jp 27 Nov 2000

jeezum galore, this takes the prize for “what I would do with my money if I were a millionare”.

Maybe I can rope some ivy-league frat idiot into some serious high stakes poker and make this work.

break stuff

By anders pearson 27 Nov 2000

ok, for the MSSMers:

who’s planning on going to the reunion thingy in january?

and

who’s going to new year’s eve at Jere’s?

RNA structure tool

By anders pearson 25 Nov 2000

for fun i implemented a dynamic programming algorithm for finding the least energy conformation of an arbitrary RNA strand and added a bit of code for drawing a nice ASCII representation of the complementary pairs that it finds. not tremendously useful but fun to play with. i would do a terrible job of explaining what a “least energy conformation of an RNA strand” is or why anyone would care about such things so i won’t. if you don’t know what “dynamic programming” is, take a gander at the source code and marvel at the counter-intuitiveness.

it’s amazing what insomnia can accomplish.

cradles

By anders pearson 25 Nov 2000

not only does Cradle of Filth (british black/horror metal band) have a new album “Midian” out which is kicking some serious ass on my little speakers, but Dani Filth, the lead singer is starring in an upcoming horror film called “Cradle of Fear.” he plays a deranged psychopath (how did we ever see that one coming?).

glorious noise

By anders pearson 23 Nov 2000

i’m tempted to go out and buy a new hard-drive so i can install BeOS just so i can play around with this guy’s audio software. i’m particularly interested in the one called “american_thighs.” it “buzzes and burps and makes really loud sounds and feeds back and screams and all sorts of other nice things.”

if it ain't broke: fix it till it is.

By anders pearson 23 Nov 2000

while everyone else in the US was gorging themselves on tryptophan today, i was hunched over my keyboard eating triscuits, listening to Disturbed, and birthing the newest incarnation of /dev/random.

it’s not much to look at yet as i’ve decided to eschew fancy design for the time-being until i get everything working just the way i want it to.

but there are lots of fun new toys. obviously bookmarks and sketches are now integrated in what i hope is a nicer way than before. unfortunately i have to repost the sketches by hand so it may take me a few days before i get them all up in the new section.

bookmarks should be fun. i’m hoping that if the other seeders all post their bookmarks up on here, we’ll have sort of a nice little micro search engine of our own consisting entirely of links that were hand-selected to be useful and interesting.

there is a little search box now too. it works. it doesn’t do anything fancy and it’s one of the areas that i’m working on improving.

and perhaps you noticed the “random post” above by “markov” and you’re wondering what the hell the deal is with that? markov is the statistical hive mind of the seeders. specifically, markov is a second-order markov chain algorithm as applied to the total text of all the posts in the database. a first order markov chain would store a matrix of the transition probabilities for all the words in the text that we are looking at. then, a random word from the text would be selected, it looks up the possible transitions for that word (eg, if we randomly selected the word “the”, the matrix might show that statistically the word “the” is followed by “cat” 20% of the time and “dog” 80% of the time so we pick one of those probabalistically). then, that word is looked up, a new word is picked based on the transition matrix and the process continues. our markov chain is 2nd order though. that means that instead of looking at a matrix of the transitions from one word to another it looks at a sequence of two words transitioning to another (eg, instead of “the” transitioning to “dog” or “cat” we have “the dog” transitioning to “runs” or “barks”. then we randomly pick “runs” and we repeat the process with “dog runs”, etc). the net result of all this is that you can generate cool random texts that tend to almost make some sense and can be quite amusing. markov is still pretty stupid and can’t do basic things like starting and finishing sentences when you would expect, but i’m working on that.

so enjoy the new toys and let me know if you find any bugs (i wouldn’t be surprised) or can think of anything that would make it even nicer. i’ll be posting the new source code once i have a chance to pretty it up a bit.

and, once things are settled down a bit, i’ll be putting together a shiny new design.

post 205

By anders pearson 21 Nov 2000

a while ago, a friend who works for the IT department of a big firm said, while describing a coworker, something to the effect of “what do you do when you’re 20-something and making a little more money than you actually know what to do with? you collect the toys that your parents wouldn’t buy you when you were a kid and you cover your desk or cubicle with them.”

i have one of those coworkers. actually i have several of them. one day (when i reach the “making more money than i know what to do with” stage), i will probably become one of them.

anyway, today i get the following email from said coworker:

Subject: Zoids

Some people have asked me about the wierd things on my desk…

“Zoids” are available from an importer based in Berkeley, called ActionAce. I’ve ordered from them several times now and never had a problem. These toys used to be available in the US market in the ’80s, but the ones for sale now are Japanese. However, the instructions are picture-based and all you’ll be missing are some safety warnings (do not eat batteries).

Generally the ones under $12 are wind-up, and above that are battery-powered. You twist or cut the plastic pieces off of sprues, then fit them together. None require glue, they all use small rubber caps which hold the pieces together.

My recommendation is to start with one of the $5-$7 types, such as the Scorpion or the Dinosaur:

http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Product/View/TMY5627600
http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Product/View/TMY5627900

My favorite larger ones are:

RedHorn
http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Product/View/TMY5628400

Gordos
http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Product/View/TMY5643100

and of course, Iron Kong
http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Product/View/TMY5643600


The entire line is available at:

http://shop.actionace.com/cgi-bin/ActionAce.storefront/1651849654/Catalog/1137

post 204

By anders pearson 18 Nov 2000

i’m hacking together a new version of /dev/random with all kinds of neat tricks and features right now. get in any suggestions now while it’s still early enough for me to add them. already it will have: bookmarks integrated, sketches seperated into their own section and posts will appear on the page in order of the time of the most recent comment attached to that one and by order of the time the post was posted. that means that it will be easier for people to see if a comment has been posted since their last visit since it will move that post up to the top. it will also make it so comments on posts that have moved off the front page won’t get lost in the archive, never to be read. it would also mean that any topic that is particularly interesting to people will stay up for longer as long as people are interested in the discussion attached to it. search capabilities will also make an appearance.

there will also be a little surprise :)

and of course, a new design.

post 202

By anders pearson 17 Nov 2000

i suppose i should write a little bit about the lecture i attended last night by Noam Chomsky.
in general, Chomsky isn’t the greatest public speaker. if you’ve read any of his writing, you know that he writes in a very dense, academic style that takes a bit of concentration to work through. well, he talks like he writes. but if you can actually focus and follow what he’s saying, he has some interesting things to say.

the title of his talk was “Freedom, Sovereignty, and other Endangered Species”. it was basically on human rights and the effect of globalization thereon. his first point was that the term “globalization” is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on. true globalization would simply remove all boundaries and would probably have a much different result than the current “western companies are allowed to exploit the third world nations” interpretation of the term that the IMF, World Bank, etc are currently using (eg, NAFTA allows an american company like Ford to go into mexico to build a plant and be afforded all the opportunities and rights of a citizen there but just watch what happens when a mexican citizen tries to come into the US to get a job). he then spoke for a while on the effects that “globalization” would have/is having on workers both in the third world countries and in the US: nothing good, of course.

one of the more interesting points he made was the irony of how human rights issues in china have been twisted to serve the corporate power structure. people protesting about opening trade up with china on the grounds that china uses prison labor to produce goods to sell to the US don’t seem to acknowledge the fact that prison labor is used in the US by american companies to produce goods that are sold domestically and abroad. so while it’s ok for US companies to undercut workers’ wages by using cheap prison labor, it’s not ok for anyone else to. the corporations have managed to manipulate the liberal and progressive movement to put pressure on the chinese government to block their competition from using the same techniques that they use.

i was a little soured on the evening by one comment he made though. talking about the repurcussions that the corporate invasion of china would have, he mentioned that things would get pretty messy when the 900 million chinese peasants are displaced from their farms by agribusiness companies and flock to the cities. while it is true that there are at least 900 million people in china who would qualify as “peasants” and agribusiness would displace most of the people who are currently farming the land, those numbers are not quite accurate. there are 1.2 billion people in china in all and about 80-90% of the population lives in the cities. so i’m not sure how he figures that 900 million people would be displaced. i agree with most of what he says but it’s a little sad to see him stoop to the same propaganda based tactics that he so vocally attacks the corporations and governments for using. his arguments hold up on their own and are only weakened by embellishments like that.