You Down with BGP?

That's a lot of dough

As we prepare to celebrate another happy end of the fiscal fourth quarter, the good folks over at xkcd.com have prepared an awesome infographic reminding us what a dollar is worth.  Click to see an intelligibly-sized image:

Sharp pointy sticks

This past Saturday my wife and I bought recurve bows with the intent to make a hobby out of archery. It turns out there are a number of parks with free-to-the-public archery ranges in the Bay Area. A couple of the ranges we have found are:

• Huddart County Park in San Mateo county near Woodside.


• Stevens Creek Park near Cupertino

We actually got started a couple of weeks ago when we went for a free lesson from the Kings Mountain Archery Club. That was a lot of fun and our instructors were very friendly, helpful, and patient. They give free two-hour introductory lessons about once a month; information about how to signup is available on their web site.

We picked up our bows and arrows at a shop intimidatingly called Predator's Archery down in Gilroy. Much like our experience with Kings Mountain Archery, the staff at Predator's Archery were pretty friendly and helpful and they offer a great "starter package" which includes everything you need as well as 5 lessons.

Happy Nerdigras

I won't go into the origins since I didn't come up with them, but March 5th has been identified as the Square Root of Christmas and March 14th is Pi day. The discoverer of the Square Root of Christmas has expanded on his work to further dub the week between the two geeky dates as Nerdigras.

I guess this may become only an American holiday, as our nerd brethren in the rest of the world insist on silly dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd orderings for representing their dates.

In any event, in celebration, the commenters over on Ned Batchelder's blog are composing an official Nerdigras carol. Here, I reproduce in its entirety, the 012-days of Nerdigras (sung to the tune of the 12-days of Christmas):

On the oh-first day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
A hash map in a B-Tree.

On the oh-second day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Two Turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.

On the oh-third day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Three unmatched parens,
Two Turtle Functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.

On the oh-fourth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two Turtle Functions,
And a hash map in a B-Tree.

On the oh-fifth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.

On the oh-sixth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Six trees sp-laying,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.

On the oh-seventh day of Nerdigras, my girlfriend gave to me,
Seven pointers dangling,
Six trees sp-laying,
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.

On the oh-tenth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
Eight bits a-zeroed,
Seven pointers dangling,
Six trees a-splaying,
Five golden ratios,
Four calling stacks,
Three unmatched parens,
Two turtle functions,
And a hash map in a B-tree.

On the oh-eleventh day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
A printout of Graham's Number
One corrupted byte
Seven pointers dangling
Six trees sp-laying
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks
Three unmatched parens
Two turtle functions
And a hash map in a B-tree.

On the oh-twelfth day of Nerdigras, my imaginary girlfriend gave to me,
[insert lyric here]
A printout of Graham's Number
One cornipted byke
Seven pointers dangling
Six trees sp-laying
Five golden ratios!
Four calling stacks
Three unmatched parens
Two turtle functions
And a hash map in a B-tree.

(Song by Jonathon Duerig, Robert K., et al)

Oktoberfest

I don't drink much, but I couldn't help but notice that the 2008 Hibya Oktoberfest is under way across the street from my office.

That's right: they have Oktoberfest in Japan.
In May, no less.

My first OpenSearch plugin

Well, yesterday I crawed out of my cave and discovered OpenSearch, the XML-based description format for search engines. Both Firefox 2 and IE 7 can import search engine settings from OpenSearch description files and add the search engine to their respective search bars. In fact, there are already description files for just about every search engine you can think of.

There is a great guide to writing your own OpenSearch description and how to link to the description file such that Firefox or IE automatically discover it. The specification is relatively straightforward so, excited, I decided to whip up an OpenSearch plugin for Kelly & Cristin's Wine Reviews.

I only encountered two obstacles:

1. Getting an icon for my search plugin. I didn't already have a shortcut icon for my site that I could simply re-use, so I had to first make an icon.
2. I typed the XML document by hand; I left out the final slash in the OpenSearch XML namespace declaration. Firefox will not recognize the file as an OpenSearch document unless the namespace is exactly right. This should have been quick to diagnose except that Firefox gives you no error message to aid in debugging - it simply refuses to load the file.

The text of my OpenSearch description is here. But if you visit the web site using Firefox 2.0 or later, you'll notice that icon next to your search bar gets a blue highlight; if you click on the icon, you'll see an option to add my Wine Review search to your search bar.

Anyway, without the half hour it took to figure out why Firefox wouldn't recognize my OpenSearch plugin, it would have only taken a few minutes to add a search plugin and plugin auto-detection code (one link tag in the HTML head) to my web site. I don't seriously expect anyone to want to be able to search my silly wine review site from their browser search bar, but certainly was neat to be able to add it.

Unix storage solution

I've been lax in updating my blog lately, mainly due to lack of Internet access at my apartment since we've moved to Tokyo. It is nice and all that I have a variety of high-speed Internet service providers to choose from, but it would be really great if any of them could actually hook up my service is less than a month. :(

Anyway, until I get my own Internet service, I've been "borrowing" access via an open AP with a signal just strong enough that I can associate if I stand right next to my window. Sitting is no good; I have to have the laptop pretty high in the air to get a signal. As you can imagine, I've been reluctant to get on the Internet any more than I have to.

That said, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to share a surprising Unix storage solution I discovered today. Actually, my wife picked it up unintentionally while shopping at the Don Quixote across the street...


I kid you not, these are cheap little plastic refrigerator storage boxes. I couldn't believe my eyes when she showed them to me. Now if I could only find ones that said "FreeBSD" and "Linux" I'd be set on souvenirs the next time I go back to the U.S.

Keepon

I saw this last night on a Japanese TV show. Apparently, a U.S. and Japanese researcher have been working on a little robot called "keepon", experimenting with human interaction. Here is a short movie demonstrating some basic emotive interaction:


The American researcher filmed a demo video of the little robot responding to a song by a L.A. band called "Spoon" and uploaded it to YouTube:


Apparently, the video was so popular that the band caught notice and contacted the researchers about using the robot in one of their official music videos. The Japanese researcher appears in the video with the robot (the video was filmed in Tokyo):


Like probably just about everyone else who has seen the video, I checked to see if I could buy one. You can't.

Update 2007/09/04 1:30am (JST):

As with everything else you can think of, Wikipedia already has an entry about Keepon. Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing anything. You could replace my entire blog with nothing but links to Wikipedia articles. :)

PowerPoint centimeters

Me, I'm 5'10" tall. That would be approximately 178 centimeters. Or 168 PowerPoint centimeters.

Unfortunately, Google Calculator doesn't recognize PowerPoint centimeters as a unit yet so you'll need to whip out a calculator and do the conversion yourself:
1 inch = 2.4 PowerPoint centimeters
1 centimeter = 1.0583 PowerPoint centimeters

How did this unit come about? From Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 189826:

To improve its usability, PowerPoint slightly misdefines the size of a centimeter to make the invisible gridlines fall at convenient points on the ruler. With this conversion, there are 5 picas per centimeter and the gridlines fall at very convenient points on the ruler. So convenient, in fact, that working in the metric system is really easier than working in the English system.

Apparently, the gridlines in PowerPoint 97 were on pica boundaries, which aligned nicely to the inch ruler since a pica is defined as 1/6 of an inch. But if you were to use PowerPoint 97 in one of those metric-using nations, the pica gridlines didn't fall on convenient points on the centimeter ruler. Solution: redefine centimeters to be an even multiple of picas, which are defined to be an integral fraction of an inch. In other words, Microsoft redefined the meaning of centimeters in PowerPoint such that a centimeter was defined in terms of an inch.

Microsoft had the arrogance to redefine an international standard measurement unit to fit their software's user interface. What makes the arrogance all the more palpable is that their Knowledge Base article acknowledging the existence of PowerPoint centimeters doesn't sound the least bit apologetic for the discrepancy.

Personally, I kind of prefer PowerPoint centimeters to metric centimeters: 168 PowerPoint centimeters tall is a lot easier to remember to an American like me than 177.8 metric centimeters tall is. <wink>

Update 2007/06/15 03:45pm:

My wife pointed out that apparently Microsoft redefined the size of a pica too: their Knowledge Base claims 12 picas to an inch, whereas there are supposed to be only 6 to an inch. I would like to suggest the name "PowerPicas" for these new pint-sized picas. That would make me 840 PowerPicas tall.

Buddhabrot

Back in the early nineties I (or I should say, my 286/12) spent many a night rendering fractals using the Fractint DOS program. Like probably everyone else into fractals, I spent a large part of my time exploring the Mandlebrot set -- one of the best known, most easily-recognized fractals.

Which is why I was both amazed and amused to learn of the Buddhabrot a couple of days ago. The same iterative series is used as is for the Mandlebrot set, but the image is colored based on the density plot of the trajectories that escape to infinity. As you can see, the images are similar to those of the Mandlebrot set only more detailed.

I was simultaneously amused, not just by the clever name, but by the fact that you have to swap the traditional axises such that the real axis is vertical and the imaginary axis is horizontal -- in other words, you have to use a non-standard orientation to make it look like a "buddha" at all. Which just goes to show that fractals are as much art as they are math.

I'm Prolog

I'm not sure how I feel about it, but apparently I am Prolog. What programming language are you?

Life hacks

Every programmer has implemented Conway's Game of Life at some point or another. In addition to the Javascript implementations [images, checkboxes] I did back in 1999, I also wrote a xscreensaver hack implementing a colorized life simulation back in 2003. Unfortunately, Jamie Zawinski rejected it for inclusion in the xscreensaver distribution with the response,

Well, my only problem is that I find almost all "life"-based savers pretty dull to look at :)

A number of my coworkers have humored me over the years and at least pretended to like my hack, so I've dusted off the files, updated them to xscreensaver 5.0, and put the files online. With the default settings, it looks like this:

Cells are born with a color based on the color of the three neighbor cells. Dead cells are drawn with a darker variant of the last living cell that occupied the space (causing "moving" clusters to leave trails). The trails can be disabled for a more pure Life experience. The hack also supports loading patterns from files in the Life 1.05 format, although the glider, bhept, and rabbits patterns are built-in if you don't have patterns of your own. To keep things interesting, if the simultation starts converging on a steady-state, a pattern of cells will be randomly added to the field.

Until I (or someone else) can convince Jamie Zawinski that Life isn't boring, the only way to install it for yourself is to:

1. Download and extract the xscreensaver 5.01 source distribution.
2. Copy clife.c and clife.man into the hacks subdirectory.
3. Copy config/clife.xml into the hacks/config subdirectory.
4. Patch Makefile.in using Makefile.in.diff.
5. Finally, configure and build xscreensaver.
   

No A, no X, just JA

I was just looking through some of the old code on my web site and ran across this blast from the past: an online othello game I wrote all the way back in the year 2000.

A couple of years prior, I had been teaching high school students how to program in C/C++. Othello seems to be just about the right level of complexity for beginning programming students.
One Saturday in 2000, I gave myself the assignment of implementing all the logic I had expected from the students myself, only I made myself do it in JavaScript as a refresher.