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Entries from June 2004

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Yes, server, yes! (30 Jun 2004 at 13:37)

Server OK!!

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Malfunctions (29 Jun 2004 at 14:45)

Carnegie Mellon is having serious malfunctions today. Newell-Simon and Planetary Robotics have both lost power for the entire day (fortunately the prototype "dark energy" defense robots are still operational). A bell sounds outside my door every 2 minutes for no reason in the following pattern: (DING DING wait wait/2 DING DING wait wait/2 DING DING DING wait/2 ...) A steam pipe vents itself loudly every few seconds, blowing smoke rings across the smoke vent grotto and wheezing as it recharges itself. Amazingly, AFS still works.

For a number of reasons I am quite stressed! This isn't supposed to happen during the summer. The easiest to explain is that I have several major things that I must complete in the next two weeks. Probably most important is my talk for LICS 2004, which will be fun to do, but still time consuming because I have not attempted to write a "flatex" tool yet (à la TeXpoint). Next up is a paper for POPL that I haven't really started writing, though I have been working on the technical details for some time. I tell you, formalizing things in Twelf is at once (well, perhaps at twice) intensely satisfying when it works and intensely frustrating when it does not, almost to the point that I am reminded of descriptions of such misbehavior as gambling or day-trading addiction. It's true -- that "Server OK" message is like a sort of drug. I currently have over 1500 lines of working mechanization, with probably that same amount to go (although much of this will be easy or cut'n'paste due to Twelf's lack of polymorphism.) Unless my pace picks up dramatically, soon, I may have to delay work on this until the paper is written. The POPL deadline is conveniently during the time I am in Turku, Finland at LICS. Did you know that Turku has only about 5 hours of darkness per evening at this time of year?

Mike and I went to a wedding this weekend in Rye, New York, and I will post my pictures from that trip online soon. Let me just relate an amusing story from the end for now: As we were leaving the hotel, we saw my grandmother (who has difficulty walking) hobbling along slowly, while my grandfather (that's Tom 5) was up ahead pushing an empty wheelchair. We asked her, "Why aren't you in the wheelchair?" To which she responds, "He said it was too hard to push with me in it!" I shit you not. Actually, this is funnier if you know my grandparents, but I hope it is kind of funny anyway.

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As it is (22 Jun 2004 at 14:33)

To quote Mark Leyner's dad (after surviving a lethal injection by the state of New Jersey),

"I feel shitty."

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Vibra-Atoms (21 Jun 2004 at 18:24)

I now have an experimental Atom feed for this site. Is there a way to stick the actual content of the posts in there? (If you don't know what Atom is, don't worry about it. God knows why I do)

These antibiotics really, honestly, go by the name Vibra-Tabs. That is hilarious.

(4 comments — 11 years ago) [ comment ]

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Papers, please! (21 Jun 2004 at 11:07)

Well, there's finally been a resolution on this interesting case about whether one can be punished for simply refusing to identify oneself. The Supreme court said, 5-4, that you can. Close, but no cigar.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/06/21/scotus.police.id.ap/index.html

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Ant Genealogy (11 Jun 2004 at 13:12)

I added a cute family tree (mostly due to Adam) for all of our various ants in the ICFP programming contest over this weekend.

Category: contests

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Passed! (09 Jun 2004 at 21:42)

I feel really cool to have a passport, like a spy.

When they issue national id card RFID implant barcode tattoo tracking clipper chips, they just need to make a few cool spy movies about it beforehand and we will all eat that shit up.

(13 comments — 11 years ago) [ comment ]

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NEW: tycon mismatch 2004 web page (08 Jun 2004 at 21:12)

I made a web page for our team this year. It has a nice drawing of an ant on it.

Tycon Mismatch 2004

Categories: drawings contests

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N'SANO Flash Video (08 Jun 2004 at 10:47)

Once upon a time the patrons of untitled.gif created a boy band called N'SANO by singing to the "music in their minds" and letting me pitch-adjust and post-produce it into a grooving love ballad. Now Don has created a flash music video for the song, which is really hilarious. (It may just be the in-jokes!)

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Tycon Mismantch (05 Jun 2004 at 23:08)

The ICFP contest is really fun this year. Our team is great. The greatest joy is naming our creations and watching them battle it out automatically on the projector scoreboard.

Punchnitz beats Cautioutz. Cautioutz beats Stapler. Stapler beats Punchnitz.

... main screen turn on. ...

Category: contests

(7 comments) [ comment ]

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ICFP 2004 Contest! (04 Jun 2004 at 19:43)

Our sweet team, Tycon Mismatch, is participating in the ICFP Programming contest all weekend!

Category: contests

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UPD: photo gallery, etc. (01 Jun 2004 at 19:56)

We swung by the Pittsburgh zoo this weekend, and I snagged a few photos before my camera's battery ran out.

Mike and I are printing up photos for "budget chic" decoration of our apartment. This is sweet.

I beat Metroid: Zero Mission in two days; 3:36 of game time. It was pretty easy, but I recommend it if you like that platform collect-the-items style. Getting 100% of the items is significantly more difficult; there are loads of infuriating dash-recharge-dash-etc. puzzles to solve.

The passport office totally screwed up my passport order; they forgot to take my birth certificate and somehow attached someone else's to my application. They seem to think it will all be fixed in time for my trip.

Today I had a minor type theoretic emergency as I discovered that my current design for the new version of our mobile lambda calculus won't work. I am pretty sure I understand how to fix it, but I hate the feeling of beginning the day with the belief that I'm almost done, and ending knowing that I am less done than I thought. As I've lamented before, I like to live monotonically.

Also, over the holiday weekend I got some good hacking done on escape. Now I'm adding ridiculous things like a pattern-based search and replace feature and automated level generation (assistance) based on retrograde analysis, which means I must be getting pretty close to a "1.0" release.

Categories: video games escape

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