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Entries from September 2003

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Axe Throw (28 Sep 2003 at 17:39)

1024×683 version Here's a picture of me throwing an axe at my brother.

(7 comments — almost 2 months ago) [ comment ]

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2*2*2*3 (27 Sep 2003 at 08:45)

Happy Birthday to me! I'll be 24 at 9-something tonight.

(8 comments) [ comment ]

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Escape Milestone (25 Sep 2003 at 19:50)

I don't think I've mentioned this here before. In some spare time I've been porting my old DOS puzzle game Escape (don't go there, the download is broken) to modern operating systems using the SDL. The port works pretty well, though it lacks the polish for a proper release. (Soon!) But today I reached a milestone: I solved the last of 100 levels that were originally released with the game. This is important because I wanted to make sure I hadn't changed anything in the reimplementation that made levels unsolvable or trivial (in fact I had, so some levels needed to be fixed), and because the new web-based level archive assumes that each level has a mechanized solution that can be checked. Anyway, if anyone's interested in trying it out, even at this early stage, send me some good puzzles and perhaps they will be included in the "official" level collection!

Categories: video games escape

(1 comment) [ comment ]

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UPD: SICO (25 Sep 2003 at 15:14)

I added a new variation to SICO called 90. It's for people who like to play chess sideways.

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Found: RAP SNACKS (23 Sep 2003 at 00:29)

543×891 version Aww hell yeeeeah. Check out this fly shiznat that I fizzound on the streetz of Shadysidez. It's RAP SNACKS that my mouth TORE UP while i stack my ca$$h and bust rhymes fo my fly bitchez.

(8 comments — 5 months ago) [ comment ]

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FALSE. (22 Sep 2003 at 18:36)

Well, the theorem I've spent the last several weeks trying to prove turns out to be false, at least in an extention to the language that we want to support (products). I'm not sure if that rules (because it explains why I had difficulty proving it) or sucks (because it means I wasted a lot of time).

To figure it out, let's resort to an old google trick, the sucks-rules-o-meter.

google search for 'cut admissibility is false rules': 5950 results

google search for 'cut admissibility is false sucks': 33 results

Well, it seems that most of the rest of the internet thinks that it rules. All right!! Thanks, internet!

(7 comments — almost 18 years ago) [ comment ]

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The K.A.S. (20 Sep 2003 at 12:07)

Sweet. If you are in kindergarten through high school you should definitely join the military force known as K.A.S. (kids against school). Check out this picture of one of their operations against T.A.S. (teachers against kids).

http://www.angelfire.com/pq/32/

(2 comments) [ comment ]

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Isabel (18 Sep 2003 at 09:26)

Here's a great animation of the approaching hurricane. Reload throughout the day to see its progress... It's projected to pass over Pittsburgh on friday night, though hopefully it will be much weaker by then.

{{{1}}}

(1 comment) [ comment ]

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Slashdot gets it?! (15 Sep 2003 at 11:17)

This article over at slashdot about "secure programming" gives me hope about the future. Most of the time when some security bug comes up I go there and rant about how C and C++ are actually the source of most of our security woes. But this time, there are loads of people making that argument (and well, for the most part) for me. Even the authors of the web page (devoted to secure programming in C and C++) have now put up a page responding to all those comments. (Their conclusion: C has 5x as many security holes per source line, but other languages have the potential for security holes, too.) For my perspective, see my posts: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

The hive mind of slashdot is not something to brush off lightly. Hopefully*, modern languages are finally making headway into the mainstream... Just wait 'til they find out that you don't need to run in a VM to get safety and garbage collection!

* The usage panel overwhelmingly rejects this use of "hopefully," but, I don't care.

(2 comments) [ comment ]

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NEW: album-a-day #16: Isabel "Refuses to Weaken" (14 Sep 2003 at 21:47)

	Album-a-day:
	· about
	· latest

I have another new album up. This one is called Isabel "Refuses to Weaken" and I made it in about 7 hours total.

I also just found the site Song Fight! which is a similar idea to album-a-day, except that the participants get a lot longer to make their music.

Categories: album a day tom 7 music

(30 comments — 2 years ago) [ comment ]

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Gender Test (12 Sep 2003 at 13:22)

This gender test is amusing and more scientific than it sounds. Try it out!

http://www.thespark.com/gendertest

(12 comments) [ comment ]

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Pixies Revived! (10 Sep 2003 at 10:05)

Holy poo, the Pixies are reforming for a tour and maybe an album in 2004!!!!!!!!

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/news/03-09/10.shtml

(0 comments — almost 18 years ago) [ comment ]

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Cheap travel!! (09 Sep 2003 at 17:02)

Yes, someone has really done it: He shipped himself from Dallas to New York in a cargo crate, pried himself out of the crate in front of his parents' house, shook the stunned deliveryman's hand, and then got arrested on outstanding warrants.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Southwest/09/09/offbeat.stowaway.flight.ap/index.html

(3 comments) [ comment ]

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More on Tom 1 (2?) (05 Sep 2003 at 16:48)

As reported earlier I have done some looking into my great great great great grandfather (Tom 1)'s service record in the Civil War. Based on my best information, here's a listing of the Murphies in his regiment.

There some weird stuff here. For example, there's a Michael P. Murphy, which is exactly my brother's name. He will be happy to know that he outranked Tom 1: A fifth sergeant to Tom's mere Private.

Now there's a new Tom and Mike P Murphy. Does this mean that the robot war starts soon?

Also, it's hard to tell which of the 139 Tom Murphies might be the one. Did he win a medal for capturing the flag?

But, I am tempted to believe that the pair Thomas Murphy and Thomas Murphy, 2nd., both from the same company, are my GGGGgrandfather and GGGgrandfather, respectively...

(6 comments) [ comment ]

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A New Kind of Logic (05 Sep 2003 at 13:10)

Proving admissibility of cut is a polynomial time problem: it's O(c * j * r^2), where c is the number of contexts, j the number of judgments, and r the number of rules. But you have to do all that by hand. It is a relaxing process, in a way, like programming or putting stamps on envelopes. My current progress: 675 of 1764 cases. (Of course, in practice many cases are the same or don't apply, so it goes a bit faster than you might think! ;))

(6 comments) [ comment ]

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Bathroom? Mushroom! (04 Sep 2003 at 10:38)

800×533 version Here's a weird thing. My bathroom is not really a paragon of lickable-cleanliness (whose is?) but it's no Grand Central Station, either. Nonetheless, sometimes a mushroom grows in one specific spot in the grout by the bathtub. It pops up quick, like two days!

I guess I'm the kind of guy who thinks that's pretty cool, even though I pull it out and then pour bleach all over the spot. Here's a nice image of it.

Category: popular

(406 comments — almost 2 years ago) [ comment ]

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Found: Maniac Mansion (03 Sep 2003 at 22:51)

Through random clicking this morning I found, by amazing chance, the answer to a puzzle that had been vexing me very slightly for ages. What was that weird show with the fly-head guy that I saw like one episode of when I was 10?

The answer is Maniac Mansion, perhaps the only sitcom based on a videogame that lasted more than one season. And doesn't the fly-head guy look kinda like Rob Schneider?

http://www3.sympatico.ca/lfsociety/pics_ge.htm

(8 comments — almost 18 years ago) [ comment ]

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September (01 Sep 2003 at 15:41)

Now it's time for the traditional monthly status update!

Later this month (on the 27th) I turn 24, which will begin the longest drought of prime ages that I have ever endured. Potential expensive birthday gift ideas: Car GPS unit, Canon macro lenses, ...

As mentioned before, I recently did a demo for my Hemlock Grid ML compiler. So I've shifted work from that now to 100% paper-and-pen theory stuff. I'm working on a symmetric modal lambda calculus for distributed computing. Once I figure out exactly what that means, well, I'll let you know.

Mike and I bought a bunch of video games. We have been playing NHL 2003, shooting for a perfect season with our ridiculously souped-up Pittsburgh Pirates team. This is the first videogame I've ever played that will actually pronounce your custom characters' names, as in, "Lemieux... passes the puck ... Tom shoots--SCORES!!!". If I had a really rare name like "Nefertiti" or "Skeletor" I might have slightly worse luck, at least until they figure out how to make a hockey commentator voice synthesis robot. I also got the ridiculously fast F-Zero GX. It's a good game, but the music is nowhere near what it was on the SNES, which is really sad. Nintendo has some kind of technology, I guess, which can take a perfect melody from any old game and then turn it into barely recognizable mush.

Since I haven't been programming for work, homebrew programming projects are flourishing. I have been hacking on my radar software a lot recently. This weekend I did some work on writing MIDI files so that I can build a digraph-based chord progression generator.

Uh, bye.

(12 comments) [ comment ]

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