Binary Paean

The Social Graph is Neither

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:06:55 -0500

The Social Graph is Neither

I would be proud to one day produce material as high quality as this: "Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction".

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:43:13 -0400

I would be proud to one day produce material as high quality as this: "Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction".

The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:28:02 -0400

The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme

Merlin Mann Says What You Should Have Been Thinking

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:16:49 -0400

Merlin Mann Says What You Should Have Been Thinking

A Gentle Introduction to Machine Fundamentals

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 15:07:22 -0500

A Gentle Introduction to Machine Fundamentals:

This is the best introduction to computing and programming at the machine level that I can recall reading. Certainly not aimed at the experienced, but a wonderful nod back to logo and a good level of abstraction for anyone who wants to know how exactly a processor and memory actually conspire to do useful things.

Solutions to Life's Dumb Problems (Part 2)

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:31:00 -0500

How do I Set Goals, Think About the World or Improve my Mental Circumstance?

First, take a look at Stoicism - yes, I mean the ancient Greek/Roman school of philosophy. Unless you are explicitly educated about it, chances are what you think you know about it is wrong. It offers a suite of practical and pragmatic ways for maintaining a productive, optimistic, and healthy state of mind. I see it as the Western tradition’s answer to Zen.

I also find there is incredible profundity and value in the Tao Te Ching and the writing of Nietzsche (worth the price of admission for the mustache alone), however these works do not offer the guidebook approach that Stoicism does.

I Seem to Flail Around and Procrastinate - How do I Get Things Done?

In a word: Timeboxing. For personal projects, I would start with the Pomodoro Technique.

Timeboxing offers a bevvy of non-obvious benefits for personal projects. First it tends to feel surprisingly liberating, rather than constraining. You are no longer comparing what you have to do with some Platonic Ideal, but with the best you can get done in the next 25 minutes. This more realistic expectation will make you naturally prioritize, and cause you to aim for the highest-value sub-tasks. Additionally, if you make timeboxing a habit you hone your estimation skills as a side-effect.

A good way to get started with the Pomodoro technique & timeboxing in general is to try it out on some straightforward chores. Have a room you need to clean that you’ve been putting off? A car to wash? A letter to write? Set the timer and get crackin’. You’ll look forward to the well earned break and probably make a lot more headway than you expect you will in such a short amount of time.

"Be the user, but not the slave, of the gifts of Fortune"

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:17:18 -0500

“Be the user, but not the slave, of the gifts of Fortune”

- Seneca the Younger

Enjoy the season.

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:57:27 -0400

Enjoy the season.

The Obligatory Miller-Rabin Implementation

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:24:00 -0400

At some point in a programmer’s life - perhaps several points - they are obligated to re-implement a primality test.

The Miller-Rabin test is a highly efficient way to determine if a given number is composite or prime. Here is my current implementation, in pure ruby.



module Primal
  attr :primal_s, :primal_d

  def prime?
    val = self.abs
    return true if val == 2
    return false if val % 2 == 0 || val == 1
    @s,@d = Primal::calc_sd(val- 1)
    Primal::witnesses(val).each do |wit|
      0.upto(@s-1) do |r|
        return false if ModMath.pow(wit,@d,val) == 1 && 
          ModMath.pow(wit,2*r*@d,val) == -1
      end
    end
   true 
  end

  class <<self
    #Return the minimal list of effective witnesses for 'sufficiently small'
    #Integers, otherwise derive the full set required for deterministic result.
    def witnesses(n)
     if n < 341550071728321
       [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17]
      else
        calculate_witnesses(n)
      end
    end

    def calculate_witnesses(n)
      #Use the full list of possible witnesses for deterministic result
      max_val = [n-1,(2*(Math.log(n))**2).floor].min
      (2..max_val).to_a
    end

    def calc_sd(n)
     v = n; s = 0
     while v > 1 && (v & 0x1 == 0)
       s += 1
       v = v >> 1 
     end
     return s,v
    end
  end
end

#Fast exponentiation to a given modulo base
#Bogarted from http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4636
module ModMath
   def ModMath.pow(base, power, mod)
     result = 1
     while power > 0
       result = (result * base) % mod if power & 1 == 1
       base = (base * base) % mod
       power >>= 1;
     end
     result
   end
end

#Inject the .prime? method into Integer 
  class Integer
    include Primal
  end

In the clear light of day I realized I don’t need the attribute accessors, and my @s and @d variables should be local. I’ll update once I’m near Vim again.

"I shit digital awesome and fling it at unsuspecting projects."

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 22:04:01 -0400

“I shit digital awesome and fling it at unsuspecting projects.”

Radio is Shit; Hunt Down Good Music Like a Boss

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:03:00 -0400

If you haven’t noticed that radio plays the auditory equivalent of shit purée by now, there may be no hope for you. You may be forgiven for not knowing why this came to be, or what to do about it, however.

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”- blue_beetle

Radio doesn’t sell music. Radio sells people’s ears to advertisers. After a bit of legal shuffling, Clear Channel realized this market was inefficient, and started buying up radio stations. It soon wound up with a large majority of all US stations. Since music is not the product, and the listeners are not the customers, Clear Channel decided that they should do what makes business sense; minimize the costs associated with keeping ears. Translated: fire the people who did actual work finding local, interesting, or unusual music & rehash centrally planned shitty top-40 lists as much as possible. Sort-of luckily, Clear Channel turning radio to crapola only greased the wheels of the MP3 takeover of music distribution.

So, where to find good music now?

Luckily, the Intertubes democratize audio broadcasting in a powerful way. Any yahoo with a laptop and a condenser microphone can record music or a podcast. This means there is plenty of garbage, but also almost certainly someone talking about just what you want to hear. You can find decent music podcasts by going through the big branded stores (Zune, iTunes, etc), or just searching around for podcast lists. Grab a lot, delete the ones that suck, revel in the remainder.

Want a more active approach? Here are some ways to go hunting for good music directly:

Hit the Amazon music store, rate some albums and see what the almighty recommendation algorithm pulls up for you.
Try one of the sexy discovery applications/websites; Grooveshark, Last.fm, Pandora, or The Hype Machine.
Try a new music platform like The Sixty-One to get exposed to things you wouldn’t otherwise hear.
Ask a badass for bands worth checking out, and they’ll tell you about great bands that almost never get play on the radio like: Florence + The Machine, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, M83, Arcade Fire, Angus & Julia Stone, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Deadmau5, Johnossi, The Vincent Black Shadow, Ratatat, or The Diablo Swing Orchestra.

Now go forth, and suffer shitty music no longer.

"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:40:59 -0400

“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.”

- Isaac Asimov

Solutions to Life's Dumb Problems (Part 1)

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:03:00 -0400

Lately I realized I had found several solutions to various annoying problems that might help other people. I could not find these solutions documented other places, so here they are. As I solve more of life’s dumb problems, I will continue the series.

I have inflamed, scaly, acne-ridden skin in areas like my nose or chin that just won’t seem to go away.

Many people have found shocking success with the clean towel trick. My skin was generally well behaved, except I had persistently inflamed skin on my chin and nose. I eventually realized I had the same problem under a different guise. What was contacting my face frequently in those places? My bicycle helmet’s straps, and my glasses. I started wiping down the clips and spacers on the helmet and my glasses’ nose pads every few days with alcohol & my skin cleared right up.

I do pull-ups as a regular part of my fitness routine, but pull-ups and chin-ups only seem to develop my back & biceps.

Try doing pull-ups with both your legs extended fully in front of you, by bending at the waist - knees locked & parallel to the floor (or higher!). This will shift your center of mass forward so that most of the effort goes to your chest and deep-arm muscle. As an added bonus, holding the posture will ensure your abs get engaged too.

I bought Onimusha 3 on Steam, but Capcom’s legacy of making fun games with unspeakably shitty PC ports continues. Can it be made to run?!

Yes, actually, it can. But you need to do several things to help it along. On a Windows 7 system the game came up windowed, and would crash randomly during the first video cut-scene…which happens to be before you can even start playing.

To fix it; browse to wherever you installed steam, then your steamapps\shared\onimusha3 folder. Find the sub-folder that has all the game’s pre-rendered videos. Delete or rename it to prevent the game from playing them - this will prevent crashing during cut-scenes. You can, however, watch those videos separately with VLC or another player to follow along.

If your game won’t run full-screen even though you have set fullscreen in the configuration options, select the game window once it is running, and hit alt + enter. It may also be beneficial to run the game as administrator & in compatibility mode for windows XP SP2. It worked for me with those settings enabled, but I did not test fully enough to say they are required.

Finally, you may notice that “Cofigure controls” in the menu option won’t show you the current keyboard controls at all, nor let you change them. By default the mappings are ASDF for movement and IJKL, spacebar, and enter for your actions. Shift/Control manage your target lock & stances.

How to Un-Suckify Vim on Windows 7

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:35:00 -0400

So you have your superfly new Windows 7 machine, and you want that amazing Vim text editor that all the cool kids are talking about. You grab the 7.3 installer, run it, and see something like…this:

You immediately start to wonder why everyone thinks Vim is interesting. The answer is: Vim is amazing, but you have to jump through several hoops to unlock the majority of its potential, especially on a windows system.

So here is how I got Vim working happily on Windows 7.

Downloading

Grab the newest version of gVim for windows(In my case, 7.3).
Download the badass ir_black colorscheme from Todd Werth. Also grab his .vimrc and .gvimrc files.
Head back to vim.org (unless you read ahead, you sly dog you!) and search for the fuzzyfind and NERDTree plugins. Download them.

Good, now its time to put those pieces into place!

Installing

Run the installer for vim, the default settings work.
Browse to C:\Users\< your login >\. Create a “vimfiles” directory, if it doesn’t already exist.
Create “swap”, “colors” and “backup” folders within your shiney new “vimfiles” directory.
Copy the ir_black color theme you downloaded into that “colors” folder.
Copy the .vimrc file into C:\Users\< your login >\. Rename it to “_vimrc”.
Copy the .gvimrc file into C:\Users\< your login >\. Rename it to “_gvimrc”.
Extract the NERDTree and Fuzzy-Finder plugins into C:\Users\< your login >\vimfiles\.

Now feel free to delete the installers and the original .zip files if you’re the organized type.

Tweaking

Finally, the home stretch: Todd’s .vimrc file is flexible, extensible, and badass - but written mostly for *NIX systems. Some edits have to be made to make it play nice on windows. Open it up in your soon-to-be-displaced-by-vim text editor.

Scroll down to around line 111 (Directories).
Change the “backupdir” and “directory” directives to be:

set backupdir=~\vimfiles\backup  
set directory=~\vimfiles\swap

Scroll down to around line 225 (CommandT).
Comment out the following line (preface with “):

let g:CommandTMatchWindowAtTop = 1

Then find and delete:

map <Leader>f :CommandT<CR>

finally, add the following anywhere in the file (I put mine in the “fuzzyfinder” section):

map <Leader>f :FufFile<CR>

These changes effectively disable the CommandT plugin.

I simply could not get the CommandT plugin working on windows 7. Using the current Ruby DevKit and MinGW32, I could create the makefile, and then get it to compile (with errors). However, using it in Vim would lead to a crash any time I used it to select a file. If anyone out there has it working on windows 7, please let me know how.

Save and close the “_vimrc” file.
Finally - open up the “_gvimrc” file.
Go down to line 21 (elseif win32 segment).
Insert the following between the elseif and end:

set guifont=Consolas:h13

Save and close the “_gvimrc” file.

Now, open up gvim, and bask in the glory! (windows-key, gvim, enter). If you see any errors at the bottom of the window relating to backups or swapfiles, make sure your new C:\Users\< your login >"vimfiles” directory is writeable.

Education

Although I suggest you ease into it, you do have to spend some time to get the most out of Vim. I had great results with the peepcode series about vim, but there are piles of other documentation on the web and built into vim.

"What if casualty estimates grow into the thousands? What if oil prices skyrocket, sparking..."

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:57:00 -0400

“

What if casualty estimates grow into the thousands? What if oil prices skyrocket, sparking inflation and lines at the gas pump, and costing the U.S. economy thousands of American jobs? Suppose the Middle East erupts in a tornado of violence, toppling regime after regime in the region?

Even a rudimentary list of the possible contingencies shows that costs may grossly exceed what the Administration wants the public to believe.

”

- Senator Byrd, Feb 26, 2003

Where is your intelligent design now?! Just kidding, tapirs...

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:11:00 -0400

Where is your intelligent design now?!

Just kidding, tapirs are cool. But seriously, read some Hume.