I got a good laugh out of this one. I’d disagree about the Chome comment though, seems its secure too.
From College Humour Via Neatorama
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Browsers as Transport
Saturday, April 3, 2010
WikiGolf Graph Traversal Game
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Update 28-May-’01: The Source for the project has been posted
That sounds like a fun game doesn’t it? Well that was our project description for our Software Engineering Project module. Needless to say its a bit fuzzy and a touch on the random side, but after a bit of research I came up with the following:
- WikiGolf is a game where you start off on a random page on wikipedia, (using the random page function). You then try to get to a predetermined finishing page in a set number of clicks. To do this you can only click on links in the main article. You can’t use the search function etc.
- The graph traversal part is done by moving through the graph of all the links on wikipedia. Somebody already trawled the links and we’re given a graph of all the links in a file which we have to read. For example the wikipedia page for Sex links to all of the following pages.
sex: gender male female sexorgan vagina prostate gender identity karyotype transvestism crossdressing discrimination sex segregation sexism reproduction sexual_intercourse
We have to use these links to construct a graph and traverse it.
- Game. Well it has to be fun to play….
So there you have it. Its kind of esoteric, but I think we’ve managed to get a good grip on it. So with that in mind, we set about forming our groups and making a plan.
The first 6 weeks of the module were based around doing practicals to get us a base level of code. Some with which we could work on to make to game. We started by writing a program that would create a graph of nodes with links to other nodes, as well as some basic operations on the graph. Then we modified it to be able to read the contents of a file. We finished with being able to find the shortest path between two points on the graph. Once we had those practicals done it was time to move on to the rest of the project.
Having formed our teams, everybody started having meetings, and devising how they wanted their game to look and play. The reason I’m writing this now is that we just finished our meeting to decide exactly how the game should look and feel. Everything will be done in Java, so we went with Swing, as it seems to be the easiest to learn. I managed to find some simple WYSIWYG editors in the group who aren’t too into coding everything from scratch like me.
I’m rather happy with how things are going at the moment. I managed to get pretty much the entire back-end working over the mid term break, so now everybody is just working on the GUI, and trying to get it to look pretty. Once the entire thing is done, I’ll try and post a copy of the program up here (if my team doesn’t object).
RoR, I’m In love
Sunday, March 21, 2010
I’ve officially given up on php. I’m sick of it! I’ve been using it for over a year now, and it’s really starting to piss me off. It’s just the little things, and to be honest it’s probably to do with the hap-hazard way I started learning it. But alas, it’s gone! I’ve followed to crowd and I’ve gone to Ruby, and more specifically, Ruby on Rails.
I’ve spent the last few days, at the expense of studying for my midterms, (I’ll do anything not to study, including learn a new language) learning Ruby on Rails. I’ve no background in Ruby at all, but I’ve dabbled in python, and there are some similarities there. But all in reality I’m starting from scratch with it, and I love it.
Everything just seems so much simpler. This whole convention over configuration approach is brilliant, as well as all these little scripts and generators. To show just how simple it is, this evening I started with the plan to write a login system for my simple test website. Within 2 hours I had a working one, where I understood every line of code, and how it slotted into the bigger picture. Compare that with the week it took me in php.
I think I’m in love! Ruby is just so clean and simple and rails is a godsend. Once I get to grips with it all I can see myself churning out functional website after functional website. Not these half-assed php still-births that I’ve been producing over the last couple of years ….
Clean tagging
Monday, March 15, 2010
(via inhabitat)
A very unique take on graffiti. Reverse Graffiti. Its where graffiti artists, instead of tagging a wall with spray paint, clean it, leaving behind their mark in another way. This particular example comes from a group of students in Durban, South Africa.
(via mrsmullerauh)
(via ed.tait)
Predictive Text assignment
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Just before we broke for Spring Break, we were given our end of year assignment for my Data Structures & Algorithms module. We were given a fully implemented keyboard interface, as shown below, and we had to design and implement a class that takes the input from the keyboard and creates a predictive text system which anticipates what you want to say based on what type using the keypad. Basically the T9/Dictionary/Predictive Text system you use on your phone when you text someone.
When I saw the project outline I started to get excited, finally a proper (or what I would call proper) programming project in college. Last year we had an Alice assignment, which to be honest, was pants! But this project really piqued my interest. And subsequently, I’m 5 days into my spring break, and I’ve nearly finished it. This thing is due for the end of the semester, which is another 7 weeks away.
Considering I’ve worked 2, 8 hour days at work in that space of time, I consider that quite an achievement. I’ve only got to implement one more method, and do some refinement & commenting of the code and it’ll be ready for submission. Everything seems to work perfectly, and I even managed to find a file of about 60, 000 English words to use as a starting dictionary.
I’ve rather enjoyed doing this project, it was like a sex. Great fun while while you’re doing it, but once it’s over you just want to go back for more….. given a 30min rest and a sandwich of course.
Now I suppose its onto the WikiGolf Graph Traversal game….. But thats for another post.
I don’t know what to make of it…
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Other than to laugh. But I got a good 20mins of enjoyment out of this post - http://www.27bslash6.com/5pm.html. Please read it all the way through to the end. I particularly liked the following:
Despite your assumption, I have the highest amount of respect for authority. I actually wanted to become a police officer but failed the IQ test when I arrived on time at the correct building
It is a fairly large job as one of the backpackers is American and will therefore require a hole several sizes larger than normal. On the plus side, the other is from England which obviously means no dental records.
Brief Summary: Blogger in Australia gets a letter from the police stating that one of his blog posts violates the law. Blogger writes back. Hilarity ensues.
It’s all over this post – http://www.27bslash6.com/guaranteed.html
Enjoy
Happy Hallmark Day!
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Sierpinski Valentine
Or better yet. Just ignore today go on with it as you would any other Sunday. Why not just do something next week. Make it a surprise, make it special. But don’t just do it because Hallmark tells you to.
Google. Big or too big?
Thursday, February 11, 2010
I like Google. I really do. They make some great products and they do some wonderful things, such as Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome, Picasa, Grants, Google.org, Youtube, Google Earth, and their latest go at the universal translator and so on. Some of those products there were acquired, but they managed the steward them well after they were bought
I also dislike Google. They do some really bad products and some really crappy things. They censor results in China (about to stop, but they still did it for about 4 years), Dodgeball, Jaiku, Video, Orkut (outside of Brazil/India), Notebook, and so on.
As you can see I’m in two minds about the company. On the one hand I feel that they are a good force in the world. They’re using their position to create competition and spur innovation. They’re using their money to fund worthwhile projects and goals. In general they seem to be the gentle big lumbering behemoth with only good intentions, and when they do something bad, you can generally see it in their eyes that they didn’t mean it.
However at the same time, Google is becoming a bit of an overlord. They are so big that they have their finger in almost every pie. Search, email, photos (Picasa), social networks, video (Youtube), translation, phones (Android), browsers (Chrome), computer OS (Chrome OS), location based services (Latitude), health records (Google Health), blogs (Blogger), hardware (helping design the hardware of the android phones), Fiber connections to the home etc. The list goes on and on and on.
I had my first Holy Shit! moment with Google a little while back after they had launched a few things, with the second 3 being launched at the same time. They launched Chrome OS, Chrome browser, and Android, Google translate as you type, automatic transcription/captioning on Youtube videos and translation of Youtube videos. When I saw all these releases I realized what a force Google is in the world. These are only sideline projects. Google makes over 90% of its revenue on Ads, and most of that comes from search ads. All these other things are just periphery and while you could argue that the reason Google is so successful is because they host this range of other products, the point still remains that these aren’t money spinners and aren’t likely to contribute majorly to Google’s overall income so they should stay classified as sideline projects.
When you consider that they released such well formed and featured projects, with such direct impact on people. Which featured a major bound towards universal translation, (via speech-to-text, text translation, and then text-to-speech), and this isn’t even their main aim. It really hit home for me that Google is truly a force to be reckoned with.
But even if we assume that Google is good, and all they touch is gold, and they’re guided by Larry and Sergey’s loving care as well as their motto ‘Don’t be evil‘. What happens in 10 years when Google is not so divinely guided? What happens when the founders have left and the businessmen start to get in? Or people with a different vision and purpose take the reigns. Google will still have their fingers in all these pies. They’ll still have so much of our information that they could hold it hostage.
Even if we trust Google today, why trust Google tomorrow, or next week, or 10 years from now?
And yet even after all of this, I still use Google services. Gmail, Search, Wave, Apps, Translation to name but a few. I know it a cliche. But in this case only time will tell! I still have my hopes that Google will stay in our good books, but I’m also very wary of what changes are going on, in and around Google, and how they react to them.
(All sources and references are linked to in the text above)
Stackoverflow is great!
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
For the programmers out there, the title may seem like a bit of a misnomer. A Stackoverflow Error is one an error whic “occurs when too much memory is used on the call stack”, to quote Wikipedia. In short this is not a good thing.
Why do I like stackoverflow then? Well because its the name of a great forum for asking and answering programming related questions. I’ve been using it for a little while now, mainly for little onesey-twosey type questions. But today I decided to ask a more difficult question about exceptions in Java. I’d spent a while researching it online and I couldn’t find a simple clean answer. Everywhere seemed to give conflicting reports, and none were specific to my problem.
However when I asked my question on stackoverflow I got about 7 direct, appropriate responses within an hour. A couple of which then lead to informed discussions on the topic. I learned more in that hour than I did in about 3 hours of searching. That’s why I love it.
Xocai is a scam
Monday, December 7, 2009
Note I waffle on a bit here. But I’ll list my resources so you can check them out yourself
- http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4176 (there is an audio podcast there you can download and listen to)
- http://www.ronanobrien.info/xocia-is-a-scam/
- Contact me if you’d like some more
Xocai is based on multi-level-marketing, which is a perfectly valid and legal marketing method. However most of the time it is used in a very specific way. To take your money.
While I’m sure that you went to a meeting where they hyped up the product, and showed you some of the people that have made millions off of it. What they probably didn’t talk about are the mathmatics behind it. Most M-L-M schemes work on the principle that in order to make money, you don’t have to sell the product, you just have to recuit a pyramid of people under you, who will then either buy the product, or recruit people under them…. and so on.
However if you look at some simple maths behind it you’ll see that it won’t add up.
So lets say you need to recruit 5 active people to break even, people who will buy/sell the product or recuit new people. Not unrealistic, considering that most of the people you sign up will never really be active. Well do the maths on that. if you have 5 people at each step of the way, After two steps, where you have recruited 5 people and each of your people have recruited 5 people. Thats 5×5=25 people. Now how many steps do you think you are from the origin?
Lets say your 10 steps down. Not unrealistic. The company recuits a few people and they recuit a few people and so on, until the rep comes to ireland. At this stage there are over 282,475,249 people involved 5^10. Going purely on active people. At step 12 there will be 13,841,287,201. 13 Billion people. Double the population of the earth.
While this doesn’t have a major point in and of itself. It shows that the maths that they showed you is unrealistic. It cannot work in the way they have said. However if you get in early, you can make money. But the chances of it happening are very slim.
Also the fact that the boxes cost €150 each. Why do you think it is so expensive? Becuase it is so good? NO. There are plenty of better products that boast the same qualities but they are much cheaper. It costs so much so that the manufacturers can make money off of selling it to you, their distributors. Not the customers. No customer in their right mind would buy chocolate at €5 per 6g (which is the figure I’ve heard bandied about). So they make it mandatory for their distributors to buy a box a month. Thats over a grand a year, which i can gaurantee you is a massive mark up on the cost of the product.
They also require you to buy product so that they just about escape the pyramid scheme classification.
A couple of MLM companies post their distributors income. And over 99% of them loose money. Not even break even. But loose money. Precisely their initial investment, and their monthly purchase. which in your case is over a grand a year. (sourced from the podcast listed above on skeptoid.com)
If I’ve piqued your interest please read/listen to my sources at the top. They go through the details with much more detail and better info than me