December 2011
1 post
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October 2011
1 post
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The Stanley Parable
(cross-posted from my Google Plus profile)
I know this is old news for some. After watching Extra Credits, I tried out The Stanley Parable. It’s an interesting commentary on games, but packaged as a Source engine mod. It’s free, so it’s worth a look, if that suits your fancy.
September 2011
1 post
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August 2011
2 posts
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July 2011
1 post
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The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov →
A friend of mine shared this essay with me. This is a neat little piece about the nature of human understanding.
June 2011
4 posts
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Server Migration!
Hello everyone! If you are seeing this, then Zombie Zen is working properly. I just migrated to Linode, so things may still be weird for the next day or so, but don’t panic. I’m doing enough of that for you. :)
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Reblog if you've seen a girl with hair like this
supernaturalunlimited:
Just watched Scott Pilgrim again a few days ago. It continues to grow on me.
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May 2011
7 posts
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“Because vacuum tubes are awesome.”
– Doug (after a discussion of the simplicity of VGA)
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goray: A Drop into BitBucket
I’ve moved goray from SourceForge to BitBucket yesterday. This also signals a switch from Bazaar to Mercurial. Along with other changes in the goray project, I think this will make goray easier to work with and contribute to. Read on for more details.
First off, goray builds much faster now. goray uses SCons Go Tools to expose the Go compiler to SCons. SCons Go Tools used to create...
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FIRST Team 973 Victory at St. Louis
This is my second year mentoring FIRST Robotics Team 973, and last weekend, we won the world championships in St. Louis, Missouri. With 320 teams at the championships (not to mention the countless others who didn’t make it to championships), to perform this well is an amazing feat. I’m proud of all of the students on the team who worked so hard to get to the top, and we made it. ...
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New Go Stable Release
Yesterday, the Go programming language announced their second stable release, introducing language changes, better packages, and general speed-ups. I’m proud to say that I helped out in a small part by contributing a patch to the zlib package.
For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about Go, it’s a programming language that brings all of the pleasant features from...
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obama@whitehouse:~$ sudo chmod +x /bin/laden
April 2011
2 posts
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Texture Mapping!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted because of some events that required my attention, but I’m back with yet another goray rendered image! A lot has changed in the rendering infrastructure (refactoring and such), and now it supports spot lights and texture mapping! Texture mapping and Blender export have not been merged to the trunk yet, but they’re coming soon.
The...
February 2011
4 posts
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Currently expanding the FIRST scouting project to generate PDFs with barcode IDs. Data entry will be epic.
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Going to Google
Hello, everyone! I am excited to announce that I will be a Software Engineering Intern at Google this summer! I was waiting until everything was finalized and the paperwork was signed before I made the announcement, and the time has come. Mountain View, here I come!
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January 2011
3 posts
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FIRST Experiences with MongoDB
I’m currently working on a FIRST scouting data management project in my spare time. The requirements I’m working with are fairly well-defined, but the statistics collected change from year to year. I want to be able to use the same software year after year and keep historical data intact. I’m using Django for the front-end, but instead of using a traditional SQL database,...
December 2010
5 posts
shadowschwa asked: MYRRH!!!!!
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Most people have 1000 wishes for Christmas; a...
I ordinarily don’t repost these sorts of things, but I had a good friend who passed away from cancer four years ago. Before he died, I was able to share one last Christmas with him. Every year since then, I ask myself, “If this was my last Christmas, would I be happy with my life?” Health is a gift. Cherish it.
Be thankful if you are in good health; show compassion for those...
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Watchjacob:
PhotoShop Tutorial Rap
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November 2010
7 posts
2 tags
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Autocomplete Considered Harmful
Stop using autocomplete. People no longer think about what they say, what they type, and how they spell it. Especially for programming, autocomplete is a sin.
I’ve seen many programmers make a spelling error in a function name and have it propagate through the entire project without catching it. Why? Because Eclipse just blindly copies it whenever you type the first few letters. If...
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IE8/HTML5 Fix
Hey, everyone!
It has recently come to my attention that some of the code that I was using in my website rendered Zombie Zen and a couple other sites I’ve been working on completely un-viewable in Internet Explorer 8. Ironically, it was the part of my code that was supposed to make HTML5 render better on Internet Explorer.
Though I’d like to put some distance between myself and...
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Unix Command Line of the Day
I wanted to paste a text file with my homework assignment into Gmail. Unfortunately, said text file was on the school server and I really didn’t want to permanently download the thing to my hard drive. So this is what I did:
This connects to the school server, retrieves graph.txt from my home directory, and copies it to standard out. I then piped the text into pbcopy, which is the...
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October 2010
9 posts
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White Rabbit and a deck of cards
[We had received a message from Enoch with a building number, a 0-level room number, and 3 two-digit numbers.]
Me: I don't think this building has a basement.
McLeod: Can't find a map... this is room 105...
Me: Maybe we're reading it wrong...
McLeod: ... [looking at some nearby lockers]
Me: No way...
[And indeed, our heroes found two decks of cards (labeled Alpha and Beta, with the message "order matters") inside the locker. Later, that same evening...]
Me: Dude, I think we saw something like this when we were researching the last cypher.
McLeod: Oh yeah?
Me: In Cryptonomicon, they used something called a Solitaire cypher. Maybe that's it. All I've gotta do is pop open Vim and write a Python script to perform the deck operations. Let the hacking begin. [puts on music from The Social Network]
[After some home-cooked burgers, our heroes wrote a simple Solitaire cypher decrypter in Python and decoded the latest message.]
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“Lost cooling in machine room last nite. Most services down.”
– Twitter / @csl_status on the cusp of a lab I have due today
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“Now I’ve got an 0xE to Valgrind.”
– Me (after finally getting results from a black box test for an assignment)
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Flare is now $0.99!
Flare is now on sale at a special introductory price of $0.99! You can go and purchase it from the Android Market. This offer is only valid until October 30th, so buy now!
If you find Flare useful, please write a review on the Market. And tell your Android-device-wielding friends!
Flare is an easy way of sharing locations and remembering them. Simply type a message, pick a phone...
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Some days, you just have to use grep.
September 2010
2 posts
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Introducing Flare
Ever needed to tell your friends where you are? Forget where you parked? If you have an Android phone, there’s now a solution: Flare.
Flare is an easy way of sharing locations and remembering them. Simply type a message, pick a phone number, and your flare will be sent, even if your friend doesn’t have Flare. Flare uses text messages to communicate, so no personal information is...
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August 2010
1 post
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Am I the only one who thinks that xkcd hasn’t been funny for the last month or so?