Voder-Vocoder

As of this week, I have officially made my decision to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill starting in the fall. I will be a graduate student and research assistant in the Computer Science Department. I have been offered a summer job in the department, and will be moving up next month to start it.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# ~/bin/coin
#DTPD#
if (ord(open('/dev/random').read(1)) % 2):
 print "heads"
else:
 print "tails"

But why throw away seven bits of entropy?

#!/usr/bin/env python
#DTPD#
n=ord(open('/dev/random').read(1))
for i in xrange(8):
 if  (n % 2):
  print "heads",
 else:
  print "tails",
 n >>= 1
print

I now own no TV.

That thing was heavy, and I never have to lift it again.

Update on my life: it is awesome.

That is all.

#!/bin/sed -f
#DTPD#
#convert *bold* text to *html bold*
# also converts /italic/ text to html em
s/\*\([^\*]*\)\*/<strong>\1<\/strong>/g;
s/\/\([^\/]*\)\//<em>\1<\/em>/g;

I’ve decided that using it as an ebook reader is incredibly convenient, because of its small size (it fits nicely in my pocket!). The only advantage an e-ink screen still holds for me is super-long battery life.

I added these lines to the CSS for this page

pre { overflow:auto;
      overflow-y:visible; }

and this line to the (X)HTML

<meta name="viewport"
    content="width=device-width" />

which seems to make the site render much much better on my Ipod Touch’s small screen.

I really think a computer should last more than 32 months. Sloop, the computer I built in June 2008, failed yesterday. Coincidentally, I ripped the old HDDs out of Dalek the day before to send it to be recycled. Now I have two old boxes to recycle.

I bought a cheap desktop at the store yesterday and didn't even try to look for a good deal online. I just wanted to have a functioning computer. The new case is 34% smaller by volume (I just measured). I would have gotten something even smaller, but I wanted a t least one PCI slot, one PCI Express slot, and room to mount my old HDD. I named it Occam.

Occam is a Dell. The CPU is a Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5800. One benchmark rates this as 34% faster than Sloop's Athlon 64 X2 6000+, which was an upgrade 18 months ago.

I propose that Jimi Hendrix's “1983…” be adopted as a transhumanist anthem.

“Real” is not an acceptible synonym for “80-bit floating-point number.” Real numbers aren't even countable, much less in a bijection to a set of size 2^80.

For the first time in twenty-five years, I am not overweight. That is all.