inamerrata

Ooops. Emergency woblomo post coz I forgot. Here’s the link to the other day’s screencast that apparently didn’t make it through aggregators. Hohum.

So here’s where I’m up to with my “trigrid” project. The idea is you’ve got a bunch of roads on a triangular grid (hence the name), with little peons on each segment of road that will carry goods from one end to the other. Some segments spontaneously create goods, others destroy them. The point is [...]

I don’t have anything interesting to say today, so instead I’m going to link to an oldish post on my junkcode wiki (rss feed). Namely redcat — a program that merges ed-format diffs, so they can be applied in a single pass. That makes a big difference when dealing with anywhere more than a few [...]

ajtowns – Scamming my way onto “Team Samba” (”hey, I use it!”) was a good idea. Winners! #lca2010 #hackoff

Wellington Perl Mongers were awesome enough to run the Hackoff during LCA 2010. It consisted of a couple of hours of team hacking to decode craftily hidden eight character tokens. I’d seen Rusty carefully putting the “Samba [...]

At this year’s linux.conf.au I decided it was high time I learnt how to program simple graphics. The use case I had in mind in particular was simulating/visualising resource transportation in a grid based real-time strategy game like Widelands, but really I’ve been a bit annoyed that I haven’t been able to do basic graphics [...]

So with March coming up again, I thought I might have another go at some regular blogging. The World Blogging Month page doesn’t seem to have been updated (and David Pennock hasn’t blogged at Oddhead since October…) but I figure every other day still sounds more reasonable than every day, so I’ll stick with that, [...]

Phew, so March is over in another hour or so, and this post will be my sixteenth of the month, thus kinda completing the woblomo challenge, even if it ended up pretty damn flaky after the 19th… But hey, it was kinda fun, at least from this end.
If you’re looking for actual interesting content, you [...]

I guess I posted my previous post too soon, because just after midnight last night the usage that had disappeared magically reappeared. Traffic shaping had already started about six hours earlier, despite internode-quota-check telling me there was a few GB left, and I’d gotten the “over quota” email, so at least it’s all consistent now. [...]

Okay, so I’m late to the party, but munin is great. I modified Mark Suter’s internode-quota-check to dump output in a form suitable for munin and ended up with some graphs. Today’s is a little confusing:

Somehow the blocks of downloads that almost used up the remainder of my quota yesterday just vanished! Awesome. Especially since [...]

On Wednesday the 25th, I was thinking about project growth. The day before I’d posed a question to the debian-vote list:
Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project is going to improve Debian’s value the most? By how much? How will you be involved?
There have only been a couple of replies so far, the first [...]

So moving onto Monday the 23rd. Something I’ve been pondering blogging about for ages now is an analogy I came up with for the way Debian is organised. I’m not quite sure of the motivation, but it goes something like this: imagine all of the people in the organsiation arranged in a circle. That circle [...]

So, catching up on my WoBloMo posts. On the 21st I was in Melbourne for the Linux Australia council meeting. Saturday was mostly organisational stuff: basically getting an idea what each of the council members thought about the approach we’d take for the rest of the year. Stewart invited Andrew Cowie to give a presentation [...]

So I’ve pre-poll voted in preparation for my trip to Melbourne for the LA face-to-face. Not a very exciting range of candidates: Anna Bligh for Labor who’s premier; Mary Carroll for LNP who’s apparently the state secretary of the party; Gary Kane for the Greens who’s running on an anti-developers platform, with light rail to [...]

(Random topic courtesy of Dressy Bessy)
A couple more thoughts on Sunday’s post. In comments, Brendan Scott asks “Why would a trader extrapolate against their estimate v valuation?” But there’s actually a broader question — why would anyone trade at all? The initial scenario provided infinite supply at $500 per item, and gave a randomly chosen [...]

The efficient market hypothesis — that prices in a market immediately adjust to fully reflect new information as soon as it becomes available — is probably the primary foundation of the success of markets at allocating resources: eg, making the prices people are willing to pay at supermarkets influence what farmers produce and how much [...]