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 […]
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, […]
From the ABC today: Opposition finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce is courting controversy again, warning that Australia is getting to the point where it will not be able to repay its overseas debt. That’s a big call, which I don’t think is actually true. But how close are we? In the news at the moment is […]
I finally got a smartphone a week or two ago. I ended up getting a Nokia N86, based on a combination of form factor (I would’ve preferred a flip phone, but apparently not enough people do for there to be lots of different models, and I’m still a bit reluctant to go for touch interfaces), […]
So the government’s decided to go ahead with the “clean feed” filtering scheme. This doesn’t seem remotely surprising to me, they’d already committed to it in their election policies: That is why Labor will: Provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet […]
(Continued from yesterday, and referring to the MV=PQ equation) Presumably most people care most about increasing Q (how much useful stuff people end up producing — the more the better) and keeping P roughly constant (if prices increase a lot, you can’t buy anything unless you’ve got lots of savings; if prices decrease a lot, […]
The financial crisis seems to have devolved into a debate about whether stimulus packages are a good idea or not, or possibly whether debt-financed ones are. Really, the
A brief update mostly linking to other things. I’ve been thinking it’d be fun to try developing code in a wiki environment — ie, web based, reasonably pretty, simple markup, potentially collaborative, and with text/links as first class elements; basically my idea of what LitProg2.0 might look like. As such, I’ve been poking at some […]
Good grief. It was bad enough discovering that the characters in Shadowunit maintained in-universe livejournals (and respond to comments), and not much worse to discover the title character from Castle maintaining a twitter account. Watching him solving an in-universe crime pushed things a bit, but the latest seems to be that the “Nikki Heat” novels […]
Apparently it’s IMO season, and in honour of such, Terry Tao reposed one of the questions on his blog as a “polymath” project — something to be solved collaboratively over the web, rather than by individual effort. Two hundred comments or so later, and a complete proof was achieved, though how much that benefited from […]
So as per my post from a week ago, here comes the description of my first little side project. But first a quick reiteration of the aim: I’m trying to get a feel for what it’s like actually doing a tech startup; so not charging for my time, but rather making something once that I […]
Matt writes on ideas, organization and overflow, and that he’s ending up with so many awesome ideas, that even when he notes them down for future reference, he’s so busy that he ends up independently reinventing them before finding time to actually make them happen. (Spoiler: he likes the approach of Steven Covey’s Habit Three […]