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Thoughts on the Library of Babel
Each book in the Library of Babel has 1312000 characters (22 letters, space, comma and period). This means that there are 251312000 ~= 1.956 * 101834097 books. This is a really really big number. There are only about 1080 atoms in the observable universe. If we wanted a set of unique books, each dedicated to an atom, each book would only have to be ( Read more... ) -
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Last week I wrote my first real Haskell code. For that my matter, it was my first non-trivial purely functional code. Pattern matching is nice. Typing was less annoying than I was expecting, and I suspect there are parts of Haskell that make it even less annoying. I ended up with a simple (unbalanced) binary tree implementation storing key/value ( Read more... ) -
Patience Diff, a brief summary
Last night I went to a coding party at a friend's house. I was on my laptop, and so didn't have any of my regular projects with me, so instead I spent some time figuring out some code for another person at the party.
The code in question was the implementation of Patience Diff, a diffing algorithm written by Bram Cohen of Bittorrent fame, and used ( Read more... ) -
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Tonight was the Open Text Christmas party. After a slowish start, once people I knew started showing up, things started to improve. By the the time that dinner rolled around, a lot of people had gotten a few drinks in, and were starting to relax. I negotiated a trade for our table's bottle of red for a neighbouring table's bottle of white, and over ( Read more... ) -
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For some strange reason, X has decided that clicking my middle mouse button should cause it to restart. (Also, the delete key takes screen shots.) This has lead to a number of accidents while using Firefox. -
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THE CAKE IS A LIE!!! -
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Exams are over (my last one was last Saturday.) Two went well, one went so-so, and the was blegh. I don't need the so-so one to graduate, and the blegh one was found blegh by a large number of other people in the class I talked to. It wasn't that the questions were difficult, but that a large number of them required you to remember a definition ( Read more... ) -
Shop Smart! Shop S-Mart!
Yesterday, dualistic sent me the URL of the Zombie Infection Simulator. I'd seen it before, but this time I noticed that the source code was available, and so decided to try making my own variant.
The result is the Zombie Infection Simulator: Housewares Edition, where there are random chainsaws, cricket bats, sawn-off shotguns, etc. lying around for people ( Read more... ) -
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Last night our TV gave up the ghost. When we turn it on, it makes an ugly discordant buzzing noise. It's likely that the transformer's busted (the TV used to whine for a while after it was switched off). Looking at reviews, it seems that people tend to be dissatisfied with this model, and that about 9 or 10 months on a refurb is better than some ( Read more... )
