I've been working on my very first PC build over the last three evenings. Tonight I plugged it in, crossed my fingers and turned it on... and booted into the BIOS config! Woohoo! I'm now past my worst fears of crushed CPU socket pins and the like. (And considering what I spent on all this, that was no small fear.) Tomorrow, I'll get the ( Read more... )

A little while back I mentioned that I was working on a custom programming font. It's been rather educational and I've learned a ton of trivia about computer fonts. By far the most interesting thing is that drafting the shape of each glyph has turned out to be the easy part. What's the hard part? Grid fitting (a.k.a. hinting or instructing).
( Read more )

I defended today!

For nearly five years now, I've had two color schemes defined in my init.el file for Emacs. One is a basic dark text on white scheme that's a tweaked version of the default colors from XEmacs. The other color scheme is something of its inverse with light text on a black background. I based the second one off of the first. While I found that the ( Read more... )

"It would be pointless to observe that the finest volume of all the many hexagons that I myself administer is titled Combed Thunder, while another is titled The Plaster Cramp, and another Axaxaxas mlö."
         - "The Library of Babel" Jorge Luis Borges.

Well, as of the point when they froze the scoreboard, my solo effort was ranked in the 24th ( Read more... )

I'm calling it a night.

Position Score Team Problems Solved
21 2763.6783 Combed Thunder 16I'd broke the top twenty and was in 19th place for a good long while earlier. Oh well. At least I finally had a respectable ICFP showing this year and did reasonably well for a solo effort.

Step: 0 Distance: 2.2343e+06 VDiff: 3588.08
...
Step: 711 Distance: 0.0530664 VDiff: 3.04898e-05
This is just with made up numbers since I haven't hooked it into the VM yet, but still. I also need to optimize for fuel consumption (7688 units, in this case). By I can hit an arbitrary moving target fairly squarely now ( Read more... )

I doubt these will be useful to anyone else reading this, but I'm going to collecting these here as notes to myself so that I don't lose them. I should really just turn them into shell scripts.

Generate an Emacs TAGS file for a project

find . | grep -E "\.(cpp|cc|cxx|hpp|h|hxx)$" | etags -Use this recursively scan a directory and all ( Read more... )

It's done! Grand totals: one full week, five questions, and seventeen typed pages written including almost four pages for the 64 entries in the references list. And countless iced chais chugged.

Frankly, I'd rather have spent the time and energy doing, well, the actual publishable research that this is supposedly testing my preparation to do. I ( Read more... )

Real life has sort of overtaken things and it's clear that I won't be able to get as far as I'd like in the ICFP contest so I've decided to bow out. Given that, I figure that I might as well save some time for those still in the running and impart some of my ray tracing knowledge. So I'm giving away two little routines that ought to be helpful to ( Read more... )