w00t, I'm published!

I got this email a while ago:

From: InfoWorld Letters
To: Y2kBugxp90
Date: Jun 16, 2006 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: Thank you for supporting Mac tinkerers.

We enjoyed your letter (below) -- and we are interested in publishing it in InfoWorld.

If you would like to grant us permission, please reply to this e-mail (preserving the history) and include your city and state for the letter's attribution. Your e-mail address will not appear in print. Should your letter appear in the magazine, please note that it may be edited for length or clarity.

Looking forward to your reply,

Alec C. Wagner
Deputy Managing Editor
InfoWorld


On 6/14/06 1:19 PM, "Y2kBugxp90" wrote:

Although I myself am not the type to recomplie Darwin, I most certainly sympathize with those who want to do something new with it. Your article hits the nail on the head, and exposes the commercialization of Apple's formerly liberal policies. Hopefully Google will continue to support open source, too.


Nifty, eh? OK, maybe not a big deal, but I've always wanted to make some sort of public stand for open source. If you're wondering, my letter was in response to this article.

Dangit, TIGER!

Why do they have to make such perfect toys? Not only did they craft the unforgettably addicting Bop-It, but their Lazer Tag game is the best there is. Er, it might be the only one there is, but it's still damn cool. I borrowed the Deluxe 2-Player Set from my 10-year-old cousin, and I'm hooked. The two 'taggers' each use a plastic dome on their tops, packed with infrared sensors and LEDs, to braodcast its position and detect hits, and one more sensor inside the gun's barrel to detect a 'lock-on.' Pre-programmed on the tagger units are such unique game modes as Save the King, Hide and Seek, and Own the Zone, which are more interesting than the names suggest. The set also comes with two pairs of HUD sunglasses, with status lights for lock-on, successful shots, and received hits. They also block 99.9% of UVA/UVB radiation.

Hmm, that sounded a little like a proprietary product review. I just can't help but be excited that I've found the only "FPS" that I can really get into. I'll have to get a set of my own pretty soon.

UPDATE: Tiger Electronics also makes tagger pistols that can be used in tandem, and a bazooka-like tagger called the Master Blaster, which shoots a Nerf-like foam missile that senses impact and sends tag signals to all players near the "blast". This game's crazy, like water guns with advanced scoring and no water.

Funtime CS lab.

The week, we wrote an infix-to-postfix expression translator. Not terribly easy, but very fun. The purpose of the translator is to provide an easy way to evaluate infix expressions, since to read postfix (RPN) is a much simpler task for a machine. The translator does its business by simply letting any operands pass through, but holding operators in a stack until a same- or lower-precedence operator is encountered. Here's an example: The expression "2 - 4 + 5 ^ 3 ^ 2" would first be tokenized into numbers and operators: {2, MINUS, 4, PLUS, 5, POWER, 3, POWER, 2}. The first token is a 2. It's a number, so it isn't touched; it becomes the first token of the result string. Then MINUS, since it's an operator, is pushed onto the stack. The 4 is passed through, making "2 4", then PLUS comes up. MINUS, the top of the operator stack, has the same precedence as PLUS, so we can pop it, giving us "2 4 -". The PLUS is pushed onto the stack, and the 5 after it makes "2 4 - 5". POWER is a higher operation than PLUS, though, so we just push it on top of PLUS. POWER, must be treated differently than PLUS or MINUS, because exponents evaluate from right to left, so we can't pop the first POWER before pushing the second. Finally, after the last token, 2, the string is "2 4 - 5 3 2", and the stack is {PLUS, POWER, POWER}, but now we've reached the end of the token list, so we need to pop the rest of the operators. This leaves us with "2 4 - 5 3 2 ^ ^ +", which is the proper postfix equivalent of the given expression "2 - 4 + 5 ^ 3 ^ 2", and it evaluates to 1953123. I didn't cover parentheses in that example, but they are relatively easy (although I had quite a time getting them to work): if you come across a closing parenthesis, pop operators until you find the opening one.

I hope that was a good refresher for those unfamiliar with RPN or stacks. Otherwise, learn to use an HP caluclator.

Strechy-pants DS case (Phat edition!)

Yes, I ripped off John Spain's idea. However, in doing so, I've taken a very different perspective on its construction. I'll have to start from the beginning:

My sister has a yoga-pants fetish. She attends yoga classes weekly and excercises nearly daliy, but in order to maintain this ritual, she requires a constant supply of yoga pants. These are typically slightly loose and infused with spandex, and at the last count, she had over 10 pair. During a recent clothes-shopping trip, she spotted a pair of yoga shorts that she immediately insisted that she needed. I persuaded her that, instead of paying $18 for yoga pants that were shorter than those that she had purchased earlier for around $3 each, she should cut the legs off of one of her many pairs. This plan was a success, and I was left with the pant legs. Having seen John Spain's brilliant idea, I proceeded to design a (stretchy) DS pants case of my own. This is with what I came up on Monday:



Yes, I went overboard. I ususally do with design papers and blueprints and such. It should be readable enough; it's hard to write with a broken pencil lead. Anyway, as you can see, it requires sewing, unlike Spain's. I was lucky enough to have a little experience in the field, and besides, the pant leg wasn't large enough for me to try out my fancy origami skills.

The next day, I happened to find enough free time to make it, so hereforthwith, I present a photographic record of its creation. (Hi-res pics here.)


This is the pant leg, trimmed up and ready to go:



And now, to hem the bottom edge:



I really, really suck at hemming.



First stitch: not so bad. My s3\/\/1n(_+ 5|<111z were coming back.

I had room, so I added one more pocket than my blueprint specified:



2 (stitches) + 2 (slanted cuts) = 3 (sad pockets).

At this point, though, the pockets sagged terribly when loaded:



I thought sewing down the sides might help. It didn't do much, though:



Oh well. The final product still looks pretty dang sweet:



OK, it's not really the final product; it still needs Velcro. I'll get to it soon.

bunnyhero, to the rescue! (originally posted 5.6.06)

The guy behind all of those cheesy adopt-a-pets seen on MySpace profiles in fact seems somewhat smart. His website, bunnyherolabs.com, in addition to housing the animales digitales, contains such wonderous gimmicks as a 'monster attack' DHTML script, allowing you to enhance any webpage with Godzilla, tanks and jets. For example, if you don't like what I say in my blog, you could attack it. Among other playthings bunnyhero (a.k.a. Wayne Lee) has created, there is a fortune cookie image maker, an animated eCard system, a bunny-versus-demons flash game, and a graphical tagboard. Many of these small interactive web projects appear half-finished, but with good potential. Hopefully bunnyhero labs will be more fleshed-out in a few months.

Stunning video (originally posted 26.5.06)

You should have seen this already, but if you are unfortunate enough not to have been introduced to it, it's at this place. At the time of posting, the video is unavailable, but the link might work later. Otherwise, just google 'pythagoras switch'.

EDIT: I found one that works. This one is unedited, so you may want to skip the anime intro and the bit of cheesy dancing near the midpoint.

OK, first post. (originally posted 25.5.06)

Time for me to start this rusty engine. Expect talk of Nintendo and my pro66ies.

We'll start with the proggie side: I'm taking CS 2020 for the summer, so I'm getting lots of exposure to Java. It's a cool language, as far as syntax and portability are concerned, but it's just so dang SLOW! It's interesting that a course teaching algorithm efficiency should use such a bogged-down language. It takes more time to start the VM than to perform a quicksort. Until today the course has just been review of 2010, so the first two projects were about simple OOP concepts, but I've had to fish my brain for the trig I learned three years ago, in order to draw regular pentagons.

In other news, E3 has come and gone, but the Wii has got me psyched. I already have a DS and simply adore Metroid Prime Hunters and Tetris DS, but I can't wait for Red Steel and Twilight Princess. That's not to mention the fact that all of the best NES and SNES games will be available for download. I've never finished a single Square game, on any platform—they were always constrained to short sessions at friends' houses—so you can imagine that I'm itching to play Chrono Trigger again.

LATER EDIT: OK, well I've beaten FF Tactics Advance. I haven't finished it, per se; I've only completed around 175 of the 300 missions.

Yay, blogger doesn't suck.

All right. New blog. My last one here at blogspot didn't go so well, since—well, let's just not go there. Since this is actually a move from my previous blog on (shudder) MySpace, the next three posts are the junk I had there. Enjoy!