Earlier this week Meghan and her cousin Mimi (who lives next door)
saw a report on tsunami relief efforts on the news. They decided
they wanted to do something to help.
Since neither one had more than a couple of dollars in their piggy banks,
and just giving money didn't seem like actually doing much to them,
they decided to try and gather supplies instead.
Mimi's mom Becca (my sister) helped them make up a postcard-sized
flyer which they took around to all of the houses in our neighborhood
(about 140 houses total), asking people to contribute items for
hygiene kits. The flyer said to leave items outside Saturday morning
(New Years Day) and they would come collect them.
Once they assembled the kits from the items donated Becca was going
to take Meghan and Mimi down to Salt Lake to the LDS Humanitarian Center
so they could be distributed globally where needed. The
Humanitarian Centers guidelines for hygiene kits called for:
- 2 unbreakable combs (no sharp handles)
- 4 toothbrushes (packaged)
- 1 tube of toothpaste (6-8 ounces, no pumps)
- 2 bars of soap (approximately 4-5 ounces)
- 2 hand towels (15"x25")
This morning they went around and collected the items people had left
out for them. They managed to collect enough donations to assemble
six complete kits and another twenty-two partial kits (soap was the most
popular donation).
This afternoon Meghan and I went shopping for the items needed to
complete the rest of the kits. We had fun searching for the best
bargains so that we'd be able to afford to complete as many of the
kits as possible. We went to at least ten stores, but we ended
up finding a lot of good deals: two-pack of Vidal Sassoon combs
for $0.69, 8.2 oz tubes of toothpaste for $0.69, six toothbrushes for $1.00,
and 100%-cotton hand towels for $1.69 each.
We purchased all of the combs that one grocery store had and had to go
to another to get the rest that we needed. It made me wonder—if you
were going to assemble these kits in mass quantities, what kind of prices
could you find online for bulk case-lot quantities?
The best single source I found in a half-hours worth of Googling tonight (or
should I say Froogling) was DollarDays.com for case-lot purchases.
If you visit their website directly you have to register in order to see
any pricing information—but, if you go to
Froogle, search for an item,
and click through from their link, then you can see their actual pricing.
I also discovered that there are
people who clip coupons, and then rather than using the coupons themselves,
auction them off on on eBay!
I admit I'd never stopped to think there might be a secondary-market
for coupons...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 01,
2005
at 22:13
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Last year we decided the kids were getting old enough that they might
actually enjoy taking a long-ish roadtrip to go somewhere. Caleb
was the most interested in planning, so we let him pick where to go.
He chose Mt. Rushmore, so we spent
a week in the Black Hills (staying at
The High Country Ranch in Hill
City, SD) and had a thoroughly enjoyable time. We took
a couple days going (by way of Colorado and Nebraska) and coming (by way
of Wyoming).
This year Meghan is suddenly much more interested in planning the
family trip. It looks like a summer roadtrip, to a destination selected
by one of the kids (with parents retaining their veto perogative),
will probably become a Cleverly family tradition.
A couple of weeks ago I helped her find the official State Department
of Tourism websites for
Arizona,
California,
Colorado,
Idaho,
Montana,
Nevada,
and Oregon
so she could request free information packets.
(It was really exciting when Caleb got a
whole big envelope full
of stuff from South Dakota last spring.)
Meghan announced this morning that we were going to go to Oregon
and then come home by way of Northern California. I suspect she was
swayed to Oregon by the fact that her good friend Dani recently quit
working at Deseret Book and moved (back) to Portland.
Besides Portland and the beach (Astoria probably?), other possible
destinations appear to include: Crater
Lake National Park and Oregon Caves
National Monument. Once we get to Northern California:
Redwood National Park and
Lassen Volcanic National Park.
We'll also stop by to see old friends from college who are living in
the Bay Area (Karl & Jolene and PJ & Pili), I'm sure.
There is still a lot to research, plan and explore. Suggestions on
things to see are always welcomed.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 02,
2005
at 20:54
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I picked up my new Rose K contact
lenses from Dr. Judy's Bountiful office this afternoon. Jacob
(bless his little four year old heart) lost one of my gaspermeable lenses last
fall, and I've been stuck wearing my glasses since then.
Because I have Keratoconus, glasses are
not able to correct my vision to the degree that hard contact
lenses can. I've been coping by setting application font sizes to be at
least 24-27 points. No more of that (at least for the time being,
knock on wood), yeah!
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 03,
2005
at 16:37
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A comment on an Ask
Slashdot article on how to introduce children to computers (&
programming) pointed to Parallax.com
as a good source for teaching kids about hardware and low-level programming.
I've always been more of a software guy than a hardware hacker, ever since
I began programming at the age of eight. So, I'm intrigued somewhat
by the BASIC Stamp microcontroller. It looks like people
can do some pretty cool things with them, and they appear to have a lot of
online documentation and other educational resources.
Something to keep in mind, on the back burner, for the day when I
find myself with copious amounts of spare time and no other projects
to work on...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 03,
2005
at 21:47
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Will Duquette (a fellow Tcl'er I first
met at the 9th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference in
Vancouver, British Columbia in 2002) is nerdier than 78% of all people.
I took the same test and
found out that I'm nerdier than 80% of all people. I'm not sure exactly how
I feel about that...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 04,
2005
at 19:19
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I've been lurking on the alt.publish.books Usenet group for a while now. Going
through my saved messages tonight I came across
this post I'd saved from Stella Azbug.
Here is Stella's list of "good book typefaces:"
and her list of "good sans serif typefaces for heads etc.:"
For my Mormon's Book project, I've chosen Palatino. And
many years ago when I compiled Final Teachings, I chose to
set it in Bembo. (Sadly, Adobe's online store doesn't seem to remember my
purchase—having been almost a decade now, I guess I can't blame them for
purging old data—and the computer I had installed that font on has
long since been turned into a boat anchor.)
Another source for typeface advice: the interactive
Esperfonto
Typeface Selection System.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 04,
2005
at 19:34
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God's email, beginning yesterday, won't be returned to sender, at least
not in The Netherlands:
AMSTERDAM—Dutch postal company TPG has decided to send all anonymous
letters addressed to God to the country's evangelical broadcasting company.
Up to now, the Deity's mail from the Netherlands has ended up in the
wastepaper basket.
Members of the aftercare division of the EO broadcasting company will pray
for the people who write the letters, clergyman Cees van Velzen, of the
division, said on Monday.
And in case you were worried about people writing to different Gods:
The Christian broadcaster forwards letters addressed to Allah or other
non-Christian deities to the appropriate organisation.
Source: Expatica: News and Information for Expats in the Netherlands.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 04,
2005
at 20:40
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Does this definition apply to people where you work?
warm-chair attrition (warm-chair uh.TRISH.un) n.
The loss of workplace productivity due to employees who dislike their jobs
and are just waiting for the right time to quit and move on to something
better.
Source & example citations: The Word Spy.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 05,
2005
at 07:16
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Who writes for the Weekly World News, and more importantly
(or scarily) who actually believes their nonsense?
Here's the first paragrpah from an article entitled "Clarence Thomas is a 'Black Power' Mole!"
Butt-Kissing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is secretly a
black power fanatic who has purposely built an "Uncle Tom" image to deceive
his whitie Republican pals—like President Bush.
The article also purports to unmask Chief Justice Thomas's future
agenda:
- FULL reparations for slavery, in the form of all cotton in the United States.
- RENAME every Robert E. Lee School after Harriet Tubman, a heroine of the underground railroad.
- INSTITUTE an affirmative action program to recruit black athletes into professional hockey.
- BAN white rappers like Eminem from the airwaves.
Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 05,
2005
at 10:16
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David St. Lawrence has a blog,
Ripples, that is chock
full of good advice and interesting antecdotes. His post du jour is entitled
"Get
the salary you deserve."
It may be difficult for you to grasp this, but companies respect people in
proportion to what they pay them. Actual performance is difficult to observe
and is assumed to be proportionate to salary.
That rang especially true to me.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 05,
2005
at 15:59
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I can't believe I've lived most of my life in Utah, and I've never been
to Goblin Valley
State Park. DeAnn goes on a yearly hike there with her brother,
she says it is a fun place to visit, and that the kids would enjoy it.
Photographs of Goblin Valley from:
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 05,
2005
at 20:03
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Since it's been snowing quite heavily this week I've been taking the
express
bus to Salt Lake each morning for work. This morning I was aiming for the
7:33 AM bus, but had to wait for a freight train crossing 2nd North,
literally within eyesight of the Kaysville UTA park & ride lot
just on the other side of the tracks.
By the time the train had passed, and the railroad crossing arms had
gone back up it was 7:34 AM. I turned into the park & ride lot just
as the bus pulled away from the stop. There wasn't time for me to find
a parking spot and flag the bus down. So, I ended up waiting 23 minutes
out in the cold for the next bus.
As I'm standing outside waiting, I consider how different waiting for
a bus is in America as compared to Brazil (at least in the Amazon region
of Brazil). There you don't really have a bus schedule. Just bus stops.
If you want to catch the bus you go to the bus stop and wait. De
vez em quando the bus comes by. You might end up waiting just
a minute or two, or you could be in for a longer wait. It's anybodys guess.
But since culturally Brazilians aren't as tied to a clock like a ball and
chain, it's really no big deal. Plus, most any day in the Amazon is
beautiful, even when it is raining.
Here in America the buses run (more or less) on a punctual schedule.
I can look at the microwave clock in the kitchen and gauge whether I
have time to make myself some breakfast or not. Syncronicity. Movement.
Places to go. People to see. Too many things to do. Hectic. Frantic.
These were all the things I was ruminating over as I waited in the
cold January morning air, feeling saudades for the saner
pace of life in Brazil.
Imagine my complete confusion and momentary
disorientation when the bus came, and as I boarded (being first in line),
the bus driver says: "Bom dia!" and then adds
(assuming, I guess that neither I nor my fellow passangers behind me
would know): "that's `Good Morning' in
Portuguese."
Yes... yes it is... é mesmo.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Friday, January 07,
2005
at 18:53
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Will Duquette has released Ramble version 0.1. Binaries are available for Macintosh OS X
and Windows, as well as a tclkit.
Ramble is a retro tile-based aventure game Will is programming for his
kids to play, in my favorite programming language, that he is also using
as an opportunity to write a series of essays,
The Ramble
Chronicles, which explore issues behind the design and programming
of tile-based games.
The first time I played, I lost. I won on my second try. Give
Ramble a try and see how you do.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 08,
2005
at 15:04
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Came across Neel Krishnaswami's Lexicon role-playing game today. Here
is his introduction:
The basic idea is that each player takes on the role of a scholar, from
before scholarly pursuits became professionalized (or possibly after they
ceased to be). You are cranky, opinionated, prejudiced and eccentric. You
are also collaborating with a number of your peers—the other
players—on the construction of an encyclopedia describing some historical
period (possibly of a fantastic world).
The game has twenty-six turns (one for each letter of the alphabet).
Read Neel's
article for a full description of his original rules, but here is my
summary of them:
| Entry |
Cite |
| 1st | — | A, | Cite: | | two entries B-Z |
| 2nd | — | B, | Cite: | one A entry | & | two entries C-Z |
| 3rd | — | C, | Cite: | one entry A-B | & | two entries D-Z |
| 4th | — | D, | Cite: | one entry A-C | & | two entries E-Z |
| : | | : | etc. |
|---|
| 23rd | — | W, | Cite: | one entry A-V | & | two entries X-Z |
| 24th | — | X, | Cite: | one entry A-W | & | two entries Y-Z |
| 25th | — | Y, | Cite: | two entries A-X | & | one Z entry |
| 26th | — | Z, | Cite: | three entries A-Y | |
- Each scholar writes one entry each turn (beginning with an A on the first, and a Z on the last) of approximately 100-200 words, citing # of other entries (either previously written or yet to be written).
- It is an "academic sin" for a scholar to cite an entry he has written (or write one that she has cited).
- For each new letter, B thru Z, any previously cited entries must be written.
- A scholar may disagree with his colleagues interpretations or conclusions, but must accept their basic facts.
Probably best played on a private Wiki, in-person, or via email. Sounds like it could be a lot of fun with the right group of people...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 08,
2005
at 20:32
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For a lot of people, Usenet is dead—rendered useless by spam
(much as I find my personal email is becoming). However, there are still
groups, such as comp.lang.tcl and
comp.text.tex that
are still vibrant and alive.
Last night I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the
LaTeX
memoir class formatted poetic verse with a different amount of
trailing vertical whitespace (by default) than the stock book
class.
Finally in desperation
I posted to
comp.text.tex, and by today
Dan
Luecking of the University of
Arkansas had posted a reply outlining what line to edit in the
memoir class source code to correct a very obscure bug
that I'd been tripping over, and also explaining the reason for the
buggy behavior (which his change fixes—Thank You Dan!).
Incidentally, the memoir manual's first few chapters
are a superb tutorial on the art of book design. I suggest anyone
even remotely interested in the subject give it a read even if they'd probably
never use LaTeX for typesetting.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 11,
2005
at 22:14
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I've been looking at Asterisk this
week—even before
the Asterisk
story on /. today.
At work I've built a fairly sophisticated online survey/research tool.
Just last fall we used it to conduct various customer-related research
projects that in the past we'd have paid an outside research firm on the
order of $300,000 to do.
I've been thinking of how to broaden our reach. We can conduct customer
satisfaction surveys online only of those customers who are online—which
admittedly is most, but not all. And even among those who have internet access
a web-based survey might not appeal to them because they don't like
hitting [Submit] repeatedly or something.
Certainly not the only company that conducts customer satisfaction surveys
by phone, but I was reminded this week that
The Olive Garden restaraunts
give some randomly selected subsection of their customers a 1-800 and a
"survey code". If the customer calls in and completes the automated phone
survey they'll get a coupon for a free dessert they can use on their next
visit.
I'm especially intrigued of the possibilities because there are
ways to program Asterisk in Tcl.
One of Tcl's great strengths as a programming language is that you can
develop working functional prototypes very rapidly. So it would be easy
to experiment with a lot of different approachs in short order.
Cade points out that for less than $200 you can get
some hardware
to start playing with...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 12,
2005
at 18:51
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Benoit Clairoux has a very interesting collection of
soft drink cans
from around the world.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 12,
2005
at 20:35
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At work today Jack Lyon, one of our editors, was asking questions
about LaTeX and what I'd
had to do to use something other than Computer Modern
to typeset the book I've been working on.
Somewhere in my googling & reading various tutorials and books
I learned that I could use Palatino simply by adding
\usepackage{pxfonts} to my LaTeX document's preamble.
Since Palatino is a good book typeface
I decided to use it and avoid
purchasing a font for now.
Since I'm still in the early stage of learning (La)TeX I didn't know
what to tell Jack to do in order to be able to use any arbitrary (postscript)
font. Using Google I found these instructions that look to be good guides:
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 13,
2005
at 20:45
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In a thread on comp.lang.tcl
Joe English had
this to say:
Mark Twain is reported to have said "There are three kinds of
lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics". He would have listed
a fourth kind, except that programming language benchmarks
hadn't been invented yet.
While Damon Courtney writes:
You know the one thing that never gets faster? Me. My time is precious.
I don't have the time to write 100 lines of Java when I can do it in 10 or
less lines of Tcl.
My time is too—since I'm not paid by the hour.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 15,
2005
at 19:47
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A book I've been reading, A Sideways Look at Time, makes
reference, briefly, to "Marchetti's Constant":
Ceasere Marchetti, a Venetian physicist plotted what is called Marchetti's
Constant, which argues that from Neolithic times to medieval and to the modern
age, the time spent travelling by people each day has remained at a fairly
constant one and a half hours; and though this time stays the same, the
distance travelled has expanded dramatically...
A google search for "Marchetti's Constant" (currently) only turns up one
article ("Why we're reaching our limit as a one-hour city" in the Sydney Morning Herald, April 2004).
I'm curious to read Marchetti's study, but haven't been able to find
it (or much information about it) on the web. It might be
"Anthropological
Invariants in Travel Behaviour", but
no electronic version is available, so it's hard to say for sure.
And, while you can apparently order a reprint from the foregoing link,
the order form doesn't say how much it costs (so I'm a bit leery to fill
it out with my credit card information).
Google finds a dozen documents referencing this paper
(mostly PDFs).
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 15,
2005
at 21:29
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Will has
released Ramble
v0.2. I spent some time showing Meghan, Caleb & Jacob how to play
it last night. Even though some of their friends have xbox or Nintendos
they are open-minded enough to be enthralled by the "retro" graphics.
Since Jacob isn't old enough to read yet, and Caleb's still learning (Meghan
is already reading several grade-levels ahead of most kids her age), I decided
to hack in speech synthesis via the OS X
TclSpeech package. I discovered
Will had some experimental code already stubbed in for speech, so I just
fleshed that out some and sent him my patches.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 17,
2005
at 10:46
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Meghan wants me to help her make some crossword & word search puzzles
from a list of words she prepares. (For example, names of US states, though
her list is only up to fourty-four—not sure which six she is missing
yet.)
While there are a lot of shareware programs to produce puzzles, I figure
I'll enjoy it more if I learn how to create my own. A pretty basic (read
naive) approach for placing words seems like it will be quite
easy to implement, though I imagine there are semi-sophisticated algorithms
for doing it fast and for producing the highest quality arrangements.
I'll need to do some research in this area.
Here are three different TeX packages that simplify the typesetting
of crosswords:
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 17,
2005
at 13:35
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I'm seriously surprised that there aren't already people
in my neighborhood doing food groups (aka food swaps)...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 17,
2005
at 14:44
518 comments
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The Modesto Bee
(California) newspaper has an eye-opening and touching
story about Gianna Jessen who survived her
mother's third-trimester attempt to abort her 27 years ago.
(Via Open Book.)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 17,
2005
at 20:06
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eBay and Amazon are both advertising great prices on new & used
orphans, corpses, assassins, etc.—get all of
the details on
Jeff Lindsay's Sanity Defense
blog. Mormons are also for sale on eBay.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 17,
2005
at 20:32
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There is a good article in the inaugural issue of the
Free Software Magazine
entitled "Every Engineer's Checklist for Justifying
Free Software."
[I]t seems that the only reason managers want free software is because it is free (as in free of costs). Thats not a good reason in itself: in the long run there are compelling reasons that robust, mission critical infrastructure software should be made free software.
My manager at my present employer wants justifications other than
"the cost is free," so this checklist will come in handy.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 19,
2005
at 23:21
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An off-topic thread on the rec.puzzles newsgroup got steered back on topic with an ObPuzzle: "Are there
other books where the complete story takes place in less than 24 hours?"
After returning from Brazil, and back in college, I read Josue Montello's
novel, Os Tambores de São Luis ("The Drums of St. Louis").
Though the narrative arc covers several hundred years of history, the actual
time elapsed is from one night to early the next morning, circa 1915.
This is one book I've always wished I owned (I checked it out of
the library as a student).
I wish there was an English translation—I'd recommend it to all my
friends if there were.
I found the book again tonight on a Brazilian
Amazon-like website. The ISBN is 8520902871.
I used isbn.nu to see if it
happened to be available via any US booksellers, but it wasn't.
The price is R$67,00. At current exchange rates
that'd be just under US$25.00, which is a reasonable price for a book of
this length. Guess I better look into what Submarino's shipping rates
are...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 20,
2005
at 00:38
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Looking for vapid mission statements or HR propaganda announcements?
Save the money you would otherwise spend on a consultant and
use this software
instead.
A few examples:
- We have committed to work towards synthesizing communities and extending our schemas as part of a larger strategy to produce more benefits for our workers.
- We resolve to continue towards competently innovating our vertical perspectives and engaging forward-thinking partnerships in order to take over the nation.
- Our task is to execute a strategic plan involving cleverly embracing multilevel partnerships and sharply deploying our e-solutions.
Also available: buzzword bingo cards.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 20,
2005
at 13:13
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My personal favorite programming language, Tcl/Tk, is sometimes
criticized for not being or having "one true way" of doing Object
Oriented Programming.
Tcl is such a more flexibile language than most (simillar in this
respect to Lisp) in allowing the programmer to define his own control
structures to fit the needs at hand (even so far as enabling
radical language modifications).
There isn't just one way to do OOP in Tcl, there are
lots of ways.
Personally I quite like Will's
snit, and
XOTcl.
But, anyway, back to the topic at hand. Tcl sometimes gets flamed
for either not having any OO-abilities (that are "built-in"), or for having
too many. Seems a lot of people just want there to be one way to do
something—which is a constraint that doesn't naturally fit well with
a language that gives you so much power, freedom and flexibility.
I've started reading Lambda
the Ultimate ("The Programming Languages Weblog") and a
comment to a recent article linked to an essay,
Why OO
Sucks which begins:
When I was first introduced to the idea of OOP I was skeptical but didn't know why - it just felt "wrong". After its introduction OOP became very popular (I will explain why later) and criticising OOP was rather like "swearing in church". OOness became something that every respectable language just had to have.
As Erlang became popular we were often asked "Is Erlang OO" - well, of course the true answer was "No of course not" - but we didn't to say this out loud - so we invented a serious of ingenious ways of answering the question that were designed to give the impression that Erlang was (sort of) OO (If you waved your hands a lot) but not really (If you listened to what we actually said, and read the small print carefully).
At this point I am reminded of the keynote speech of the then boss of IBM in France who addressed the audience at the 7th IEEE Logic programming conference in Paris. IBM prolog had added a lot of OO extensions, when asked why he replied: Our customers wanted OO prolog so we made OO prolog
I remember thinking "how simple, no qualms of conscience, no soul-searching, no asking "Is this the right thing to do" ...
The rest of the article is an interesting rant to read. I personally
believe OOP is over-hyped, and that too much of the world thinks that OOP means
(just) the type of OO available in Java or C++, but that it is (like other
methodologies) a good tool to have in the toolbox. Tcl just allows me to
have a whole bunch of OO-tools in the toolbox, not just one.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 20,
2005
at 23:29
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A friend & coworker, Rose, has solved (off-the clock I'm sure), all but
a half dozen of the 32,000 FreeCell games. It turns out 29,999 of them are solvable.
Only game # 11,982 is not solvable. So Rose has five more to figure out still.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 22,
2005
at 14:36
4491 comments
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Common sense tells us that learning something (non-trivial) takes
both time and practice. Yet walk into a bookstore which sells computer
books and you'll see lots of books that purport to teach you how to
program in this language, or all about that buzzword.
I suspect authors and publishers are catering to people who want
to get rich quick. If I can learn Java in 24-hours, and hiring managers
have a Java-buzzword prerequisite, then by shelling out $49.95 I can
be on the path to a fabulous & wealthy career in a weekend.
Peter Norvig has written
an excellent essay exploring this phenomenon (you don't, he notes, find books
about "how to learn dog grooming in a few days"). I recommend anyone
interested in programming or computers to read
"Teach Yourself Programming
in Ten Years."
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 22,
2005
at 16:36
409 comments
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I've found two new books I'd really like to own that I've added to
my wishlist:
Both come highly recommended from various contributors to the
Lambda the Ultimate blog.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Saturday, January 22,
2005
at 22:40
401 comments
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This evening Becca told me
about
Heimskringla
or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by the
medieval historian Snorri Sturluson (ca. 1179–1241).
We're distantly descended from Olaf Haraldson, hence her interest.
Looks like quite interesting reading.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 23,
2005
at 23:06
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Ramble version 0.3
is out. Will's added quite a few new features (in addition to the speech synthesis support on OS X), so check it out.
As usual Windows starpacks are available (a single file install for all the
unwashed masses ;-) and as a .App disk-image for all the enlightened OS X
users. Everybody else can get a
tclkit version
for their OS.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 23,
2005
at 23:16
581 comments
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Andrew was sick today, so rather than taking him with us to Church
this morning, Shauna had me stay home with him (I'm sure the parents of
other nursery-age children would thank us if they knew of my selfless
sacrifice to spare their children the germs ;-).
While perusing the
rec.puzzles
newsgroup this morning, I found the
2680 challenge posted
by The Last Danish Pastry.
The question deals with this text file containing 2,680 lines. Each line lists five
integers between 0 and 244. The question is whether it is possible to
select just forty-nine lines from the file such that all 245 numbers between
0 and 244 are included in the result.
Now, a little bit of basic arithmetic shows that in picking 49 lines,
which each contain five numbers, we'll end up with a total of 245 numbers (49 x 5 = 245).
Since we need to have each of the 245 numbers included in our
results, we obviously cannot ever repeat any number—each of the
49 lines selected must not share even so much as a single number with any
of the other selected lines.
Just looking at the file there is obviously structure to it. I
spent some time analyzing the frequency with which each of the numbers
between 0 and 244 appears and discovered (independently) the same
information that Patrick Hamlyn posted.
My algorithm (running in the background—and all the CPU crunching
is heating up my lap!) goes like this:
- recursively select possible line combinations
- discard all lines that share a number in common with the selected lines
- backtrack as early as we can when:
- run out of further lines to check (and haven't selected 49)
- or, when we eliminate all the lines containing some number not already on a selected line (that would leave us with an unfillable gap)
The search space for a naive-recursion search is huge! What I'm not
(yet) sure about, is whether my checks to backtrack early
(avoiding persuing hopeless combinations to their ultimate depth) cuts
the search space enough to make a solution practically feasible or not.
The fiendish detail to all this is that The Last Danish Pastry (the
original poster) doesn't even know if a solution exists! So this could
be a wild-goose chase completely.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 23,
2005
at 23:28
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Shauna's paternal grandmother, Allie Arnold Christensen, passed away 11:20 PM last Friday, just 24 hours & 40 minutes before
her ninety-first birthday. Her funeral will be tomorrow.
Though we'll miss her now, the knowledge that
families can
be together forever brings us comfort and peace.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 24,
2005
at 10:18
391 comments
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The irony here is just too rich.
Netcraft is reporting that
SCO is only just now, ten months late, releasing patches to an
OpenSSL vulnerability on UnixWare. (In comparison most major
Linux distributions and the *BSD's had patches out within a day—or
less—of disclosure of the vulnerability.)
My favorite line in
the article is this: "Our January
Secure Server Survey found only 70 SSL-enabled sites running on SCO Unix."
Considering SCO's propensity to sue
their own customers I am surprised there are even 70 SSL-enabled UnixWare
sites left on the Internet.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 24,
2005
at 18:36
396 comments
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Yesterday I blogged about the
Heimskringla
and mentioned that I was a distant descendant from Olaf Haraldson (aka
Saint Olaf).
Becca provided me with the line today, and by my calculations Olaf would be
one (or more) of my (more famous) 8,589,934,592 thirty-second
great-grandfathers.
- Dean Cleverly (father, 1949–)
- Dorothy Batt (grandmother, 1915–1982)
- Hazel Jane Lee (great-grandmother, 1894–1993)
- Orrin Strong Lee, Jr. (2nd great-grandfather, 1862–1948)
- Orrin Strong Lee, Sr. (1835–1919)
- Dr. Ezekiel Lee (1795–1877)
- Rhoda Keith (1768–1854)
- Martha Littlefield (1750–1836)
- Rebecca Williams (b. 1715)
- Josiah Williams (1692–1770)
- Benjamin Williams (b. 1651)
- Frances Deighton (b. 1611)
- Jane Bassett (1584–1634)
- Elizabeth Lygon (b. 1562)
- Elizabeth Berkley (b. 1512)
- Elizabeth (Isabel) Dennis (b. 1485)
- Ann Berkley (b. 1474)
- Maruice de Berkley (d. 1506)
- Lord James de Berkley (ca. 1394–1424)
- James Berkley (d. 1405)
- Sir Maurice Berkley (1330–1368)
- Margaret Mortimer (1308–1337)
- Joan de Greneville (ca. 1285–1356)
- Sir Piers de Geneville (d. 1292)
- Sir Geoffrey de Geneville (1236–1314)
- Beatrice d'Auxonne
- Beatrice de Chalons
- Beatrice of Germany
- Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of Germany
- Judith, Duchess of Swabia (ca. 1101–1131)
- Wulfhild, Duchess of Baveria (ca. 1075–1126)
- Magnus, Duke of Saxony (ca. 1045–1106)
- Ulfhild, Princess of Norway (b. 1020)
- (Saint) Olaf Harldson, King of Norway (ca. 995–1030)
Updated February
26th to include timeframes for each ancestor, where known.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 24,
2005
at 19:02
453 comments
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Patrick Finnegan points to various example Windows SysAdmin tools
written using Tcl and the TWAPI
extension that he has contributed to
ActiveState's
Tcl
Cookbook.
TWAPI is a great extension, and Patrick's examples look like useful
examples to study.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 25,
2005
at 00:53
115910 comments
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A Bird's Eye View has
a post up about an
email
going around detailing the [purported] 2004 Stella Award winners.
Sadly they do all sound quite plausible considering the litigious society
we live in.
While there are Stella Awards
(for 2002 &
2003), the 2004
awards haven't yet been published (but will be sometime on or before
February 1, 2005).
StellaAwards.com claims
that the cases listed in the email circulating the Internet are
bogus
urban legends.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 25,
2005
at 18:25
402 comments
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Sunday I blogged about the pathalogical
2680 challenge. Risto Lankinen
identified the true nature of the problem as:
This is a well-obfuscated way of asking if 5x7x7 box can be packed with
the F-pentomino. To see what is an F-pentomino, convert any line of the
text file into base-7 and plot the (three) resultant 7:ary digits in 3D.
There are 2680 orientations of an F-pentomino within a 5x7x7 box, and a
quick (sample-based) check suggests that they are all represented in the
text file. Selecting a set of 49 non-overlapping integer lines hence is
equivalent to finding a set of 49 F-pentominoes that fill the box.
Quick scan of the net indicates that this may be an open problem in the
art of packing theory...
In case (like me) you don't know what an F-pentomino is, the
Wikipedia entry on
Pentaminoes has explanations and images.
The original poster, "The Last Danish Pastry,"
confessed that Risto had spotted what he was really asking, and that
he'd hoped that posing the question in the way he did might
lead to the discovery of new approaches to this open problem
in packing theory.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 25,
2005
at 18:59
399 comments
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Salvatore ("antirez")
Sanfilippo explains what he thinks are the
advantages of Tcl over Lisp.
I agree with him on every point mentioned, though I do hope Tcl
someday gets automatic
tail-call optimizations, proper
lambas, and
first class continuations.
(Feather perhaps?)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 26,
2005
at 19:29
400 comments
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A terrible accident occured this morning when a
suicidal man left his SUV parked on the tracks in front of a commuter train
in Los Angeles.
The man "changed his mind" and got out (safely) in time, but
ten people onboard the train were killed.
Police Chief Randy Adams is quoted as saying that "the [SUV's] driver
is in custody, and police will charge him with 10 counts of murder."
Perhaps this will be a (failed) case of attempted suicide that might
lead to a death-penalty conviction?
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 26,
2005
at 19:43
392 comments
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I've been slowly working my way through A Gentle Introduction to Haskell and
find that a lot of it is actually making sense to me.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 26,
2005
at 19:58
399 comments
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Shauna's bookclub is meeting tonight at our house to discuss
John
Grisham's
Skipping Christmas. She wanted me to see if there
were any lists of discussion questions I could find online for her.
I went to Google expecting to find something relavent...
Do a Google query on
"skipping christmas" "book club" questions. As of
today, five of the top ten results are from:
- ooipkro.ru
- ribolovam.ru
- wickedtoys.ru
- belkhp.ru
- topnavigator.ru
Amazon.com's product page on the book doesn't
even make the first page of results.
Let's try
a slightly more specific query and with a
-site:.ru to get rid of the Russian sites. There are sixteen
results. Some .com friends of our Russian .ru sites show
up:
Each of the aforementioned websites, when you link through to them,
redirect you to buy-traffic.net. (I'm not linking directly to avoid
helping their Google PageRank in any way.) The destination page
on buy-traffic.net lists a number of affiliate links to
various online merchants.
At the bottom of the buy-traffic.net page is a copyright notice of
SearchMeUp.com Inc. That website, in its footer next to
it's contact link points to umaxlogin.com for it's
"affiliate program."
umaxlogin.com purports to offer "the highest paying solution
for your search traffic." Their "contact us" page lists (soley) a yahoo.com
email address.
A whois lookup of
searchmeup.com is registered to
a company in Seychelles (a group of islands in the Indian ocean northeast
of Madagascar, according to the CIA World Fact Book).
buy-traffic.net, meanwhile, is registered to a
Javon Lockley, who ostensibly lives in Muskegon, Michigan.
umaxlogin.com is registered to a company in Cyrpus.
A little research turns up The Russian Institute for Public Networks Whois Service. All
the Russian sites listed above are "Corporate" sites registered by one
Eduard P Mashkin.
The two .com's,
adnaver.com &
artnetcn.com, are
(at the time of this writing) mysteriously missing their "registrarname"
attribute, so no information is available. Very very strange, no?
Quite the global little group, all working together, no doubt,
persuing the holy grail of search engine optimization.
I hope Google fights back and bans all these websites from their
search results. They are obviously feeding the GoogleBot different
content and redirecting all the unsuspecting web searchers to their
partner sites for their own pecuniary gain.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, January 27,
2005
at 19:30
1208 comments
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Many of the blogs I read tend to be devoted to one, sometimes two,
themes. I don't pretend to have experienced enough of the
blogosphere to know whether this is generally the case or
not.
I haven't found a single theme yet. And I don't know that I'm even
looking or trying. My interests are too varied.
Some of the things I'm interested in:
- programming & programming languages
- legal issues (even though I chose not to attend law school after college)
- self-publishing & print-on-demand technology
- typesetting (TeX & LaTeX!)
- computer security
- the study of time (and how different cultures approach the passage of time differently)
- entrepreneurship & small-business
I'm also interested in politics, religion, and family, but to date I've
decided largely to keep those areas private from my online life.
So basically lacking a cohesive overriding theme, this blog exists
for me to record and share my thoughts and findings in the ecclectic
mix of stuff that I enjoy.
In that regards, I feel my objective is simillar to
Kevin Walzer's—I'm
doing
what I want.
I haven't enabled comments on this blog. Why?
- It eliminates the nuisance and clutter with having to deal with spammers
- I wouldn't want to stare everyday at a bunch of "0 comments" links
(how depressing!)
In the unlikely event that anyone reads this blog and would like to
comment on something, email works. The best address to use is:
cleverly
@
gmail.com.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Sunday, January 30,
2005
at 14:13
592 comments
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"The day
after," an essay definitely worth reading today from this
Iraqi blog.
(Via Kevin
Walzer)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 31,
2005
at 11:37
1300 comments
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I came across reference to the Anhenreihe system today, which I previously wasn't familliar with.
This system assigns a unique number to each ancestor.
The cool (to me) feature—which isn't explained in the
Anhenreihe Wikipedia article—is
that if you write the Anhenreihe number in binary it trivially
encodes the generational relationships all the way back to the
n-th ancestor.
The first digit is always a 1. It represents the child. Then,
tracing backwards to the parent, then grandparents, and so forth, a
0 represents a father, and a 1 a mother.
By my calcuations, the Ahnenreihe number for my relation to
St. Olaf is 23,865,465,306.
In binary that number is 10110001110011111100001100111011010, which
can be then be read in English: St. Olaf is
my father's mother's mother's father's father's father's mother's mother's mother's father's father's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's father's father's father's father's mother's mother's father's father's mother's mother's mother's father's mother's mother's father's mother's father.
Got that?
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 31,
2005
at 20:38
401 comments
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