These guys are my new favorite:For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced ( Read more... )

Here's a library of Python decorators. I particularly like the extra coat of meta on the first one.

This is sort of a followon to yesterday's shell functions/dc post (the relevant tab was enqueued while trying to figure out the dc hex input thing). I'm sure some of you have seen RSA in 3 lines of perl before. Reading through the commented version is worthwhile, though, if you haven't previously spent the time. I don't think I understand the inner ( Read more... )

float InvSqrt (float x) {
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}This function appears in the Quake 3 source. It's reportedly about four times faster than 1.0/sqrt(x). There's a paper on how it works, and whence the magic number. Wow. (Link ( Read more... )

My magstripe apartment keycard is now also a UCLA CS barcode swipe card :D

to 131.179.192.163.80 trace.txt | grep S | src | ip | sort | uniq -c | awk '{print $2 "." $1}' | sort -t. -n -k1,1 -k2,2 -k3,3 -k4,4 | sed -r 's/\.([0-9]+)$/ \1/' | awk '{print $2 "\t" $1}'

to, src, and ip are aliases to make parsing tcpdump output easier. The second sort sorts IP addresses properly (bytewise). The rest is hackery to make the ( Read more... )