I doubt Dan remembers, but at one point last summer whilst blissfully engaged in much hanging out, he mentioned to me the "four fours" problem. Essentially, you try and make all the natural numbers using only four fours and some mathematical operators.

Caveat: Actually, it wasn't until I started typing this entry that I bothered to look up the " ( Read more... )

> for f in `perl -e '$, = " "; print split /:/, $ENV{PATH};'`; do find $f | grep 'somecmd'; done

In other news, for those of you for whom the above is not complete gibberish. There has got to be a better way to do this. All I am trying to do is find all the commands in my path with a certain substring. One might think this would be a job for ( Read more... )

So, umm, ya. I can stop anytime I want. Really... No! No! Don't you dare take that away... *struggles*

In other news, I have been spending a little teeny weeny bit of my free time playing Planarity. You may recall my last post claiming that I have beaten levels 10-14. Well, after playing for a little while, I got past that. Below are the screen ( Read more... )

I think Planarity might give Minesweeper a run for its money as my personal favorite mindless clicky game. Really truly spectacular. I am so glad that I did not discover this game while at work ( Read more... )

Alright, maybe my second ...

while (<>) { push @{$ws_count{+split}}, $_; }

while (($num, $words) = each %ws_count)
{
print "\n----- \#$num -----\n\n";
foreach (@$words) { print; }
}

Though honestly, the first line is the impressive bit, the rest is just nice output formatting ( Read more... )

The long-awaited quantum mafia features are finally implemented! (As an added bonus, they appear to be bug-free).

For those of you who don't obsess over quantum mafia (oh wait, that is everyone except me), those features were:

• As a solution to the "people won't take their turn" problem ( Read more... )

This only applies to people who play Quantum Mafia.

Quantum Mafia Feedback!

Certain dissidents have voiced concerns over the game balance of quantum mafia. Needless to say, those with such moribund temerity have been ruthlessly expunged.

Seriously though, I don't want there to be one obvious winning ( Read more... )

This is only relevant to those playing (or wishing to play) a quantum mafia game. Apparently, with the changing of the MuddCS webserver, my quantum mafia website broke. I went and talked to Tim about it earlier today, and a few symlinks later the website is once again fully operational. (Where "fully" is relatively defined. Though, no bug reports ( Read more... )

In the fine tradition of product releases in the dead of night, I give you ...

Online Quantum Mafia

The History
I have had the idea to make an online implementation of Quantum Mafia for a while now. There was a failed attempt in the summer of ought-3. Of course, back then I was using C and trying to parse things from input files. It was doomed to ( Read more... )

As some of you already know, I am interviewing at Google this weekend, which, I must say is at once intimidating and exciting. But do not rejoice too soon, your respite from my presence ends on Saturday. (Of course, my biggest complaint thus far has been the lack of rock climbing ( Read more... )