time warner not the problem?
Mood: contemplative
Posted on 2007-10-25 10:49:00
Tags: referrer
Words: 110

So after I went and badmouthed Time Warner it looks like our router might be at fault, as three times in the last 24 hours our connection was down, I rebooted just our router, and things then worked. Time for a Fry's trip, hopefully to find a 802.11n-compatible router that will solve all our problems.

Most of my referrer logs these days are fairly straightforward (and I don't pay as much attention), but I saw a good one this morning: pictures of abs on MSN search leads to my Pretty Pictures through Genetic Algorithms (since a few examples there use the "abs" function :-) )

(this set's icon for contemplative - also inappropriate)

2 comments

video tour of our apartment
Mood: thoughtful
Posted on 2007-10-24 14:38:00
Words: 21

Here's a video tour of our apartment I took with my mom's Flip Video.

(this set's icon for thoughtful is inappropriate)

0 comments

house-buying tips
Mood: chipper
Posted on 2007-10-23 14:50:00
Tags: house
Words: 162

It is gorgeous weather outside!

Since our apartment will be converting into condominiums at some point in the undetermined-yet-apparently-not-too-distant future, we're looking into buying a house. (or at least pricing houses so we can compare, but more likely actually buying a house) Obviously we've never done this before, but here's what we think we know:

- Rough estimate of size, location (north of here but not too far), and dollar amounts that we're happy to spend and able to spend. I've checked on trulia and they seem reasonable enough.
- A list of things about the house that are important (storage space, etc., etc.)
- ???

You'll notice this is not a long list. Do we start with a buyer of some sort and tell them this and have them suggest houses to look at? Do we talk to the bank first about a mortgage or is that after we have a house in mind? What other important questions don't I even know to ask? Help!

17 comments

shirts I want, internet options
Mood: okay
Posted on 2007-10-23 10:46:00
Tags: cluesolver
Words: 211

Dumbledore is gay! And shirts to match.

I still want this WiFi detector shirt but I feel a little bad spending money when none's coming in yet.

Speaking of computer stuff, we have Internet through Time Warner and it seems to go down reasonably often. But not really down - often just resetting the cable modem will restore things to normal. Hence my idea for a robot that can detect when I can't reach the Internet (easy) and reset the cable modem (hard unless there's some software way to do it, which I doubt).

So I looked into alternatives. Grande Communications doesn't recognize our address, AT&T/SBC/Yahoo/whatever DSL doesn't service our address, and Verizon DSL (I hate Verizon because of how difficult it was to cancel local phone service in MD, but whatever) finds a lot of different streets named Austin (our street is Austin Center Blvd) in various cities around here even though I put in the freaking zip code. GG verizon. So I guess we're stuck until I build a robot or someone reminds me of some other company I forgot.

Very stuck on simulations in clue solver, going to try to let it go for a few days and come back to it. Frustrating because I'm so close to done.

1 comment

insomnia
Mood: awake
Music: Lager Rhythms - "MLK" (IMH)
Posted on 2007-10-22 01:41:00
Tags: logic cluesolver
Words: 649

So for the second time in a week I find myself unable to sleep. I would be more worried except that (as a mostly-awake djedi pointed out) we slept until 1 today, so it's not too surprising.

As long as I'm up, some thoughts on the clue solver:

In general it's coming along very nicely. The reason we slept until 1 today is that we stayed up late with quijax and wildrice13 playing Clue and watching the movie Clue, which was great fun. Point being, I got two games of data (in which I wrote down all my cards and every suggestion made) to test it on. After actually making the effort to enter an entire game (eating my own dogfood!) I found that it did technically work. Oh, except I entered one entry wrong the first time and I had no idea until I got to the end and didn't get the right result. So now there's undo and a history tab showing every piece of information that has been entered. That makes things a lot less painful.

An deduction algorithm problem: You often have information of the form "Player 1 has at least one of the cards {Professor Plum, Knife, Lounge}" (from observing someone else's suggestion). Now that I'm requiring the user to enter how many cards each player has, so you can do some nifty inferences from that. For example, if you know Player 1 has two cards and has at least one card from each of the following sets:

{Professor Plum, Knife, Hall}
{Professor Plum, Candlestick, Conservatory}
{Professor Plum, Revolver, Dining Room}

you can deduce that Player 1 must have the Professor Plum card. The way I'm currently making deductions like this is to, for each card, assume that they don't have it and see if there's any way to satisfy all of the sets given the number of cards they have. In this case, they can't, so by contradiction they must have the Professor Plum card.

This is all well and good, but this algorithm doesn't cover more tricky things you can do. For example, if Player 1 has two cards and at least one from each of the following sets:

{Professor Plum, Knife, Hall}
{Professor Plum, Knife, Conservatory}
{Professor Plum, Knife, Dining Room}

we can deduce using similar logic that Player 1 must have Professor Plum or Knife, but the algorithm above doesn't pick up on that. In this particular application we're OK because if we ever determine that Player 1 doesn't have Knife, we remove it from all the sets above and then can figure out she has Professor Plum, but it's an interesting problem in general. (it's kind of like finding a vertex covering of a generalized graph where the vertices are the cards and the "edges" are the sets)


Anyway, the other major feature that's left is doing simulations to determine the probability of players holding certain cards. (for example, if Player 1 had three cards and the first three clauses, it's pretty likely that she has Professor Plum even though it's not guaranteed) I was going to take a stab at this tonight but I'm losing steam. My idea is to iterate over all possible solutions, and do 500 trials per solution (or whatever). For each trial, somehow assign the cards to each player, making sure that we give them the ones we know they have and not to give them the ones we know they don't have (doing this without somehow biasing the results is the hard part it seems), then seeing if that distribution of cards conforms to everything we know about. (i.e. the clauses above) If so, record that, and if not, throw it out. But you can't keep trying until you get the same number for every solution, because that biases the results.

If anyone is more clearheaded about this last paragraph, let me know :-)

0 comments

Theorycrafting: upgrades from Kara
Mood: excited
Posted on 2007-10-18 11:31:00
Tags: math theorycraft worldofwarcraft
Words: 181

Since my last set of calculations, I've gotten a lot of upgrades, and so I'm wondering what's left out of Kara that I want. Here's an updated list (including all gear from Kara since it's basically on farm status), using my mage DPS calculator:

0 comments

lapping it up
Mood: content
Posted on 2007-10-17 15:01:00
Tags: mac computer cluesolver
Words: 180

I got a laptop! It's a 17" MacBook Pro and it's pretty sweet. I was feeling kinda blah yesterday, partially from guilt with spending money when we haven't started working yet, partially from the lousy overcast weather, and partially from not quite knowing what to do with myself. Obviously in two weeks when we're working I'll long for these days of endless free time, but it's kinda like when you're cold you can't imagine what it feels like to be hot, and vice versa.

But I can't stay grumpy for like in the face of new toys, so I'm feeling better. Been setting up stuff, got WoW and Ventrilo installed (I can push to talk now!), and I'm feeling more in the mood to work on the clue solver - right now I'm adding the ability to gain information by knowing how many cards each player has.

Hope everyone's having a nice week. Has anyone seen any good movies lately? We'd like to see something at the Alamo Drafthouse but I've heard very little about what's playing. Also, Netflix is fun.

1 comment

segway tour!
Mood: tired
Posted on 2007-10-14 21:37:00
Tags: pictures
Words: 20

My mom's in town and we went on a Segway tour of Austin. Here are my pictures of said event.

1 comment

remotes, registration, etc.
Mood: thankful
Posted on 2007-10-11 14:54:00
Tags: links
Words: 547

Today, as djedi mentioned, was all things DPS-ish. Last night before bed I made a list of stuff we needed - thank goodness we didn't need proof of address unlike our fun experience in MD. Got going late as usual - first up was the Travis County Tax Office (hi Nelda Wells Spears!) to transfer the title and register our cars. Got there, signed in and were seen within a minute(!), and the people were friendly and helpful and knew what they were doing. I even registered to vote (although I'm not sure it'll be ready before the TX constitutional amendments election in November) at the same time!

Since that went so quickly, we stopped by Wendy's and had lunch - I had a delicious yogurt with granola as a side item. If that's an option to replace fries it'll make it easy to avoid fries in the future. Then on to the driver's license office on Lamar. There was a little line for check-in, but the guy at the desk was pretty amazing. He was kinda brusque but very fast and knew exactly what you needed for stuff. When we got to the front we showed him all our stuff and he gave us the form to fill out, then gave us a number when we returned them. Waited ten minutes for our number to be called and everything went fine.


Total time: 90 minutes including travel time and stopping for lunch. I cannot tell you how happy this makes me! Also, my car has Texas license plates again which is nice :-) (the Texas license plate is a lot more decorative and nice-looking than the Maryland one in my opinion)

We just bought djedi's sister's old TV off of her, and it's pretty nice - HD and all that jazz. We hooked the TiVo to the HDMI port so we can finally see our HD recordings in HD, which is pretty sweet. The problem is that you can switch between all the TV inputs with an A/V button (they don't have the original remote anymore but they have a generic-ish one that works) except the HDMI input. For that, you have to bring up the menu, scroll to the bottom, hit right, scroll to the bottom, and hit right again. And it doesn't stay in this mode when you turn it off and back on.

This is problematic, to say the least. That would bring us up to three remotes needed to watch TV! (TV remote, TiVo remote, and receiver remote to turn on the sound) Not to mention lots of annoying button pressing.

So after doing a little research I ordered a Logitech Harmony 670 universal remote. This thing is pretty darn cool. You set it up by running some software on the computer, telling it what equipment you have and what "activities" (watch TV, watch a DVD, play Wii, etc.) you want to set up and what the correct settings are and such. For the input problem I just had it add the extra five presses necessary whenever it goes into the "watch TV" activity. It is awesome. It's even a replacement for the TiVo remote, technically, although the buttons aren't quite as well laid out.

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks - thank you thank you thank you

0 comments

computer >> me
Mood: allergy-y
Posted on 2007-10-09 17:21:00
Tags: cluesolver
Words: 28

It's an encouraging sign when you write a new feature and try to test it and the test cases fail because you put the wrong expected result - twice!

0 comments

washing machine follies
Mood: irritated
Posted on 2007-10-09 12:11:00
Words: 23

This lack of a working washer is really crimping my clothes-wearing style. The earliest Sears can come out is 11 days from today.

5 comments

possibly the coolest shirt ever
Mood: geeky
Posted on 2007-10-08 16:08:00
Words: 3

Wi-Fi detecting shirt

0 comments

cluesolver, pictures
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2007-10-08 15:35:00
Tags: pictures cluesolver
Words: 106

Look, the subject is the same as the tags!

After my last post about putting the clue solver on hiatus, I couldn't get to sleep Saturday night so I got up, played a little WoW, and, in a flurry of inspiration, sketched out a clue solver GUI. It's not beautiful, but it seems relatively functional and easy to do with the GWT parts. I've coded up most of it and I'm on to writing the script interface functions and hooking it all together. This makes me a happy man!

I (at long last) have put up pictures from the trip down and a few random ones.

2 comments

my problem is...
Mood: mellow
Posted on 2007-10-05 23:51:00
Tags: cluesolver
Words: 240

Just kidding! (I have multiple problems, of course)

A problem of mine is that I can have trouble living in the moment. When I'm experiencing something I enjoy my thoughts wander to making the experience permanent somehow - buying a souvenir of a trip, arranging another get-together, buying the DVD when it comes out of a movie I'm watching. Even though I know a lot of the fun is tied up in the particular experience I'm having then (and watching a movie the second and third time is rarely as good as watching it the first), I naively try to capture it. Unfortunately, no DVD can capture the people I'm with, the anticipation of the event, the people I'm with. (except maybe Blu-ray?) And letting my thoughts wander in this direction can actually take away from the experience. Letting go and just realizing that I'm enjoying myself is worth the while.

I'm declaring a hiatus on clue solver work - every time I try to sit down and work on the UI I just can't. It's as bad as writing English papers back in college. If I were just trying to get it done I'd start over and do it in Javascript, but part of the point is learning about Google Web Toolkit. (I'm learning that I like and know Javascript better than Java, but oh well) Maybe I'll sketch out some mockups and pick it up in a week or so.

5 comments

netflix
Mood: happy
Posted on 2007-10-04 18:10:00
Words: 18

We joined Netflix - friend us! (especially wonderjess since I found other people from previous posts but not you)

3 comments

wireless dreaming
Mood: awake
Posted on 2007-10-04 10:49:00
Tags: dreams
Words: 136

Last night, as I was dreaming about being chased (or something), a thought occurred to me - wouldn't it be neat if you could dream over the Internet? It would require some way for your brain to directly connect to the local network (wirelessly, I'd assume...not many places in your body to stick an ethernet cable), and it would have to be able to interpret HTTP or some other protocol.

But think how cool it would be! You could have shared dreams with other people (would one person "host" the dream and determine what happens and the others just play a predetermined role? Or would every contribute to what happens through some complicated protocol?), and the server could record the dream so you could review it the next morning if you couldn't quite remember what had happened.

0 comments

clearing out tabs
Mood: okay
Posted on 2007-10-02 15:50:00
Tags: music links
Words: 106

Radiohead is releasing their new album on October 10. You can order a fancy disc set or download it from them and pay whatever you want for it(!), which is pretty exciting.

And on the topic of downloading music, Amazon opened their MP3 store, from which you can buy and download 2 million MP3 files, unencumbered by DRM. This is great stuff (information about the downloader, which doesn't work on Linux) and I'm planning on buying Radiohead's Amnesiac from them when I get around to it.

It's not happening here, but it's happening now - striking ad campaign by Amnesty International, in the style of transparent screens.

1 comment

nightbane down!
Mood: tired
Posted on 2007-10-01 10:56:00
Tags: worldofwarcraft cluesolver
Words: 332

The night started poorly with two people getting locked outside of Netherspite's room and people being kinda cranky in general. However, we downed him on the next attempt and killed the Prince after a few attempts. (oh, and the free loot from the Chess Event) We had grinded up our Thrallmar rep so we could run Heroic Shattered Halls and summon Nightbane for the first time.

Nightbane, despite what I read somewhere, is not about as hard as Prince - he (?) is much harder. The tricky parts for us caster DPS in the ground phase are mostly avoiding the Charred Earth (or moving out of it when it hits your spot) and trying to stay out of the AoE fear. The air phase is tough - we finally figured out to collapse on the tank, wait for the Rain of Bones, then move back to where we were standing and kill the skeletons, and stop doing anything when Nightbane lands to avoid pulling aggro (this happened a lot). Oh, and don't stand too far apart when killing the skeletons otherwise you get the Fireball barrage. The landing is definitely the trickiest part - at first we would always wipe on landing or shortly thereafter.

Anyway, on something around our 12th attempt (anyone have a more accurate count?) we finally got him. There were a few close calls before that - got him to 14% a few times before - so I had hope, but man is it tough.

I got two pieces of loot for the night (T4 helm and Jewel of Infinite Possibilities) so I'm pretty happy.

Finally got started working on the Clue Solver again and I made some progress on the GUI for once. Figuring out parts of the Google Web Toolkit - I guess it's neat to wrote JavaScript code in Java but I'm a lot more comfortable in JavaScript (and not so comfortable in Swing-like GUIs) so it's not hugely efficient. Maybe it's more of a win on bigger projects or something.

2 comments

number of boxes left: 30ish?
Mood: relaxed
Posted on 2007-09-29 00:05:00
Tags: rant
Words: 537

We're making real progress here - furniture is set up, and we have most of the essentials (toiletries, a sleeping bag to sleep on the bed, computers, TiVo, etc.), but there are still lots of boxes to unpack. It is starting to feel more like home, though. Pictures will come (as will some sort of party) when the boxes are gone.

Allergies have been hitting me hard for the last few days. They come and go seemingly randomly throughout the day. Nose running is bad, although feeling sweaty all over is much worse. The dust with the boxes isn't helping, I'd imagine.

We used Bekins for the move. Our stuff got here Wednesday which was really fast, much faster than we had expected. (only a week after they packed and loaded it!) We lost a table lamp along the way, and an alarming number of mugs were broken. The boxes weren't in great shape - a few had been torn open and such, worse than normal wear and tear that I would expect. (and worse than on the move up there) The couch got a little scratched up (how did this happen when it was wrapped in tape?), the desks are a little more flimsy (the entertainment center, which we're getting rid of, borders on dangerous), and the washer was apparently resting on the washer hoses because they're both bent out of shape and don't seal. Maybe this is more in line with a "normal" experience...it's just that on the move up (with the same company), everything seemed in the same condition that we left it in. Oh well.

djedi shipped his car with Dependable Auto Shippers and arrived quickly, without scratches, and they were even washing it when we pulled up!

As I was driving around over the past few days, I saw the following billboard:

We think rush hour is a misleading term.
We think like you think. Time Warner Cable

0 comments

getting used to new surroundings, part 1
Mood: okay
Posted on 2007-09-25 09:20:00
Tags: worldofwarcraft
Words: 323

So I got up early this morning to wait for the Time Warner people to hook us up with our own internet. (leeching off a very strong wireless connection - thanks neighbors!) Last night was a late night - went out to dinner at Rudy's with a few people and then played some WoW (our first downing of Netherspite and Prince! which should move our wowjutsu standing up to around #9 on Maiev) so I'm kinda tired. And I arrived here to find someone parked in front of our garage, so I parked in our other parking spot and kinda passively-aggressively left the garage door open so whoever parked there (thanks neighbors?) would get the message that there's someone living here now. It seems to have worked since the car's gone.

I'm feeling a little stressed because, as you know if you've chatted with me in the last month or so, I hate moving, and our stuff arrives tomorrow which is good but means we have to figure out where everything goes, etc. fast. And (this sounds ridiculous) I feel like I'm relearning how to interact with people socially, which is a bit of an exaggeration, but we didn't have many close friends up in MD and a few of them moved away. (I liked my coworkers and interacted decently with them but it's never the same for me in a work environment) We'd of course like to see people a lot (we'll probably have a housewarming party when we get settled in for good) but it's definitely stressing me out some.

The music on David's laptop has inexplicably disappeared, which is probably not good unless I just can't find it. I want to get my MacBook Pro but am waiting for the OS upgrade (October sometime). And I'm in the middle of State of Denial, Bob Woodward's book about the war in Iraq. It is excellent but engenders feelings of frustration at huge screwups.

2 comments

we are in austin
Mood: tired
Posted on 2007-09-25 00:17:00
Tags: travel
Words: 26

Made it to Austin, checked in to our apartment, stuff gets here Wednesday(!) so we have lots to do. *yawn* Will be at game night tmw!

1 comment

unstuck not in st. louis
Mood: tired
Posted on 2007-09-23 23:39:00
Tags: travel
Words: 166

After all the hullabaloo over the car, it turned out to be a big bust - we turned it on this morning and not even the check engine light was on. Took it in to the service place (who only sold tires on Sunday, no service) and the guy said if the check engine light was off, they couldn't find the code anyway and so it was probably fine if we didn't notice any handling problems, etc. We drove over 700(!) miles today, nary a warning light to be seen. Went through 280 miles of Missouri, a lot of Oklahoma and are in Hillsboro, TX right where 35E and 35W become plain ol' I-35. We were on the road for just over 12 hours so we're pretty tired but we got a room with a whirlpool and we get to sleep late so we should be fine for the less than 3 hours of driving tomorrow. (I think - it's only 3.5 hours from Dallas to Austin, right?)

3 comments

stuck in st. louis?
Mood: unsure
Music: scenes from "Dodgeball"
Posted on 2007-09-22 21:05:00
Tags: travel
Words: 467

Our journey thus far!

We got up early Friday morning, packed up the remainder of our stuff (including our computers which we had kept connected one last night), checked out of our apartment and went over to work one last time. Wandered around for a little bit, finished our last meeting and took off!

Good time was made as we passed through the long skinny part of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, a little tiny bit of West Virginia, and a lot of Ohio before stopping in London, OH. (just west of Columbus) Lunch was at a gas station Blimpie which was decent and dinner was at a Cracker Barrel which was quite tasty. (we'd never been to one before) Stayed in a bed & breakfast which was kinda pricey. Neither of us had stayed in a B&B before so the whole thin gwas a little weird - felt like being in someone's house. Did get to use the whirlpool and read on the second-story porch swing.

This morning we had a nice breakfast and hit the road again. Got to Indiana and had lunch at a White Castle (our first time! an adventuresome trip, kinda) which was greasy but good. In planning we kinda forgot about the time change, and combined with the extra distance we had made the first day we got to St. Louis earlier than planned. Met up with Carrie and her boyfriend Chris (who I had never met) and her two roommates and walked to dinner at Fitz's. I had a root beer float which was delicious, and Carrie had a "quesadilla burger" (a burger with cheese with tortillas as buns) which is genius!

Walked back to her apartment, took lots of pictures of her apartment (which is quite roomy) and got back in the car to go another 100 miles. Except after around .2 miles the master warning light went on with the check engine light, as well as something with the hybrid system. Well, crap. Pulled off into a gas station, waited a minute, turned on the car again with the same warnings. Called a few local dealerships (thanks for the info Carrie), none were open tonight or even tomorrow (curse you weekends!), although Carrie did know a place that was open on Sunday. After that long conversation and booking a hotel room here, turned on the car...and the master warning light and the hybrid system lights were off, leaving just the check engine light. (I've had the check engine light come on before, got it checked out, nothing was wrong) Sooo the plan is to get the the places that are open early tomorrow and hope they can take a look at it. If not, well, maybe everything's OK.


So, wish us luck tomorrow! I'll try to twitter one way or another...

2 comments

and so we go
Mood: impatient
Posted on 2007-09-20 10:54:00
Tags: worldofwarcraft links
Words: 323

So the packers came yesterday, and looked at our stuff, and said they could pack and move it all in a day. So we're without furniture, etc. one day ahead of schedule, but it freed us up to sleep later today! We'll be hitting the road tomorrow morning and we'll lose internet this afternoon after we return our cable modem, so call us if you need to get in touch. I'll twitter and LJ from the road as much as possible.

Do you hate the "Can you hear me now? Good!" Verizon guy? He's known internally as "Test Man", and here's Verizon's style guide to deploying him. There's so much good stuff in there, like

His sole purpose is to test our network. In so doing, he takes a step, or a few steps, and then says the line "Can you hear me now? Good!" He should say "Good!" in a variety of different ways to maintain interest. Occasionally he may put more emphasis on "Good!" That emphasis strengthens the thought that he has gotten a good connection.

0 comments

MD gay marriage (not!), leaving
Mood: bored
Posted on 2007-09-19 08:30:00
Tags: politics links
Words: 210

The Maryland Supreme Court upheld a ban on gay marriage in a 4-3 decision. Although the majority wrote "Our opinion should by no means be read to imply that the General Assembly may not grant and recognize for homosexual persons civil unions or the right to marry a person of the same sex", which is nice I guess. Maryland's gay marriage ban was passed in 1973 - that sounds pretty early. Anyway, boo.

I found this wonderful new feature in the Washington Post (how I shall miss thee!) this morning - Fact Checker, for checking claims that presidential candidates make. I wondered why nothing like this existed before. Sam Brownback's "In countries that have redefined marriage, where they've said, 'OK, it's not just a man and a woman, it can be two men, two women,' the marriage rates in those countries have plummeted to where you have counties now in northern Europe where 80 percent of the first-born children are born out of wedlock... And currently in this country -- currently -- we're at 36 percent of our children born out of wedlock." gets 3 out of 4 Pinocchios!

The packers are coming today (hopefully soon). It really feels like we're leaving our apartment now - all the walls being bare did it for me.

0 comments

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