Tag Archives: geek

AppleScript Sucks

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Here’s the thing: the idea behind AppleScript is actually very cool. That I can write a (theoretically) simple program that harnesses the power of several applications on my computer is the Next Frontier in Computing (Apple is not the only company doing this stuff). Now Apple even has a program called Automator to handle some of these tasks without you ever having to write any code. That’s a good thing, because AppleScript the language really, really blows. So much for the next frontier. It’s like the covered wagon is being pulled by an armadillo.

The temptation of AppleScript is that I need to take information from iBlog and convert it to a format that WordPress can use. AppleScript makes it really simple to ask iBlog for its data, already set up and accessible. Cool. Then we get to the part where we have to make AppleScript do useful things to the data. Uh oh. Welcome to the worst programming language ever created.

Sometimes with familiarity one learns that although a different language might do things a different way, it has its own strengths. Perl, for instance, is a text monster, but makes sacrifices to be one (so I’m told). AppleScript occupies a unique position in the programming world as I know it by doing everything badly. I challenged myself tonight to come up with one good thing to say about it. For perspective, when I try I can even think of good things to say about Microsoft and the Yankees. Not AppleScript. It’s like Apple is intentionally hiding powerful capabilities I know are there, built into the operating system. Not only that, it hides simple abilities that I can use in any other comparable scripting environment. AppleScript doesn’t want me to get my work done.

On top of that my task this time is made harder by iBlog’s grinding horrible slowness. Is nothing at all happening because I made a mistake, or is iBlog just off smelling the roses right now? What I want to do is exactly what AppleScript and iBlog’s script support were designed for, and I’ve already written some text functions that every other comparable environment has built-in, yet in the end I’ve been wasting my time. Now it’s time to bring in the big guns. Doing this the hard way turns out to be simpler than doing it the easy way. Go figure.

I will be doing a series of propellerhead articles documenting the migration from iBlog to WordPress. The articles might be interesting to someone if I wasn’t the only one on the planet still using iBlog.

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Thanks!

Moving the Blog!

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Yesterday I was hacking at some code, fixing a problem with the way the site looks on the Opera browser. I use iBlog right now, a platform with some cool features and some pretty obvious warts. It was designed to work on servers where the blogger had no control over the server at all (say, Apple’s .mac servers), and therefore the way it did some things was… unusual. Without going into too much detail, iBlog does some things that have unpredictable results on some browsers, including the latest Opera. In addition, the company that made it stopped working on it some time ago and even the discussion forums are gone now.

I fixed the most obvious problem, but there were others, and once again I was faced with the choice of spending my time cobbling together the old system or shifting to a more robust platform. Sooner or later I’m going to have to move, so I decided not to spend any more time tweaking this one.

I’ve been looking into various blogging and content management packages, without finding one that matched the features of iBlog. A couple came close, however, and that’s going to have to do. I will be moving to WordPress sometime this spring. I should be able to make it do what I want, as long as I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. Looks like I’ll be learning a bit of php.

Here’s where you come in: I’ve got a test blog up and running, and out of the box it looks… boring. Slick and professional and all that, but not really me. I Browsed through the bazillion other options people have already created and, well, they’re not very good either – either stodgy or designed by illiterates for illiterates. “Oh, you want to read the text? Dang, I never considered that…”

I takes only a glance around here for you to to see that my design skills are no better; but now I’m going to be doing a ground-up redesign of the site, even if I want to keep it looking the same. I have some thoughts about some fairly ambitious things I’d like to try, but before I get carried away I’d like to know what you guys think of the way things look right now. What do you like? What don’t you like? Layout? Colors? Content? Too much in the sidebar? Not enough whatnot?

One idea I just had: a page with links to all my stories, with a way for people to rate them. The favorites would rise to the top. Yeah, I suspect that feature’s not coming soon. But maybe your crazy idea will work! Leave a comment! Go nuts!

Thanks!

It’s Not Too Early to Start Begging, Is It?

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You know what I’d like for Christmas? I like a version of Adobe Flash that is actually designed to run on my computer. My old, old version of Flash (old enough to be made by a different company) works – mostly – but is slow and crash-prone. Anyone got a used version of Flash that runs in Intel-based macs they’re not using anymore?

Note that this would be a highly impractical gift, allowing me to waste time with greater efficiency than ever before. Flash is also very expensive and there’s no way I can justify paying for a new version based on what I do with it. But if someone out there bought Flash thinking they were going to take over the Web and then discovered what a pain in the butt Flash can be, think of me.

On a related note, I am making slow progress on the next animation, a much more ambitious follow-on to the ducks animation. I’m sure I’d be done by now if I had the right software…

Thanks!

An Unplanned Morning Walk

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I woke up this morning feeling refreshed. The sky was brightening outside, and no clouds were visible through the window cut into the sloping ceiling directly over my head. I got up, woke up my computer, and went to fix tea. The electric kettle quickly heated the water for my first (but certainly not last) cup, and once it was fixed I returned to my desk.

My computer was turned off. Not just sleeping, but completely turned off. Curious.

It wouldn’t start again, either. I tried a light switch, then a different light on a different circuit. Nothing. My apartment was without electricity. Consulting my phone I saw it was 8 am when the electricity had stopped, and out on the street the crews were hard at work rewiring the neighborhood. This was probably a planned outage and I hadn’t got the memo. (On previous occasions I had.)

Well, then, no electricity. No computers. Normally I’d be ok with this. I’d probably just go back to bed. But That Girl had specifically mentioned that she was going to try to stay up until I woke up, so that we could chat. I’d hate to let That Girl down. Obviously, then, if the Internet wasn’t going to come to Jerry, then Jerry could go to the Internet. After all, there is a friendly little café nearby that has WiFi. There aren’t many of them out in this neighborhood of Prague, so I feel fortunate to have one so close. Plus, they often have good tea there.

I was about halfway there when it occurred to me that today was Sunday. If the café bothers to open at all today it will be this afternoon. As I walked (trying not to interfere with the construction crews who were, in open violation of the ethical standards of state-employed construction workers the world over, hard at work), I tried to come up with a Plan B. There was none that didn’t involve public transportation and overpriced access. I stopped outside Little Café Near Home and used my phone to see if their wireless was up. At least I could email That Girl to tell her what was happening. There was the network! Hooray!

I have complained about my phone, but it is perfect for things like this. I laboriously typed out a message, then hit send. “Use cafemania wireless network?” the phone asked me. “Yes,” I answered. “Enter password,” my phone said. I typed the password, working around my phone’s bloody-minded insistence that the first letter be capitalized. Password entered, I hit “send.”

“There’s no network here named cafemania,” my phone told me.

Where did the network go? There was no one inside to turn it off. Maybe LCNH’s power was cut off just then. I laughed, shook my head, scanned for neighboring networks that were unprotected, found none, and decided to go home. I took a slightly different route home, around the worst of the construction, and met a dog who used to be a regular at Little Café Near Home, but hasn’t been coming in lately. The sun was shining, the birds were singing (probably saying “see you next spring”), and the air was chill and crisp. Bracing, even.

I got home, put some water on the gas stove, then with a click and a pop the electricity came back on, and here I am telling you about my morning.

Thanks!

MySpace Heroes

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I’ve been spending too much of my life over at MySpace recently. I signed up a few months ago so I could send a message to Zombina and the Skeletones, but that was all I did. Recently I was hanging with That Girl and her sister, and TGS paused to check how things were going in an online game called Heroes. It turns out that an important part of the game is getting other folks to join your bunch, so a few days later I joined in — just to help her out, of course.

I spent too much of my life getting to know the game, then another too much of my life playing the game. It also turns out that there are several other games on MySpace — or should I say several iterations of the game with different graphics. Mobsters seems to be the most popular, but there are also space, pirate, and vampire iterations with only minor differences. In all of the games it is beneficial to build up a whole boatload of friends (up to 500). Somewhere word got out that I would accept invitations to be anybody’s buddy in any game. I am a game friend slut, and now I appear to be very popular on MySpace. I have started down the slippery slope from slut to whore; I have now posted my name in a couple of places where people go to find friends for these games. [Since I wrote that a couple of days ago, my transition is complete. I now actively approach people who say they are interested.]

So what are these games that are eating my brain? In truth, they’re really not that great. Activities fall into three categories: invest in real estate to build wealth, gather members in your group, and buy stuff so your guys can beat up other guys and take some of their money.

There’s really no goal to the games, except get more money to buy more stuff to get more power so you can beat up more people. (Even the beating up happens off-camera.) Why am I still playing? I don’t know. But when I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is check to see if anyone else attacked me while I slept and stole some of my money. I calculate how long it will take at my current income level to be able to afford a particular piece of property. I have, as mentioned above, gradually become more active in adding other people into my bunch. Once they are added they are little more than a number – no further interaction is required (although some players do try to build a group cohesion).

Once things are under control in Heroes, I make the rounds of all the other clones, making sure I keep my promises to join other people’s bunches. I don’t actually do anything in those other games except occasionally reinvest real estate income.

So far that’s not a big slice out of my life, but then, then I have to check back periodically to see how things are going. Every time I review my real estate investments and strategy going forward, even though that strategy only hits important events every couple of days (and I have calculated when that time will be). Every time I go over all the gear I have for my bunch to use in battle, even though my needs in that area don’t change very often either. Every time I wind up poking around for someone to attack who might cough up a lot of money, then I decide not to bother. Every time I check for messages to see if someone in my group is asking for help kicking someone’s butt for whatever reason.

None of that takes a lot of time, and in fact my total time on the game is probably not that bad. The problem is that I do it often, and any momentum I might have had on other tasks is irretrievably lost, so I can play what amounts to an accounting game. I’ve got to get this game out of my head.

On a related note I plan to put a strategy guide to the various games up on my MySpace page, once I run some spreadsheet simulations of different stgrategies. And of course if you want to join my bunch, guild, mob, crew, family, or band (depending on the game) you are welcome to add me as a friend – http://myspace.com/?writerjer – and invite me in. I’ll join anything.

Edited to add: I now have an investment spreadsheet that people can download at Jer’s Software Hut, designed to answer the qustion whether it’s better to by one of a property or a batch of ten, depending on your circumstances.

Thanks!

The Science of Banana Numeration

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Yesterday, as I was regarding a bunch of bananas in the kitchen, I mentally dashed off this code snippet:

#typedef enum {

Banana_Green = 0,

Banana_Yellow,

Banana_Spotted,

Banana_Brown

} BananaRipeness;

#typedef enum {

Take_Banana = 0,

Hold_Out_For_Banana_Bread

} BananaAction;

– (BananaAction) takeBanana:(BananaBunch *)bunch

{

if ( (0 == [bunch count]%3) && [bunch ripeness] > Banana_Yellow ) {

return Hold_Out_For_Banana_Bread;

}

else {

return Take_Banana;

}

}

People who live in houses where banana bread is made will, of course, understand at a glance that when the bananas are getting on in ripeness and there is a multiple of three bananas remaining, one does not take a banana, but rather one holds out for banana bread, lest they face the ire of their fellow residents. Some debate is possible whether the ripeness threshold should be past yellow, as in my code here, or whether one should start holding out earlier, even though the bananas still have a few days left.

It is very good to be in a house where banana count is important.

Code notes: this is written in (more or less) Objective-C, and assumes there is already defined a collection called BananaBunch. I generally avoid multiple exit points in a function, but this one is simple enough that I decided it was OK. I haven’t bothered checking the code for errors, it’s just not that sort of exercise.

Thanks!

A Couple of Thoughts About Star Trek

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On the starship Enterprise they have one hell of a computer. I thought about it today watching someone work their iPhone. The Enterprise had even more computing power than that, way back in the ’60’s. Not bad.

But here’s something that’s bothered me for a couple of decades now. At one point Spok plays chess with the computer and wins. Since Spok was the one who taught the computer to play chess, and he gave the computer all his chess knowledge, that he could beat the computer proved that the computer had been tampered with. Which has always made me wonder: Why the hell did Spok play chess? Apparently the idea that he could get better at the game, gain new insight and thus be able to beat his own program, is unthinkable. So, if he’s not going to get better, if he’s just exercising the same algorithms that he programmed into the computer, why bother?

An unplanned bonus Star Trek beef: some of the guys are freezing to death on a planet. The transporter is doing wacky stuff. Shuttle, anyone? You know the writers were taking a bunker attitude, hoping no one would think of that.

Missing on the Star Trek crew: the IT guy. There are hints now and then, when someone messes with the computer (and I must say that the ‘mess with the computer’ scenarios are already coming true), but you’ve got a guy in charge of the warp drives but no one dedicated to the computer. I haven’t spent much time with the Star Trek progeny, but in The Next Generation the guy in charge or the computer was a computer, which in the end begs the question. The deep space galctica Enterprise prequel thing I’ve not seen any of, so I can’t comment there.

Note that Galaxy Quest, one hell of a fine movie, casts Sigourny Weaver as the IT babe, though her IT role is somewhat limited – she is the interface between man and machine. Presumably, in the Galaxy Quest universe, the computer respects her intellect over all others. That’s how I spin it, anyway.

Thanks!

It Goes Without Saying

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Last night I set up the new home for the novel It Goes Without Saying, the latest masterpiece by promising young author Edgar Pildrot. What? You’ve never heard of him? Not a surprise, I suppose, as his epic has not been published yet. It hasn’t even been written, in fact. That’s where you come in. That’s right, dear reader, you can be Edgar Pildrot — or at least a part of him. Chapter 5 is under way, Damien and Alice are on the run from mysterious people dressed all in black, and the only thing that’s missing is what happens next. It could be anything, but it will likely be a bit odd.

If you would like to have a hand in determining the fate of our heroes, pop on over and sign up! (Or, just ask me nicely and I’ll create your account.) Once I’ve given you book-authoring powers, you will be able to add your own two cents to the embryonic novel. There are only two rules: Never use the word ‘said’ and every alternative may only be used once.

Of course, even if you don’t want to participate directly, you are welcome to hang out, read along and heckle comment. Take a look!

Thanks!

He Remonstrated, She Demurred, and a Project was Born

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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she prevaricated.
“Yes you do,” he blaxtophosed.

As I was writing that last episode, I got an idea. Ideas come in a wide range of flavors, and many of them are undercooked. I’m counting on you guys to make this idea fully-baked. I think there are enough regulars now to make something like this work. Group fiction. Silly group fiction, anchored on a bit of patently bad advice every writer hears at one point or another.

I propose two chapters of a novel, chapters five and ten. The writing should be reasonable but for one rule: no word for verbal utterance can be used more than once. By chapter five our otherwise-talented author, Edgar Pildrot, will be scraping the bottom of the barrel. By chapter ten he’ll be reduced to wild invention to paraphrase ‘said’. Wild invention, I think, is something this crowd could do well. Perhaps also we should include a rule that no character can be described the same way twice. Forget names, they would have been used up in chapter one. Just a thought.

I imagine this would be a perfect application of some sort of wiki thing. I’ll try to figure out how to host one of them (I welcome any guidance), but there’s also the question of the story. What do you guys think? Would you play? How much structure should be there at the start? An outline of the novel with a little more detail for the relevant chapters, or is that too much? There must be some structure; I wouldn’t want a bunch of fun sentences that didn’t follow. Or is continuity part of the challenge? I wouldn’t want to stifle you guys too much. Where’s the balance? I’m figuring the group would write chapter five first, then chapter 10. Kind of a vegetables-before-desert thing, only in this case the veggies are tasty, too.

We also need a good name for the project. My first instinct was Outrageous Dialog Project, but that misses the import of the dialog markers.

So four (wait, five) questions:

Do you want to join us and write silly dialog?
Do you have any idea how to make the project work?
How much of the story should be predefined?
What should the project be called?
Something else?

Please give your two cents in the comments below. I will interpret the sound of crickets chirping as an indication that the rest of you have actual “lives” and stuff, and don’t have time for such silliness. I’m not really sure how many participants it would take to hit that critical mass of fun.

Thanks!

Bit by a Leopard

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I hadn’t really been paying attention to the hype (if there was any), so the release of Apple’s OS X 10.6 “Leopard” (someone in the marketing department over there needs a good talking-to) caught me by surprise. I hadn’t preordered it and I first learned it was out when reading a Web comic. The second place I heard about Leopard was from a user of Jer’s Novel Writer. That message: “it’s broken!”

Grand. Over the weekend I searched Prague for a store with Leopard in stock. Nope. No clue when it might arrive, either. There was a hint of bitterness on the part of some shopkeepers, a small resentment at being second-class citizens in the eyes of Apple, but mostly just the Czech shrug. Wait and see.

“It’s an emergency,” I explained to one clerk. “Can you find out when it might come in?” She answered in the negative. That doesn’t mean it was not possible to find out, it meant that she wasn’t going to try. (“It’s not possible” here means “I don’t know how and I can’t be bothered to figure it out.”)

I’ve gotten some helpful diagnostic information back from a couple of users, and I’ve built a shot-in-the-dark attempt at a fix. We’ll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I’ll be turning to mail order today. Why couldn’t Apple have delayed just a little longer, until I was in the U.S.?

ADDENDUM: HEY! APPLE! Czech Republic is a country too! It’s in Europe and everything! First I wasn’t eligible for your software contest, and now you won’t even ship me your product! AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I feel better now.

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Thanks!

Here’s a freebie…

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I had an idea for an interesting story setup just now. It’s not a story setting I’m likely to use in the near future, but it was fun to think about.

If the world were substantially hotter, it would only be habitable at the poles. It leads to some cool scenarios when people are finally able to get to the other pole. Naturally, it would be more interesting if there were people there already, but how did those people get there? Are there entirely separate evolutionary branches going on, and if so, how do the results compare?

I’m not sure whether a habitable planet that is that much hotter would need more of its surface covered with water or less. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Other questions arise, like:

Cosmology: would cultures that develop in polar regions have the same misconceptions that Earth civilizations did? Would seeing the sun go around in circles rather than rising and setting alter the perception of the solar system?

Cosmology 2: What shape would such people imagine the Earth to be? Perhaps an inverted bowl, which continues to bulge outward until you reach the edge? Maybe the bowl is spinning on some sort of flat surface beneath, which would explain the seasonal motion of the sun.

Mythology: The sun is important, but too much sun is deadly. Would a culture whose boundaries are defined by the strength of the sun imagine that evil lurks in the shadows they way we do, or are the shadows where the good guys take refuge from the evil that inhabits the sunny regions?

Navigation: It doesn’t seem to me that anyone will be inventing a compass in those parts. When travelers venture far to the south, what troubles are they going to encounter when trying to find their way around?

Weather: I bet there would be days when the huge storms come from the south (for the north pole dwellers) fed by the extra energy from the sun.

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Thanks!

Need a Favor

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I’ve been working on a Web site for a friend of mine, and while it currently has a pretty high degree of slickness when viewed with Firefox for Mac (it has the best debugging tools available to me), I’m curious how it will perform on various Windows browsers. Specifically:

  1. graphics – I blended the images with the background using alpha channels. I’m pretty sure this is going to look bad in Internet Explorer 6, but are there other broswers that also look bad? Can anyone confirm that they do look bad on IE6?
  2. menus – I wrote up some pretty complicated scripts to make animated menus, but I’m not sure how they’re working on other broswers. For instance, on the Leadership Coaching page, there are three drop-down menus. Do they work?
  3. sub-menus – On the lowest menu on the Leadership Coaching page (beneath the picture), does a submenu appear to the right when you roll over the top menu item? (The sub-menus are currently clipped off in Safari and Opera for Mac, which I will fix tomorrow.)

Now I remember why I don’t do Web…

I’ve only spent a little bit of effort trying to make the site aesthetically appealing – mainly I’ve been playing with the CSS to figure out HOW to make the text nice, without really worrying too much about the actual result. I’m really, really trying to make aesthetics Someone Else’s Problem. Still, there are some design elements that aren’t bad for an amateur. I’ll be working on a more consistent color scheme, but what are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance! The link is Eu-LIFE. If things look really weird to you, let me know and I’ll post screen shots to help you describe what’s different.

Thanks!

Episode 1000

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Depending on exactly how you count things (there are many unpublished episodes lurking around, and different parts of iBlog report different numbers), Saturday’s little story snippet was the 1000th episode on this blog. I’d seen the number coming, and entertained several ideas about how to celebrate it. Even more remarkable than my having written 1000 episodes is that there are people who have read them.

Tonight I took a random stagger through old episodes, ostensibly to find links broken when I upgraded my blogging software (there are a lot of them), and to fix a few formatting issues also caused by the conversion. My first impression: Muddled Ramblings is a good name for this blog. I can be incomprehensible when I don’t put my mind to it. It hurts the most when I turn cryptic right at the key moment of the episode, the big payoff sentence. This is the result, I suppose, of continuously publishing rough drafts, but Defective Yeti doesn’t seem to have the same problems I do. (In fairness to myself, I often attempt sentences with a high difficulty factor. You can’t play jazz if you don’t take chances. On the other hand, just because I’m taking chances doesn’t mean I’m playing jazz.)

Tonight I read some episodes I’d completely forgotten, and others I remembered with varying degrees of fondness and trepidation. I read the words ‘expecially’ and ‘whork’. One of those was intentional and satisfying, the other mortifying (and subsequently edited). Pronouns fly with reckless abandon, unburdened by the need to represent anything. My pronouns are free spirits, and don’t have time for oppressive grammatical shit. Free them! They don’t have time for things! Anything but things! They don’t care what they say.

Sometimes I was surprised to find two episodes next to each other. It’s impossible for me to picture the events discussed as having happened at pretty much the same time. In some cases they feel years apart in my memory. I’m not sure how that makes me feel about the last few years of my life being verifiable. I’m going to have to deal with future spouses, publishers, and other litigants with a better memory for my deeds than apparently I have.

One thought I had tonight was that should I become famous (hey, it’s possible), some poor intern at a publisher somewhere is going to have to read through all this crap, mining for nuggets that might be considered insightful or wise. By now, just over a thousand episodes in, that wretched soul is sitting with eyes crossed, pencil still poised over a blank page, knowing that if she doesn’t come up with something, she’s going to have to read the whole damn thing over again. To that person: Sorry, dude. Really. Remember when you were happy that you landed this sweet gig? Think of it this way, though. Now you can say, “Yeah, I’ve paid my dues. The check’s in the mail.” (I want to credit Snake Pliskin with that line, but it was some other guy.)

Roughly a quarter of the episodes are filed under Idle Chit-Chat. There hasn’t been much in the get-poor-quick category for a long time. I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it is the company I keep. I don’t have anyone around to discuss sporting events based on cloning up wooly mammoths, or the correct way to construct a hotel on the moon. On the other hand, just about everybody here has a get-poor-quick scheme. I think that first rush of capitalism has given the locals the impression that all you need is a good idea and you’re on your way to fame and fortune. Everyone is a schemer here.

I’m mildly curious how many words this blog has in it by now. It’s a bunch. I did a count a while back, when the blog had maybe half this many episodes, and it came out to 170,000 words — a very fat fantasy novel or two mainstream novels. It’s likely I’ve more than doubled that count, but we’ll see.

Meanwhile, for an oddly anticlimactic milestone, yippee.

* * *

OK, a bit of time has passed. I was pleasantly surprised to find that iBlog was scriptable, so with a bit of cursing at the worst programming language ever (AppleScript) I managed to write a little routine that counted the words in the bodies of all the episodes in this blog. While testing particular entries yielded slightly different results than I got from Jer’s Novel Writer for the same text (something worth digging into), it’s pretty safe to say that this blog has more than 450,000 words in the bodies of the episodes alone. That would make three quite fat novels, or five normal-sized ones.

I don’t know what to make of that.

Thanks!

Hut-Spawn!

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As long as we’re on the topic of software coming out of the Hut, I should mention that my teeming minions (misshapen as they are, with their lumbering, shuffling gait and mouths full of pointy teeth going every which way and eyes that glow a baleful green mindful of radioactive fungus) and I were down in the code-spawning pits yesterday, where with a great slorching noise and a gush of unpleasant fluid we extracted an interesting specimen from its still-warm incubation pod, which lay buried in the primordial ooze for which this quiet Prague neighborhood is rightly famous.

Although technically Jer’s Flash Card Viewer has been available to the public for a long time, the version I’ve been using leaves that old thing in the dust. The catch was that I wanted to put in the registration stuff that Jer’s Novel Writer uses, so I could ask people for money. I figured it would take a couple of hours.

That estimate was about right – two hours of coding, plus the year and a half to get around to it. I hadn’t considered the time to make the icons for the application and the library files. The one I made yesterday for the library files is, well, awful. After an hour of cursing at The Gimp my standards went from something nice to something that didn’t suck to simply something recognizable. If anybody’s in the mood to get some credit towards their Fine Arts degree over at Muddled U., let me know.

JersFCV is just a drill-and-kill learning tool, but I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. It tracks performance based on several criteria and prioritizes what “card” it shows based on that. In my use of the thing I find that the prioritization really helps me retain the information. Just when the word I always get wrong is fading in my head, bam! There it is again. Cards are grouped into levels, so you can choose what subset of your entire library to review. Overall, it’s pretty slick (for a flash card program).

Thanks!

The Good Part About Being a Geek

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There I was, updating the Big Number display over in the sidebar, when for whatever reason the site I generally use to look up the relevant prime number was not responding. The last time my favorite prime site went away, it took me quite a while to find a new place with a sufficient table of primes. I wasn’t looking forward to digging around again. The Internet is big.

PNTScreenshot.png

It occurred to me that I could write a program to calculate primes faster than I could find a place to look them up. Duh! Half an hour later, I had this beauty:

As you can see, it’s tailored just for calculating the next Big Number. It also may be the only prime-calculating software that uses exclamation points. I don’t think I’ll be marketing this one over at Jer’s Software Hut; the market for next-prime-after-an-even-thousand calculators is probably pretty limited.

That’s what’s cool about being a geek. You want a program that works a certain way, you just make it.

Of course, the mac people out there will immediately realize this should be a desktop widget. Hmm… I’ve never done one of those…

… which brings us to what sucks about being a geek. Right now all I can think about is a slick optimization for a program that generates a finite-sized table of primes. Ahh! My head! It’s in my head! I’ll probably have to code the dang thing just to make it go away. I don’t even need a table of primes, let alone one that was generated a tiny bit faster than most other tables of primes were generated.

Thanks!