Summer Philosophy

Ahh, the lazy days of summer, and the delightful philosophy that imbues them. I absolutely love verbal fencing. Because through the dancing around of argument, you get to know more about yourself and why you believe the things you do,…

True Names

Today I read TRUE NAMES by Vernor Vinge, as recommended by Andreessen. It really is a a good novella. I’m am shocked and amazed that it was written in 1984, as it has elements not seen until much later in…

Stock Market 2.0

I was reading Andreessen’s thoughts about Web 2.0 and had a nice thought myself: Wall Street is behind. They have giant festering piles of business and financial logic, and are falling behind on the internet front. What is needed is…

The Entropy

Well, my car battery is died yesterday. It seems that everything in the universe has conspired to attack me this week. On the plus side, I purchased a set of jumper cables, and an Xpower PowerPack 300 EP. It provides…

Universal Turing Machines, Part 9: Fin

The last routine left us with markings on the bits of the current state. Conveniently, it also left us to the left, while the UTM’s Start state has a loop which moves right to check wether or not a symbol…

Universal Turing Machines, Part 8: Lost in Transition

First: Last weekend I met with a friend and we reviewed this UTM subroutine by subroutine, finding a few errata, which have been fixed. Finally, we’ve reached the end. The last step of simulation is to find and mark the…

The Interruptable Power Supply

I usally goto my grandmother’s house for dinner, and today was no exception. On my home machine I’m busy compiling kde as part of a gentoo installation in a chroot on the hard drive I took out of my new…

FedEx Sux

Alright, so I ordered a laptop, and the supplier chose to ship FedEx, I chose Ground (because I’m cheap). So, Thursday morning, before work, I check up on the tracking number, and the FedEx website says it was in L.A….

Universal Turing Machines, Part 7: Registration

Now it is time to determine the state that we will transition into. Because of the difficulty of matching a sequence of symbols (the little q) that is sitting in the middle of a list (the big Q‘s) we will…

The Microsoft Tax

I recently decide to purchase a Laptop. My concerns were: must be 64-bit, must be lightweight, should be tiny. Using the venerable pricegrabber, which lets you sort and filter by many aspects (and so beats froogle to a bloody pulp),…