Glenn Willen

12:00 am: Backdated contact info post
Because all the cool kids are doing it:

Glenn Willen
5153 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Cell: (310) 809-9044

Email: gwillen@nerdnet.org

03:00 pm: Swine flu
Apparently there have been some very recent cases of H1N1 swine influenza, a strain not generally seen in humans, with confirmed human-human transmission.

CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/investigation.htm says cases have been seen in Mexico, San Diego/Imperial counties in CA, and in San Antonio, TX.

I don't think I know anybody in San Antonio or Mexico, but those of you in San Diego please be careful. :-\

EDIT: Also unconfirmed cases in New York. You guys stay safe too.

06:13 pm: I have a bad feeling I'm going to need an oscilloscope to get my IMSAI back into fully-working order. Anybody have one they want to lend me for a month or two?

Currently it will execute anywhere from a few to a few dozen instructions correctly, then launch itself off into the weeds...

EDIT: Apparently the thing I really want is called a "logic analyzer". But an oscilloscope would be better than a hole in the head.

02:51 pm: Dear lord, it appears that the GNOME developers have completely lost their fucking minds:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552387

*sigh* This is the sort of bullshit I really hate about open source. You give people lots of power and no accountability, and lo and behold, they do stupid shit. I wish there were a good solution to this.

EDIT: Oh, and I think the only reason that everybody is being so civil on that bug, in light of the developers being COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS, is that there's a threat at the bottom from the moderators to ban people who rant. Lulz.

02:45 pm: KGB puzzlehunt coming up!
I need a puzzlehunt team for the KGB hunt on March 28!

http://twistytimelines.com/

Difficulty: I have been one of the organizers/writers for each of the previous hunts, so the following restrictions on my participation are suggested, probably vaguely negotiable: If I have any other past writers or past winners on my team, we play as an exhibition team only (we can't win). I would be fine with that. If I play with a team with three people who have never won a hunt or written for one, we would probably be allowed a shot at winning. :-)

Any takers?

12:06 pm: Fantastically awesome Flash game:

http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/

There's no trickery -- it's a series of tests of how well you can eyeball angles and distances. It runs you through the series three times, and your score is your average error measurement. The errors are in "units" otherwise unspecified, which I assume are calibrated for the difficult of the tasks.

My first score was 3.67; my second score was 1.87, which is enough to get me the #2 spot on the "last 500 games" top score list, and a spot near the bottom of the "last 10,000 games" list as well.

Suggestions for play: Rotate your head. Squint. Try closing each eye in turn.

Before trying to play for score, run through it once just to see the visualization it gives you of the correct answer for "Triangle center" -- it will give you a better intuition for what point the game is asking you for.

02:21 pm: Need [Pittsburgh] housing?
This will be interesting only to Pittsburgh-types:

Jcreed and I have a spot open in our place at 5153 Fifth Ave. (corner with Wilkins). It's the first floor of a duplex; we have two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room.

We're looking for anyone who needs housing starting any time between now and august, but we'll prefer an arrangement where we don't end up having a long vacancy.

If interested, send mail to gwillen@nerdnet.org and jcreed@andrew.cmu.edu.

By all means tell your friends, but preference will go to people we know.

X-posted: cmukgb

12:21 am: I seem to have a blister between two of my toes.

I wouldn't have thought that was possible...

09:52 pm: Mystery Hunt!
[This was originally a comment on this post by 530nm330hz, but it got too long for the comment box, so I decided I should make it an entry. So that's why it reads like a reply to that post.

Note also that most of this is about 1) the Reverse Dimension metapuzzle's first stage, because I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and 2) the difficulty of the metas in general. There was a LOT MORE to the hunt than that, but I will never get around to writing a "real" Mystery Hunt wrapup post, so this will have to sufice. ;-)]

First things first: Yaaay there was a Mystery Hunt! :-D These things will never get old. ^_^ They're always Damned Fun, no matter who's running them, and that's really impressive. :-)

( on the Pluto Meta )

( on the awesomeness of the Reverse Dimension round )

( on the difficulty of the metapuzzles )

And despite all that, let me reiterate that the hunt was Damned Fun. :-D I am looking forward to many more of these, both Evil Midnight Bombers hunts -- despite length and difficulty, I have tremendously enjoyed both that I've been to, and find them to be masterful writers -- and hunts in general.

We are still hoping that some day the Manic Sages will win one... as several of us have gotten in the habit of saying, "hopefully next year". ;-)

12:34 am: Went to a Most Awesome New Years' party at Frances' place in San Diego. <3 the Mudd crowd. (Also pigsrcool who I think was the only non-Mudder there besides me. :-D)

The real purpose of this post, though: I know I don't have half the people from that party friended, and I bet they all have Livejournals. So those of you who do have me on your list, get those other folks to come comment here so I can friend them, but be lazy and not have to go search for them. ;-)

12:17 pm: Buyer Beware
Does anyone have any experience with the "U3" hardware/software? Apparently many flash drives come with it now. It's basically malware; when you insert the drive into a Windows machine, it creates an emulated CD-ROM drive with an autorun.inf file (to get around the lack of USB autorun), and autoinstalls the "U3 Launchpad software". There's no way to blank the drive (remove the emulated CD portion) without using the "U3 API" -- it's not a partition, it's a blob of data which is apparently in ROM somewhere on the device. There are removal tools for Windows and Mac, but according to a forum post I read, the Mac one installs a kernel extension, so I'm not willing to run it, and I'm hesitant to insert the drive into a Windows machine because 1) it will autoinstall the spyware, and 2) I'll still have to run the Windows removal tool, which is probably just as bad.

Fortunately I haven't infected anything yet, since the software doesn't run on Mac; but I'm not willing to use the drive with the software on it, because someday I will have to insert it into a Windows machine for something.

I suspect I'm just going to have to take this Christmas present back to the store, unless anyone out there knows how to get rid of this crap without infecting any machines with it.

Conclusion: Never buy Sandisk. (They invented the U3 technology, and it sounds like all their drives are now infected with it.) :-\ Apparently other manufacturers have licensed it too, so I don't know what brands of USB drives are safe to buy.

ETA: Another forum post suggested running the uninstaller in a fresh VMWare image, and said that worked. I'm not sure whether I'm willing to go through the effort just for a stupid flash drive, but it was a Christmas gift so I hate to return it.

09:55 am: Any CMUers going to the MIT Mystery Hunt and wanting to reside in Buddha Lounge (or if you don't know what Buddha Lounge is), please reply here at once, mentioning whether or not you have already emailed the hunt housing alias with this information. I'm trying to help them work out whether they can fit us all. (Also mention whether you need housing before, after, or both. For the record at least a couple of us are staying with rlambert after instead.) If you have questions just post them, I can answer those. :-)

11:06 am: I don't know if anybody I know uses Diskeeper, but I think in light of recent events, any of you who do should reconsider where your money is going.

10:52 am: Me -> Los Angeles
Hi Livejournal,

For those of you who don't already know, I will be in the Los Angeles area (Redondo Beach of course!) from Dec. 20 - Jan 2. (I'm going to arrive tonight around 9PM.) So let me know if you want to do anything while I'm out there! :-) I mostly don't even know who reading this is still around that area...

11:09 pm: So I finally opened up a Nalgene I bought at the Useless Stuff Auction, I think over a year ago; it contained, among other things, a bunch of a blue-ish crayons. I had assumed they were all the same color, since that's how they appeared, but now that I have them out I can see that they are the following near-identical Crayola colors:

Midnight blue
Denim
Outer space
Blue bell
Cornflower
Pacific blue
Indigo

This amuses me. It also makes me curious how this particular selection of colors got in the Nalgene of Misc. in the first place.

Anybody want some crayons?

12:21 pm: Hi everyone! I will be writing a puzzlehunt post shortly; but first I bring you another puzzle.

For reasons I will not go into here, rlambert currently has a laptop with many useful things missing from /lib; things like ld-linux.so. The laptop is still running; she has a browser and a terminal already open, and has sworn she won't close them. But very few things will run in the terminal, besides bash which is already open. (She also has pidgin open. If you give her advice directly, rather than by commenting on this post, please make sure you don't make anything worse.)

She has a complete copy of /lib residing elswhere.

The puzzle is: How can she restore /lib with only what she has available?

I've pointed out to her that there may be no solution that doesn't involve rebooting from removable media; but for the sake of exercise, try to find a solution she can do that doesn't require that. (She doesn't have another computer handy, and she doesn't have a CD drive; there may be solutions involving making a bootable USB drive using her own computer, and then booting from it, but unless you can prove without rebooting that her hardware can boot USB drives, that's a risky strategy.)

Feel free to make any reasonable assumptions (I'll let you know if they turn out to be wrong); or if you have her contact info, contact her and ask anything you need to know, and post it here in the comments. [But don't tell her to run any command that might make things worse!]

Go, lazywebs, go! ;-)

ETA: FYI to people reading this, we are helping her out in #cslounge. One correct solution to the puzzle (there may be others) was:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/backup-copy-of-lib /backup-copy-of-lib/ld-linux.so.2 command

To get something to run even in this fucked-up state.

Now we're trying to sort out the fact that she can't copy it back, due to the same reason she originally had a problem, which is that she's out of disk in /, combined with the fact that the copy of the files out of lib was done with cp -r, which caused all the symlinks to blow up into full-on files. (None of this is her fault; someone put her up to it. ;-)

06:29 pm: I don't think I need to tell any of you to vote NO on Prop. 8. But just in case.

http://noonprop8.com/
Donate (even if you're not a CA resident!)
Lies and slander by Prop. 8 supporters

That last one was what pissed me off enough to get me to post.

[Unrelated PS: Those of you who have eggs in my house -- I haven't forgotten about you, but the puzzlehunt is eating my life. Next week after the puzzlehunt is done, I should exist more. But I'm usually not at home unless I have a reason, so give me a time when you want to get them, and I'll be home then. :-)]

11:03 pm: Psychic Night at the Geller Hotel: Interactive puzzle event!
[This announcement is mainly targeted at people in Pittsburgh, but you're welcome to fly out here for it... :-)]

This semester, KGB's puzzle hunt will be slightly different from what we've done in the past. We're calling it an Interactive Puzzle Event: Psych Night at the Geller Hotel! It will take place on November 1.

For more information, http://www.gellerhotel.com/event .

To register your team of four (or whoever you have), http://www.gellerhotel.com/register.html .

For questions, event@gellerhotel.com .


If you like the sound of our event, post about it on your LJ, so we can get more players! :-)

X-posted: gwillen, cmukgb

05:13 pm: I have blown out most of the eggs from egg-dying. I didn't blow out:
- The egg (Kempy's?) with a bunch of rings made using the circle templates. (I bumped it and I think I might have slightly cracked it, so if I do blow it out I want to give it more coats of varnish first to protect it.)
- The egg that was all yellow with a little bit of white. (I didn't notice it when I was varnishing -- whose is that, and do you want me to do it?)
- The two eggs that still had was on them. (I said I would de-wax one of them, but I don't know which one. :-\)

Let me know when you want to come collect your eggs from me. :-)

08:23 pm: Hey guyz Freezepop on Friday at Mr. Smalls!

Apparently vehicles are required -- any drivers like Freezepop? :-)