Glenn Willen

Ads are irritating, and I'm tired of looking at them.

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 03:04:09 GMT

Please go here:

Manage LJ Account

and check whether your journal is set on "Basic" or "Plus".

If it's set on Plus, that means you get a few marginal features, in exchange for 1) you are seeing a bunch of stupid video ads, and 2) I am being forced to look at banner ads when I view your journal.

If you didn't realize you were on Plus, or you didn't realize the implications: Great. Switch it to Basic and everyone will be happier, and you will no longer have to suffer through video ads when using LJ.

If you are using Plus on purpose: Out of curiosity, why?

If you were using Plus by accident, please comment because I am curious how many people they did this to.

ETA: Apparently if your journal style is 'grandfathered' and is not currently available to free accounts, you will lose it if you switch. I don't know what other settings might be grandfathered in this fashion, so proceed at your own risk.

PSA

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:57:20 GMT

I will be in Mountain View / San Francisco next week (Monday night through Sunday morning.)

EDIT: That means starting tomorrow. Not a week from tomorrow! Sorry. :-)

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:08:38 GMT

Is there a name for the fallacy of assuming, when one is in the dark, that everyone else actually knows what's going on? I don't mean this in a conspiracy sort of way; just a sort of implicit assumption that, when in doubt, other people have more complete knowledge than oneself.

As an example of this, consider real-time strategy games, i.e. Starcraft. I always inordinately fear what's going on in the part of the map that I can't see; obviously my opponent is building up a massive army and preparing to destroy me with it. (Note that this is typically not true.) But I fail to properly take account, in my own strategy, of the fact that my opponent cannot, in fact, see what I'm up to either, and may well fear that unknown; and that I should be using this to my advantage.

Does everyone do this? Is there a name for it?

PSA

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:01:34 GMT

I am in the San Francisco area until Friday (the 25th). Hang out with me!

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:15:25 GMT

Today I learned what a NOM2 EDGE network is. (It is sadly not related to the nomfunctor.)

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10115034-233.html?tag=mncol;title

I don't have an iPhone to try this with, but sure enough, T-mobile's EDGE network is Pittsburgh is NOM2, which does seem to explain why my G1 has problems receiving calls when using data.

Since this seems to be well-documented, why is it so hard to find out? >.>

On the plus side, I've heard a rumor that T-Mobile may have 3G service planned for Pittsburgh. Pretty please?

PSA

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:54:00 GMT

I will be visiting Redondo Beach, August 15-19.

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:40:00 GMT

For Unix wizards out there: Here is a neat puzzle I just solved for a coworker. See if you can solve it. :-)

# Pipeline that prints every line in somefile:
cat somefile | while read FOO; do echo $FOO; done

Output:

line1
line2
...

# Pipeline that should do something on a remote host for every line in somefile:
cat somefile | while read FOO; do echo $FOO; ssh remotehost "<some command>"; echo "DONE."; done

Output:

line1
<output of ssh command>
DONE.
<END OF OUTPUT>

Why does the loop only seem to run once? (You can try this on your own system; for an example, try using '/etc/passwd' for somefile, and 'id' for the command. My guess is you will get the same problem; if you don't I'd be interested to hear that.)

EDIT: Wow, time to first complete answer: 38 minutes. I will remember to ask elljay next time I am perplexed. I was wondering aloud to my coworker as I posted this whether anyone on my friendslist did enough shellscripting to care about this puzzle. :-)

(I think it took us about half an hour to figure it out also, because I think that's about the length of the meeting we were ignoring while we fiddled with it.)

PSA

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:10:31 GMT

Public Service Announcement:

Google is hiring [more]! ;-)

Message me in some fashion for details / to express interest.

Swine flu

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:03:15 GMT

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.

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:15:10 GMT

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.

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:53:38 GMT

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.

KGB puzzlehunt coming up!

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:48:01 GMT

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?

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:09:48 GMT

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.

Need [Pittsburgh] housing?

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:28:39 GMT

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

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:22:18 GMT

I seem to have a blister between two of my toes.

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

Mystery Hunt!

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 03:01:06 GMT

[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 obviousness of the fact that 8 answers <-> 8 planets in the Pluto meta: Never ever refrain from saying something during hunt just because it's obvious. ;-) It took the Sages a surprising number of hours to catch on to that one (which was the first meta we solved.)

I completely agree on the coolness of the Doctor round, in particular Buzzcut/9th doctor's puzzle. As someone who's never so much as solved a diagramless crossword before (they always looked hard! ;-), I was absolutely floored by the beauty of that puzzle. In retrospect we should have listed the answers out in gridded rows, just as you did, and if we'd done so we would probably have seen it sooner. The AHA of the overlapping answers, which you guys got _before_ the AHA of finding the grid, we didn't get until afterwards.

In addition to never refraining from saying obvious things, you should never refrain from saying dumb things during the hunt. I believe it took fully three different times of people saying things prefaced with "this is dumb, but" for us to solve this puzzle. :-) The first was "hey, this sounds dumb, but what if that wormhole picture is the grid?" Honestly I can't even remember who said it, I was so tired at the time. At that point we had already been analyzing anything else we could come up with to use as grids, so several people immediately noted that not only was it 15 across (suspiciously promising) it had just about the right number of squares for all the answers to fit, in which it differed from every other thing we had tried, including e.g. the board (_very_ suspiciously promising!) so despite skepticism we started throwing letters on it.

We had no idea what to do, so we decided "yeah, this is dumb, all these answers are completely unchecked, there's no way this could be the puzzle! But we'll just start listing answers in rows in the grid, because we have no better ideas." So we started with the first row, ran it to the right edge, then turned it 90 degrees and ran it down until we ran out of letters. We proceeded with about 7 rows before cooler heads decided this was never going anywhere.

I think we were actually on the verge of deciding to erase it and try something else when Alan [I hope I got his name right...], whose last name I don't even know, but he's brilliant and timid, came in and said "you know, this is dumb, it's probably nothing, but I see the word 'iceberg' in there..." and then several people called out words in the following couple of rows, and we all started applauding and told Alan to please talk more. :-D

It actually took 3 or 4 minutes before someone _else_ called out "hey, those aren't just words. They're answers!!" And that was the point at which we got _really_ excited. ;-)

Anyway, I went on at such length about this puzzle because it was my absolute favorite puzzle of the hunt, and it was a joy to help solve it. We had about a dozen people in the room, which was pretty much capacity, and the excitement was palpable. (Recall, in case you'd forgotten, we're a very large team.) I found it so much of a joy to help solve the puzzle, I barely had room for anger and disappointment when it told us something we already knew, after all those hours. :-P (We never did solve the actual meta. Checkers?! This was clued how? Oh well. At least it didn't involve a map of the Senate.)

I agree with you on the excessive number of AHA! moments per meta, and the partially-resultant degree of bottlenecking present in the Hunt. If you guys didn't like the bottlenecks, imagine being on a team of over 100 people with nothing left but two metas and about three other puzzles unlocked, at the end of the first round, for probably over an hour. :-\ Every single metapuzzle was a long hard-fought struggle, and it was just too many hard-fought struggles for one hunt. They all seemed to require nearly all the round answers, and in each half of the hunt you had to solve all metapuzzles to move forward; and every single meta had quite a few leaps, which to me felt more unchecked than not (although once they put the puzzle site back up, I think I'm going to take a more detailed look at "number of unchecked intuitive leaps per metapuzzle".)

It ultimately felt like for every meta, we kept Seeing How it Worked!!! and then we couldn't solve it, and we iterated that enough times to despair at getting to the end of any of them.

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". ;-)

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:36:06 GMT

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. ;-)

Buyer Beware

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 20:24:57 GMT

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.

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:01:07 GMT

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. :-)

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:07:30 GMT

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.

Me -> Los Angeles

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:53:30 GMT

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...

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:12:10 GMT

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?

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:27:10 GMT

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. ;-)

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:35:58 GMT

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. :-)]

Psychic Night at the Geller Hotel: Interactive puzzle event!

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:04:34 GMT

[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