The Blandfill Blog » danny

Games

danny — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 04:35:39 +0000

So today I went to the Google Games, an event at the Google Cambridge office involving a bunch of geeky competitive events.

Highlights:

There was a music-identification round (part of a larger trivia round), during which they rickrolled us and played awesome music like the Firefly theme, Korobeiniki, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar, and Dragostea Din Tei. Unfortunately, I was unable to correctly name Korobeiniki, as I have long held the misconception that it is called Kalinka. (I’ve been disabused of the notion before, but still couldn’t remember the right name.)
There was a puzzle round; I spent the last half hour or so working through about 70 cases of one puzzle, looking for the one that satisfied certain conditions. At the one-minute-remaining mark, I had three cases left. I managed to eliminate one more of them, and then sent in the other two as answers, feeling sure that I had missed the answer. Instead, one of them was correct! I was both happy and sad.
I was really excited to play Wii Sports Resort (there were supposed to be rounds in rowing, basketball, skydiving, and swordplay), and I was the only one on the team who’d played before, so we kind of figured I’d do them all. Then they said each person should only do one event, so we decided to be good competitors (they almost definitely wouldn’t've noticed had I done them all), and two other people did the first two events (I wanted to do swordplay). Then time ran short and the last two rounds were canceled. I was and remain severely disappointed.
We were the highest-ranking Harvard team (the first five spots went to MIT). Success!
Foosball. Playing with new people was fun. There was a left-handed table there (you shoot left instead of right); interesting, but it was also a really bad table.

interview

danny — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:24:36 +0000

I had a phone interview with D.E. Shaw today (I’m applying for a summer internship there). I was kind of afraid I’d get asked about what I wanted to get out of it and where I wanted to be in ten years, which I would’ve had an awkward time answering (that is, arguably, a bad thing in its own right, but never mind). It turned out to be basically fact-based, so that was okay. I talked about the work I did with an astronomy professor last term; the interviewer had me talk about how we processed the data, then asked me some questions about the statistics of it. I remembered the process pretty well, though I guess I wasn’t very clear and had to retry some of it. I remembered the Poisson distribution, but he asked about the conditions for one to be approximated by a normal distribution, which I didn’t really remember. I said it’s acceptable when the expected number of events is at least 20, which turns out to be about right.

After that he asked how to do quickselect, which I answered fairly well, and how to partition an array in place, which was okay, though I didn’t say it very smoothly. Then he asked a pretty simple probability question, which I sort of figured out how to do pretty quickly in kind of a neat way, but it was different from what he was expecting and I didn’t explain it very well, so that kind of fell down. I got the expected method with some prompting, but I really should’ve made it more clear that I actually knew what I was doing. I think he did somewhat recognize what I was saying, at least. Still, I think that was quite a trip-up.

“I will stomp on things to focus my mental energies, or ‘menergies’.”
– T-Rex

GChat

danny — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:26:04 +0000

Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.

The result:

(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)

Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.

I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.

So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw

uneven wet bricks = traction fail

danny — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:09:12 +0000

Stars

danny — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:11:36 +0000

This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.

As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.

Cassiopeia over the horizon.

Orion.

Big Dipper.

This is the PLEIADES.

And now for something completely different.

This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.

xeyes!

danny — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:10:53 +0000

Sometimes when I’m not using my giant CRT monitor, I put xclock on it. (Okay, so I’ve only done it once before today.) Today I decided that that was boring, so I remembered xeyes:

They stare into your soul.

Unrelatedly:

Please disregard the post below.

danny — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:30:11 +0000

Nothing to see here, move along.

Scooter

danny — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:09:35 +0000

I’ve started using a scooter to get around:

It's a scooter!

The flute section is highly appreciative; other people are generally less so. Or at least they don’t say it much.

Unrelatedly, all my sections for all my classes conflict with everything; the ones that don’t are at inconvenient times. I’m currently looking at having a half hour free between 11:00 and 10:00 on Wednesdays.

“I’m pooched, man! I’m pooched!”
- T-Rex

danny — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:32:43 +0000

I haven’t posted anything yet, so I suppose I will.

Classes:
I’m currently planning to take Physics 143a, Physics 15c, CS 175 (Graphics), Math 122, and English 182 (Sci Fi). I’m also intending to audit CS 50 (everyone’s taking it!) and Astronomy 17, and possibly CS 153 and CS 61, though 15c conflicts with a half hour of 61. Also, I have the 61 book, so I might just try to read it.

That will be all for now.

Failure is just success rounded down, my friend!
- T-Rex