Archive for category the Internet
Games
Posted by danny in college life, computers, science, the Internet, video games on April 3, 2010
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
Posted by danny in Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet on February 3, 2010
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
Severe internet withdrawal
Posted by charles in computers, the Internet on January 13, 2010
Ah, the great firewall of China. It’s been over two weeks since I’ve had access to facebook, YouTube (I have no idea what kind of video Tom embedded in the post below), blogspot, fmylife, Harvardfml, and select Wikipedia articles (including the one on the great firewall of china).
I’m almost having trouble wasting time on the internet; luckily, failblog and the Onion are still accessible. My Google searches are also limited although I was able to access images of the Tiananmen square incident while I was in Beijing.
Interestingly, Google is considering abandoning its Chinese operations.
More interestingly, why isn’t the most morally decadent site on the internet, 4chan, blocked?
Gotta go, angry voices are knocking at my door.
A silly post. Happy ‘teens, Blandfill!
Posted by tom in computers, science, the Internet, video games, videos on January 9, 2010
I’m making a silly post! This is so I can make a more thoughtful post later without having any backlogged sillyness to interfere.
I’ve been playing Diablo 2! I finally beat Duriel. I’m a necromancer and I summon skeletons. That game is hard and sometimes repetitive so I’m gonna lay off for a while.
There was a robotics kickoff! I didn’t sleep last night! Instead I played Diablo 2 with Nico. Nico has returned to school, to the best of my knowledge. So, today I am pulling an all-day-er. I made up this term; it describes when you have been up all night for some reason and, if you were a rational person, you’d go to sleep as soon as you were done with whatever was keeping you up all night. But I decided I want to stay up so that my sleep clock (totes not a biology person, someone explain why it exists) isn’t all screwed up, and I’m trying to make it all the way to normal-people’s-bedtime so I can be set all right and stuff. It’s about 9:20 PM as I’m writing this sentence so I think I’ve been mostly successful! Also hugely sleep deprived, which is why this post is a collection of words that lack logic or intelligence behind them.
Adrian sent this out over that one email list: http://www.dontevenreply.com/
I countered with http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php and http://www.27bslash6.com/
Here’s a silly video to break up the pace:
I have been playing the xkcd game for like two whole hours without ending. (The xkcd game is something we made up, I think, where you click “random” until you get a repeated comic.) Usually it doesn’t take more than 20 minutes, but I’ve been going really slow and leisurely, analyzing the details of each drawing, trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the jokes. (Like backslash escape sequences, for example — something I wouldn’t catch in a handcuffs reference even if I was vaguely familiar with the idea when comic 234 came out). I think my patience to do it so slowly is very related to my sleep-dep-ness; reading xkcd endlessly is trance-like.
I am reasonably sure that I haven’t been just forgetting which ones I’ve seen since I began playing, since my browser cache would load previously seen images instantly but all the comics I come across load noticeably slower than instantly.
I imagine this blog post is pretty boring. I’m streaming all over my consciousness right now.
This comic is funny.
To come, two posts (which I might combine into one) on less playful topics: A) New year’s resolution (1240×1480? ^_^), B) What happens to me when I am at home.
CS50 Projects!
Posted by blandfill in college life, computers, science, the Internet on December 13, 2009
Hey everyone, as you may or may not have known, the CS50 fair was this past Tuesday, and three of us participated (Danny’s too good for CS50, although we did try to get him to TF the course).
Note: The cloud is being reset on January 1, 2010, so the links will no longer work soon.
Charles’ Project:
An automated trading system analyzer written in Python3 (eventually going to be moved to its own domain). http://cloud.cs50.net/~li15/fp/
Duncan’s Project:
A course selection tool that randomly selects appropriate Core classes. http://cloud.cs50.net/~dwatts/final
Tom’s Project:
An interactive speech recognition program named “Hal Py-Thousand.” Source Code: http://www.blandfill.com/tomstuff/CS50.rar
Danny:
Look at the post below for one of Danny’s many projects. http://www.blandfill.com/2009/12/13/gchat/
GChat
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, hacks, science, the Internet, video games, videos on December 13, 2009
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
Long overdue
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 25, 2009
Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.
Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Stars
Posted by danny in Music, Uncategorized, college life, computers, science, the Internet, videos on November 19, 2009
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.
This is the PLEIADES.
And now for something completely different.
This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.
Blogs are wonderful means of procrastination
Posted by duncan in Music, college life, science, the Internet on November 1, 2009
This has been a pretty fun weekend. I’m going to tell you about it. Lucky you! As an aside, everything I’ve done in the following had the effect of postponing the completion of my CS50 problem set that was due 26 hours ago (as of yet uncompleted). But I digress.
This turned out to be Freshman Parents’ Weekend, which involved some fun awkward gigs for band, and a great Glee Club concert. We went to Sanders Theater and played some fight songs. They had a very strange panel table, and two comfy red chairs enclosed by two coffee tables with water jugs and glasses on them. Obviously, when it come time to play Ten Thou, Ed and I sat in those chairs. I had a good time with that. Then there was a rehearsal from 4-6, which made getting to Sanders in tails at 6:30 a bit of an issue, but an easily resolved one (and resolved it was, by leaving the rehearsal early).
The Glee Club concert went fantastically. It was great to be on stage in front of an almost full house, although I had forgotten how much I sweat while under those bright lights.
Everything you just read was written about a week ago, mostly because I got tired of blogging and stopped. Then I felt guilty for not blogging in three weeks, so I’m going to finish this now. Isn’t that fun? Since the last time I posted, my cell phone has been acting strange. I woke up about 6 hours after going to sleep Sunday morning and discovered that my cell phone had a funny colored bar on the left side o the screen. I was perturbed, but not too worried; I could still use it, right? Well. As the day went on, I found that every other row of pixels had turned white, so I could only half see what was on the screen. Again, not a huge deal, I could see what I was doing, but I was beginning to get a little worried. By the time I went to sleep that night, my cell phone screen had turned completely white, and as of right now it has a lovely crack across the screen from me banging it to see if that would make it work better. Turns out it didn’t. Regardless, my phone still works, but now I just don’t text, and I have to hope that whoever calls me is someone I actually want to talk to.
Oh yes, the HUB 90th reunion was this past weekend, and it was fantastic; I’ll be posting the video of it as soon as it goes online. It’s worth a watch. Granted, there are bands that are 300+ without alumni, but something about seeing 40 years worth of crusties and undergrads scramble on a field is very impressive; it’s like Brownian motion, but with a purpose. Pretty cool, eh? That in itself makes this post a science post. I’ll link to the wikipedia article on Brownian Motion as well. Now this post can be about the Internet as well! Fantastic!
Stuck
Posted by charles in college life, the Internet on October 14, 2009
Funny things can happen when you’re the moderator for a mailing list but don’t have the password. You would think that I would be able to post emails to the list, but I am required to approve my own messages.
