Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators

Mark Lentczner recently made a Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators. Mark's blog was Slashdotted via this article about his periodic table. I have mirrored a copy of the table on my server. The table is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

My mirror: PeriodicTable.pdf

My own linux-based home entertainment system

GeeXBox is a Linux distro meant to be used to allow any computer to become a home entertainment system. I found out about GeeXBox when it was in its 0.9 stage. It was alright back then but it had some bugs and was a bit glitchy. GeeXBox 0.97 is out now and it is incredible! GeeXBox has TV-out support, support for common controllers, the ability to find and play any shared media on the network, an internal FTP server to allow anyone on the network to remote the file system, and support for many different media formats. Many settings in GeeXBox can be customized by Windows or Linux users by downloading the ISO generator and changing/replacing files before the ISO is re-created. I have created two Matrix-style themes for GeeXBox that can be found on GeeXdB.net.

I am planning to build a shuttle box this summer that I will hook into our TV and stereo system. The video card will have to have SVIDEO support and will probably some kind of nVidia. The sound card will need to be very good. 512MB RAM should be good. GeeXBox is live-cd based so it loads itself into RAM on boot and I want to be able to cache as much of the movie I am watching as possible. The CPU does not need to be fancy; just as much as a DVD requires. The motherboard should have USB 2.0 support (I believe it is standard anyways). The motherboard does not need built-in audio or video; however a built-in NIC would be nice.

Blogger, RSS Feeds, and Creative Commons

Blogger's new features and new look is awesome and everyone seems to be loving it. One thing that Blogger is still missing though is a way for users to customize their RSS feeds more. (For those of you who don't know what RSS is check out What is an RSS Feed? and Introduction to RSS). Users of Blogger can currently edit their website template and the HTML code in their posts but they do not have the ability to alter their RSS feed in any way. Blogger probably does this so people cannot mess up their RSS feed and render it useless. A good way for Blogger to allow editing is to allow users to add some extra select tags to their feed to allow some more flexiblity. The RSS tags are really the only thing that need editing.

The reason I thought of this is because I recently licensed my blog under a Creative Commons license to allow people to re-distribute my work, make derivative works from it, and even sell my work as long as they give me credit for it and license their work under the same Creative Commons license. This allows the words I am writting here to be heard legally by means of open-source-like redistribution. Anyways, after licensing my work I found that I could put a few tags into my RSS feed and people would know, if they accessed my blog via the feed, that the work was still licensed under the Creative Commons license. I then realized that there was no way for me to edit the feed without logging into my server and manually editing it. Blogger doesn't currently allow users to edit their feeds in any way

My idea for Blogger is to create a few form fields (HTML input boxes) to allow users to add the correct tags to their document to inform users about the licensing information of their feed. Each post should have its own licensing tag (which will proabably be the same for all posts). An example of the licensing tag is:

<cc:License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">

The whole blog should also have some other tags in it to denote what rights the reader has. More information about denoting a creative commons license in an RSS 1.0 feed can be found at RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: mod_cc.

Converting from Decimal to Binary

I discussed the algorithm one would use to convert decimal to binary. I decided that it would probably be easiest to start of with a simple method simlar to this:

$decnum = <STDIN>; # get input from the user

while($decnum<0) { # squeeze all the ones in possible



  for ($x = 1; $x <= $decnum; $x = $x * 2) {

  # find the largest number that where { log(x)/log(2) = W (W is a whole number) }

    $maxnum = $x;

  }

  $decnum -= $maxnum; # subtract the binary-based num. we have so we can loop

  push (@onevals, $maxnum); # store the binary-based num. for later use



}

$currentnum = shift(@onevals); # get the largest binary-based num. we put in storage

$binarynum = "1"; # add a 1 in front (this is our starting point)



for($x = 1; $x < $currentnum; $x = $x * 2) { # add the appropriate number of zeros

  $binarynum .= "0";

}



while(@onevals) { # add all the ones in the right spots

  $currentnum = shift(@onevals); # find the next largest binary-based number

  $binarynum ~= /0(0{log($currentnum - 1)})$/; # find where the next one should go

  $binarynum = $` . 1 . $1; # add the one in there

}

print "$decnum in binary is: $binarynum"; # print the result

Please realize that this code was just written off the top of my head and I haven't even tried it yet. Perl is almost never bug-free for me the first time. Its the basic idea though.

Pirate and blame it on your neighbor

if( $fed_trouble )
{
print "It wasn't be";
&crash;
}

This Slashdot article poses the idea of opening up your wireless LAN to the world so that you can do what you like and claim it was a neighbor or a wardriver. On our home wireless firewall we have MAC address restriciton and a DHCP setup. Both of these would have to be turned off to allow outsiders (and you) to access your LAN and anonymously use it. This would allow people to ruin your bandwidth; plus I doubt the authorities would believe that you didn't know what you were doing.

Long time no post

I haven't posted in a while. I've been posting to p2p galore some recently. I just realized how easy it is to download episodes of CSI or one of those other investigating-type shows. I can get the newest CSI espisode recorded from an HDTV in an hour or two via bittorrent. I use SharpReader to see when my favorite (blogs && news sites && torrent site && other RSS-supported sites) are updated. I just click on the links to the shows in SharpReader and the torrent opens right up.

I use Torrents.co.uk and #TVTORRENTS to find torrents. #TVTORRENTS also has an IRC room on news://irc.efnet.org. The instructions for the IRC chat are at IronFish.org.

I can't wait for the summer.

p2p galore blog

I've created a new blog recenly for p2p filesharing links. The links will be for Bittorrent and emule downloads. Links to downloads movies, games, and software will be available through this blog. If anyone would like to participate in the blog, please visit it and comment on the first post (about the blog).

p2p galore

Pong

To re-program the game Pong you need to consider a few basic variables. The speed of the ball must be kept constant and the slope of the ball must change accordingly when a ball hits an object. The actual slope of the line that the ball is traveling in can be determined by the Pythagorean theorem: A² + B² = C². A is the change in the X axis per millisecond, B is the change in the Y axis per millisecond, and C is the slope of the line.

When the ball hits a flat surface the slope must change to allow the direction of the ball to change. When the ball hits a horizontal flat surface the change in Y must become negative and the change in X must stay the same. When the ball hits a vertical flat surface the change in X must become negative and the change in Y must stay constant. A more accurate game of Pong would include other variables such as a change in slope according to the velocity of the paddle at the moment that it hit the ball and where the ball hit the paddle (the edge or the center). These factors would change the velocity of the ball and would make the game more interesting, however they require much more math.


The previous post was posted from my cell phone while I was at school. I text messaged an email address that can be used to post to my blog. I thought of the ideas behind the making of Pong today after my friend asked how you would go about programming a game of Pong.

I'm posting this from my

I'm posting this from my cell phone. I just realized how difficult it is to make a good game of pong. There r 2Many vars. bye

I'm getting ready for a switch to Linux. This time it will be fairly permanent (I hope). I switched to Linux last winter break for about two weeks. I was using SuSE 9.0 then. I got into making FreeSoftwareReviews and I needed to use Windows to review software. I kind of got stuck in it after finding some new software and leaving my Linux distros to obsolete themselves.

I'm debating about which Linux distro to use as my main system. I have a ridiculous amount of hard drives and I'm hoping to buy two more this summer. I use a Lian Li removable hard drive bay with 8 removable hard drive drawers. At the moment my hard drive status is: [Windows 2000/98 (120gb)], [Slackware 9.1 (8gb)], [Mandrake 9.2/Slackware 9.? (80gb)], [Mandrake 10 (8gb)], [SuSE 9.0 (80gb)], [Longhorn (120gb)], [no OS (300mb)], [empty drive drawer], [empty drive drawer].

I think I might try Linspire (aka Lindows), Fedora Core 2 this summer (I tried Fedora Core 1 already). I think I will be switching to either Mandrake 10, SuSE 9.1, or Slackware 9.1. I had a little crashing problem in Mandrake 10 (probably because I multi-tasked a little too much). I would love to switch to Slackware permanently but I'm not very familiar with updating my system regularly, patching it myself and such. If there was a service I could use to do this while in Slackware (or a website that recommends what to update frequently) I may give it a try. If Fedora Core 2 impresses me more than Core 1 did, I may even switch to it. Any suggestions are welcome (*hint hint*).

I changed the name of this blog to chmod 311 because I think it suites the blog and my life in general well. For those of you who have never had to change file permissions on a Unix-based system, chmod is a command that alters read/write/execute permissions of a file according to the user, group, and the rest of the world. The basic system for changing permissions is based on numbers. 1 represents read permissions, 2 represents write permissions, and 4 represents execute permissions.

The basic file permissions chart:
	user	group	everyone
read	1	1	1
write	2	2	3
execute	4	4	4

Most of the files I deal with, including many of the files on my harddrive can be read and written by me and can be seen by the whole world. In this way I can share many different files and allow others to use them yet keep people from changing those files on my computer. (This is how it works on most p2p clients)

sURL is an awesome new site that can make a URL very short or *very* long. It was made by an ACF member. (ACF stands for alt.comp.freeware, it is a newsgroup for discussion of freeware). Here are some of my sURLs:
http://surl.co.uk/?232, http://surl.co.uk/?233, http://surl.co.uk/?174, http://surl.co.uk/?268, http://surl.co.uk/?269

I started creating a very simple JavaScript script (I know it sounds redundant) that searches the top freeware directories. So far the script can only search by opening new windows for each website. Soon there will be a feature for framed version of this searching script. The first version of the script can be found at http://www.freesoftwarereviews.com/freewaresearch10A.html.