dolphinling's weblog

vdash

dolphinling — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:41:34 +0000

http://vdash.org/ looks very interesting. It also looks like the kind of thing that could help me practice with really formalizing my proofs (though I think currently I usually know how, I’m just too lazy).

Your youtube four meme

dolphinling — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:09:40 +0000

So I don’t think I’ve ever posted a meme on here, but this one from Christopher Blizzard is kinda cool.

Open your fancy Firefox 3 browser.
2. Click on the awesomebar and type in ‘youtube’.
3. Post the first four videos that come up.

Here are mine.

Comments reenabled

dolphinling — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:38:58 +0000

So after only a year and two months, comments are finally reenabled here. I’m now using Akismet and Bad Behavior for spam blocking. Hopefully, it will work out well enough to leave it open (I didn’t like having to skim through 200 spams a day to find the on average 0 actual comments there).

Wikipedia is supposed to make it EASIER to slack off, right?

dolphinling — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:46:59 +0000

So I have a paper to research on coding theory (error correcting codes and the like) and I’ve been reading wikipedia pages for a few hours. I go to get a mint and decide it’s time to take a short break while I play around with the circular mints, trying to pack as many into one layer of the container as possible. As I read the wikipedia page on sphere packing, I come across

Sphere packing on the corners of a hypercube (with the spheres defined by Hamming distance) corresponds to designing error-correcting codes: if the spheres have radius d, then their centers are codewords of a d-error-correcting code. Lattice packings correspond to linear codes. There are other, subtler relationships between Euclidean sphere packing and error-correcting codes; thus, the binary Golay code is closely related to the 24-dimensional Leech lattice.

Grr. Stupid wikipedia, I was trying to slack off. >:o

Automatic updates

dolphinling — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:16:34 +0000

This has got to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen about Mozilla as a platform.

Grey Text Considered Harmful (to your eyes)

dolphinling — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 15:04:58 +0000

Dear everyone,

Please do not use grey text on a white background. Use black. Grey is harder to read, causes more strain on the eyes, and makes me less likely to read what you say. Really. I recently realized that one weblog I used to read a lot I wasn’t liking nearly as much recently, not because the content was worse, but because it was actually more work to read and that made it not worth it.

So don’t do it. Please. Or I’ll just stop reading your stuff (maybe not even consciously).

And yes, I am aware that this blog uses it, by virtue of the default wordpress theme. I only just realized that, and am fixing it now.

Edit: So a wordpress update broke this for a few days. Fixed now.

Today I learned (2007-08-25)

dolphinling — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 17:39:19 +0000

Today I learned that sort -R (random) will place two (or more) identical lines together in the output, even though the order will change each time it’s run (even with identical input). I wonder how they do this. Maybe they put everything in a hash, but with a random salt?