Pug’s Place

Several topics to toss in tonight’s update, so I’ll go in order.

1. Chasing Jimbo Wales

A group I’m involved in here on campus (Florida Free Culture) has arranged and secured funding to bring Jimbo (Jimmy) Wales to UF on Wednesday, April 12 2006. Jimbo is the founder of Wikipedia (and the whole of Wikimedia’s offerings, actually). He’s The Man behind the open encyclopedia concept. Anyway, I’m helping in various small ways to make sure this thing happens. We’ve just kicked into super- ultra- mega- crazy organizing mode to do all of the invites, secure panelists for a panel about various free culture-ish topics to occur after Jimbo’s keynote speech, publicize and followup the event in a positive way.

This should end up being a really fun event. First, Jimbo will be giving a keynote about Wikipedia, research and higher education (among other things I’m sure). Then he’ll be sitting on a panel with four other persons addressing specifics about open access to research information, open file formats (instead of MS Word files, for example) among other topics. Hopefully it’ll attract plenty of influential people, and even some students.

Amusingly, it’s about 8 people (including E. and myself) who are managing this whole task.

2. New ‘Top Music’ list

Since I’ve somewhat stopped using IMMS my favorite music list was getting rather stale. I’ve changed it now to show the songs I’ve played the most in the last week. Might be more entertaining.

3. Programming Contests

The UF ACM Programming Team is hosting programming contests here this semester to get more explosure and generate more student interest. The first of these contests was last weekend - 10 students competed, what I’d call an excellent turnout for our first try. I assisted in judging, so I couldn’t win anything. We’re planning at least two more, one of which is rather large, is in 10 days and is being put together by a large amount of sweat from my brow.

On February 25th the University of Central Florida is driving three teams and support personnel here to compete against seven UF programming teams in a full-scale 5 hour programming contest. I’ve reserved a computer lab and a classroom, garnered support from my department’s chairman, purchased $300 in prizes, had guest accounts created for computer access, acquired money to purchase food and drinks for competitors and advertised, advertised, advertised. Amazingly, a quick count in the RSVP account shows that we are only one person shy of our effective maximum number of UF students. So it looks like from a turnout aspect we’ll be success full!

My team consists of myself, Tim Smith and Justin Michalczak. We are “Team gump/tion zebra”, an ‘in’ joke, referring to the third line of the sample input of one of the problems Tim wrote for last weekend’s contest.

Oh, and last night I judged the “First Annual Codeslingers Shootout” at the Gator Linux Users Group meeting. The problem was selected by the LUG organizer, Clint, and was the classic Game Show problem:

Monty shows you three curtains.

Behind two of the curtains there is a silly gag prize. Behind one of the curtains is a really nice prize (like a new car). The prizes are randomly distributed before each game. But, there is always one nice prize and two silly prizes. Monty asks you to pick one of the curtains. Monty then opens one of the curtains that has a silly gag prize behind it. The audience has a good laugh.

Then Monty turns to you and says, “I’ll give you a choice. You may stick with your original selection or you can switch doors right now.”

What should you do? There are 3 possible answers: One, keep your original selection. Two, switch. Or, three, it doesn’t matter.

Your program will show either by algorithm or simulation the one correct answer from these 3.

The winner was Eric Lavigne, “Fastest Codeslinger 2006″, who wrote a correct solution in 9 minutes in ~12 lines of CLISP. I wrote two reference solutions in 15 minutes before the contest in both C++ and Java and they’re here, if you’re interested: [Java, C++]. Amusingly (and not at all obviously), the solution is to always switch doors. See basically, when you select one of the doors in the beginning you have a 1/3 chance of getting the grand prize. Then a door is removed, but your original selection still has a 1/3 chance of being right. The probability of your first choice does not improve. Which means that the remaining door has a 2/3 chance of being right. Since 2/3 > 1/3, you should always change doors.Edit: Correct fraction size. 1/3+1/2 did not = 1. Was tired, sorry.

People can debate this solution for hours because it does totally fly in the face of common sense, but programatically you can simulate (or calculate) exactly what happens to the probabilities and see that yes, you should always switch.

4. Class Notes

I noticed something which amused me today. Let me frame it in the form of a question: Those of you taking classes now, how many pages of notes have you taken for your courses so far this semester?

At present, 1.5 months into a 4 month term, I’ve taken the following volume of notes:

• Distributed Operating Systems: 3 lines, one of which is the name of the course (misspelled as “Distributed Oberoning Systems”
• Concurrent Programming: 2.2 pages, front and back
• Networking Security: 1 page, front and back

Now, I do write very small, but still… I realized today that I don’t kill nearly as many trees as the majority of the people in my classes. Yet I still learn the material. At some point in the last four years I figured out that no matter how detailed I make my notes, I never go back and re-read them so, well, why take heavy notes?

Anyway, I’d love to be amused by your experiences / utter hatred. Flame on.

5. Other news

James and I bought Sunkist last weekend. I’m sipping at one now. Orange soda is so underrated.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (which I recieved at the end of January) and occasionally doing homework. I know, I should be working on Gpremacy. I will soon, I will…

I did some work on our apartment’s server today (whose address is not for public knowledge), among other things I added SSL support to its web server. But to add SSL support I needed a key. Most people just generate their own key and sign it themselves, which works fine (but makes web browsers pop up a “hey, we don’t trust this key signer…” message). I, however, am too clever. So, without paying anything I have a key signed by a central key authority. How, you ask? I pulled out my quantum computer prototype and recreated their private key.

No, just kidding. I actually signed up with CAcert.org, a free certificate authority. All you have to do is authenticate your domain (by responding to an email sent to admin@yourdomain.net), upload a Certificate Request and download your new signed certificate. This was nicely explained at the Gentoo Wiki, so it was a relatively painless operation. The only thing to remember is to use your website’s hostname (e.g.: pugsplace.net) for the Common Name field, even though the prompt (on my version of openssl) said “Enter your name.”.

Sidenote: to install CAcert’s root certificate in your web browser so that your browser trusts them, just click here: CACert’s Root Certificate (PEM Format).

I was a complete moron. I bought PugsPlace.net. Somehow I completely missed that it wasn’t already owned this morning. I could have sworn I looked! Unless it expired today (which is improbable)…

Anyway, the site’s back to its good ‘ol name. No need to panic.

Summary: New website: http://www.PugsPlace.net/

Aftermath: Now, I’ve got PugsPlaza.net for a year. I’m going to come up with something suitably odd to do with that domain. Stay posted.

Pug’s Place is now called Pug’s Plaza. The reason for the name change is simple: I just bought http://www.PugsPlaza.net/. I’d have bought PugsPlace.something if any of them were available… but I didn’t really feel like being PugsPlace.co.uk or PugsPlace.biz.
This has also prompted yet another server movement, the second in a week. But now I’m hosted at DreamHost.com, and since I’ve already paid for a year of hosting, I had best not be moving the site any more.

But hey, I’ve got email back up. That’s highly important.

This is actually a test of my wp-mail script after a request from Hans-Goeran Puke. He wanted automatic image scaling to be done for images posted by email and by Sprint phones.

If it works for him, I’ll post this new version at the standard place.

I’ve made some updates to my wp-mail.php hack for Sprint PCS phones (old story). The ChangeLog is below for the last few versions.

Download from Pug’s Random Bits of Code place, as normal.

* Version 0.3.3 (23 April 2005)
* - Stop using random numbers for the filenames — use datestamps
* (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
* - Add automatic image resizing (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
* - Yet another fix for Sprint Picture Share emails
* (patrick AT princephotography DOT com)
*
* Version 0.3.2
* - Allow multiple Sprint pictures at a time to work (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)
*
* Version 0.3.14159265, Shoop Edition
* - Support the new (April 2005) Sprint Picture Share emails (jcjones AT ufl DOT edu)

Ladies and gentlemen, with the power of Planet Planet, I have created Planet Pug! It’s a collection of most of my comrades’ blogs. The original intention was to make it simple for me to read everyone’s blogs from my cell phone (with or without a cool java RSS midlet).

So I’ve got this planet that syndicates everyone’s blog. Now you can go to a single hourly-updating spot to find out all about what everyone’s doing. You can also syndicate *this* feed, so that Firefox shows the latest posts (howto) or use anything else you’d like. There’s also a minimal HTML version suitable for cell phones, etc. Find all these on the right-hand side of the page under “Viewing Options.”

Note: E’s blog is not yet being posted on the page. For some reason her blog’s causing exceptions in Planet. I’ll try to fix this sometime soon.

I apologize if this post is really disjointed, as E. just pointed out, I’m rather ill today. I had a great bass voice last night though, and was only able to speak in a funny accent. I don’t remember much of last night, actually… ah well. Time to do something that requires no brainpower — study Man’s Food.

I’ve done a few things to my blog this morning:

1. I added Gravatars to the blog. So if you have a Gravatar.com account, you get an icon next to your comments here. You can sign up when posting a comment if you like. All icons have to be rated by human beings as to their content (movie ratings), so it takes a little while between uploading an icon and having it show up, but trust me, they’ll be there.
2. My comments get a “blog author” tag next to them, and registered users get a “subscribed” tag, shamelessly stolen from the awesome Tempus Fugit blog. Nobody is allowed to register on my blog at present, so nobody gets the subscribed tag, but that might change in the future, donno.

Anyway, the Gravatar thing seems cool. I am looking forward to adding personality to the blog comments.

I’ve switched to using WordPress as my blog software of choice. I’ve also written a PyBlosxom import utility which I used to import all of my entries and comments (woo!). I’ll put it online for everyone’s use sometime soon.

I’ve got a lot of neat stuff turned on that isn’t visible yet since I need to customize the layout / graphics of the blog. There is no lack of cool plugins for WordPress. Expect neato random stuff being added in the general future, as well as a couple misc. plugins I’ll be writing to do things like the favorite music display.

Now it’s time to grab food before seeing Twelfth Night at the Phillips Center.

Following the guidelines at Google’s Blog, all URLs and links in comments here have the rel=”nofollow” tag attached to them, a tag which tells Google, Yahoo and MSN not to pay any attention to that link - so thus comment spam here is a complete waste of time.

Have fun, spammers.