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Saturday, 2006 April 29, 15:03 — language, mathematics, neep-neep

how’s your German?

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes are quite what I’m after, and I think it may miss some solutions.)

Would I pay for a translation? Well, I’m obscenely broke these days, but I might.

Tuesday, 2006 March 21, 14:22 — neep-neep

another one for Perry?

How many MacOS experts read this?

When I launch Grapher, I get a Warning:

Font Conflict
Several characters (Greek letters, e.g.) cannot be displayed correctly because of a conflict between the installed fonts. If you are using MathType, please make sure that version 5.0a or higher is installed.

Font Book’s function “Resolve Duplicates” does not help. Any suggestions?

Sunday, 2006 March 5, 22:34 — neep-neep

life imitates art

In Bruce Sterling‘s wonderful novel Schismatrix (1985), the spaceship Red Consensus has an interesting feature:

The control room . . . had been designed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that instruments should use acoustic signals. . . . Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a combination of heartbeat and brain.

Now:

the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system.

(Cited by Sore Eyes.)

Sunday, 2006 March 5, 21:17 — neep-neep

the real reason

An acquaintance writes:

Eudora remains my client of choice because

  1. I’m used to it
  2. My attitude is Augustinian: “Make me a LINUX user, but not quite yet.”
  3. I love the splash screen, which looks like an insane mailman manically throwing people’s letters away over his shoulder.
Thursday, 2006 March 2, 11:13 — neep-neep

technology marches on

I had a bitch of a time uploading files for the new version of WordPress. It’s my first update since migrating from the Linux box to the Mac Mini, and the ftp client I have is crap compared to gftp which came with Gnome.

And I see I’ve (partly) broken my theme: it can’t display single posts. Until I get around to repairing/rewriting it, you get this generic theme.

Monday, 2006 February 20, 18:39 — cartoons, neep-neep

the wonderful thing about standards

is that there are so many to choose from!

Elsewhere in the wonderful world of webtoons, how to stand out from the crowd.

Wednesday, 2005 November 23, 14:37 — me!me!me!, neep-neep

possibly not one of my brightest ideas ever

If my new printer’s resolution is 1200 dots/inch, then a sheet of gringo-standard letter paper with half-inch margins can take an image of 9000 by 12000 pixels. As a test, therefore, I rendered one of my most complex Povray images at that size. It took 182 hours.

Now if I can find a program that will open an image that big . . . .

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