Fingertoe.com

Blogged with Flock

Posted by Josh Reighley at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was blogging in the backyard, and down I went. I survived with a scratch on the back, and the macbook is unharmed.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday I was on a helpdesk call... It went something like this:

Caller: When I turn on my computer, I am getting a message saying the power supply type could not be determined. It will not boot into windows.

Me: Can you unplug the computer's power supply and plug it back in?

Caller: Okay, I got that done.

Me: Okay, Now fire it up again and lets see what happens?

Caller: What??

Me: Lets fire it up again.

Caller: Fire it up? What do you mean?

Me: Oh, I am sorry, Lets power it on again.

Caller: Okay, it is working fine now.

So, is "Fire it up" a Northwest idiom? Is it Technical Jargon? I believe I was talking to somebody in the Northeast.. Do most folks have the same response when they hear that phrase as my caller did?

I am glad they didn't have any accelerants handy... ;-)

Posted by Josh Reighley at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A friend from Jr. High and High School, Paul Komarek, now has a blog. Sometimes it makes my head hurt.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been playing with Facebook a bit. It looks fairly slick. Much cleaner than myspace. Only 6 people I correspond with regularly have profiles though.. Hopefully I will find more.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I ran across this link and figured I better share it for the benefit of my good friend Jess

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recently I have tried to spend time doing nothing.

I just sit in a chair, and think.

No television, no internet, no radio, no kids just me.

I did an informal survey at work, and nobody spends any time doing nothing.

How much time do you spend doing nothing?

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance - Yahoo! News

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

$10 wok keeps TV station on air - 22 Feb 2007 - National News - New Zealand Herald

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gmail has a feature where it displays ads on the left side of the email. These ads are selected based on keywords in the body of your email.

Sometimes this is really helpful. If I am talking with one of my nerdy friends about one of my nerdy hobbies, sometimes they are incredibly relevant ads that catch your attention.

Other times these ads are very humorous. I receive an weekly email from my Pastor. Here are some examples of Google ads I get when I read my Church mail:

slave bracelets Affordable, varied selection. Metal bras and bikinis too.

Duck!
The Dick Cheney Survival Bible 250 Ways to Find Cover from the VP

Taser Holsters and More
Good Stuff for the Good Guys Military, Tactical and Duty Gear

Ways To Stay Awake
Information on alertness and energy Learn more at the official website.

Dog Lodge and Bunkhouse
Dog Boarding, Seattle, Bellevue Boarding small dogs under 35 lbs

(this next ad was served on an announcement for the Men's Breakfast)
You Run Girl
A web site devoted to
Average Women Runners

Jess has a habit of replying to 8 or 9 month old emails. Today I got an email from him where he noted that hindsight had shown the prophetic nature of my email. Of course the Google Ads sent me to some prophesy conference website.

I then got the idea might be fun to send an email back and forth in order to gain craziest Google ads.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I bought a MacBook.

So far so good. I am still fumbling my way around a bit, but I am catching on. Keyboard shortcuts seem to be quite important in Mac land.

MacBooks ain't cheap. Especially if you want service for more than a few days. Hopefully I will dig it, and perhaps if I am lucky I will even figure out a way to make a few bucks off of it.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had asked for a RFID development kit for Christmas, but nobody got me one. Imagine the fun you could have!

U.S. warns about Canadian spy coins

I am not sure what these spies are up to, but I have some ideas of what is possible.. For 100 bucks, I can get everything I need to start playing with RFID. I would bet it wouldn't take me more than an hour to get a working application where I can tell which RFID chip came near my sensor.

I wonder how many new technologies are going to come out of this war. It seems that with a few hours and cheap micro-controller, you could cause some pretty accurate destruction.

Doesn't it seem likely that this innovation is more likely to happen on the enemy's side where cheap duct tape solutions are made to accomplish a objective, than on our side, where we have a massive infrastructure making weapons for a profit?

I think that corporate America is stifled by commercialized innovation as well. A company is not going to release a product unless it is not only useful, but supportable, mass producible, and has potential to be profitable. Sometimes a market for a solution is so small that only one company would be interested in having it. As a result, the big trusted players are not interested in solving that problem without a massive up front fee.

Other times the solutions are rather duct-tape like, and a company doesn't feel comfortable supporting or putting their name on the technology. As a result they go with a more expensive trusted solution. Sometimes the expense of getting a job done neatly prices the problem out of being solved at all.

Seems like the enemy has some advantage here. They have a relatively specific target. They can do it using whatever inexpensive technology that they can string together to achieve their result, and failure is an option for them.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I bought a new toaster today, and it cooks eggs!

I have been coveting this contraption for several months now, and my wife has been laughing at me. It works exactly as advertised. You add water to the steamer tray using the measuring cup that they provide, then add the egg and meat in the steamer, put the English muffins in the toaster slots. Turn it on, and 4 minutes later, you have all the makings for an Egg McMuffin without the Mc.

It also has a tray for making hard boiled eggs. I tried that out and it also works perfectly. I mentioned my new toy to my friend Jess, and he tells me he has had one for a year, and still likes it.

Andee stopped laughing at me when she tried one of the sandwiches.. They are pretty darn good. Better than I expected honestly. Usually really cool ideas don't work out in the real world as well as they do on paper. This device seems quite well engineered though.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the best reason I have seen in a long time to stop using Internet explorer:

IE Clipboard Plunder | ScriptingMagic.com

Basically websites can lift the contents of your windows clipboard without asking. So lets say you copy something out of quicken, or you online banking website, then you visit some sports site you like. If the webmaster is evil, he can collect that data that you just control-C Control-v ed someplace else and use it for whatever he wants.

In I.E. 7 it prompts you before divulging the data, but it prompts you for a lot of other things as well, and sometimes it is easy to click through without paying enough attention.

Firefox and Opera are sane enough not to include this "feature" Download firefox. You won't be sorry.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So today, I noticed the "WE SPIED ON DIANA" headline on Drudge, and it made me wonder...

Does the United States have the capability to retroactively spy on somebody, after an event of interest?

We have radio telescopes pointed at the sky, recording everything that they hear for further analysis later. This analysis is the goal of projects like SETI@Home. Doesn't it make sense that we could use the same recording technology to record all of the radio transmissions from a place like Paris, or Afganistan? Then if a world event of interest happened like 9-11 or the possible assassination of a world leader, we could unleash supercomputers on those recordings and reconstruct the transmissions that originated from certain devices or locations?

It doesn't seem to far fetched. The intelligence benefit would be profound.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just installed the Firebug firefox extension. That is the coolest extension I have seen to date.

I have built several Cascading style sheet driven websites, and it has always been a bit of a trial and error process for me. I just can't see where all of my classes and borders and stuff go... Firebug instantly eliminated all of the confusion. I can now go over the HTML it will highlight each division of the website!

It's like I was blind, but now I can see.

I am actually a bit scared to go examine my work.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been playing a lot of chess online. I have been using two different sites and I figured I would share my experiences.

The first site I tried is called RedHotPawn.com. It is a very tidy, easy to use website. It's interface is easy to use, and the advertising is unobtrusive. The downside is that they only allow you to play 6 games simultaneously. This may not sound like a big restriction, but when your opponents are only making a move every few days, this is a big bottleneck. They remove this restriction if you pay a modest fee of 6 dollars a month or 30 dollars per year.

The second site I play on is chesmaniac.com This website is certainly less polished, and not as easy to use, but it allows unlimited games without a fee. There is a lot of very good competition on both sites.

One downside I see with Chessmaniac is that all of the timeouts are mandatory. If either player fails to move within the prescribed time, the game is recorded as a resignation. On RedHotPawn if your opponent doesn't move within the allocated time, you have the option of sending a reminder or claiming the win. It is kind of sad sometimes to win a game because of a timeout when you where really enjoying it and would prefer to see how it would have played out. The other effect of the mandatory timeouts is that the ratings tend to be more jumpy. and inaccurate.

Here are my games so far from the chessmaniac site. Sometimes I am brilliant, sometimes I am boring, and sometimes I make really dumb mistakes.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After reading this article I have a pretty confusing question.

Going for a blast into the real past

Lets say that there is a light on your desk. The light is attached to a button. If you push the button, then the light comes on about 5 seconds prior to the button being pushed. If you saw the light came on, and you knew that that light was caused by your impending future action, would you push the button?

Seems to me, every time the light came on, it would be a big dilemma for me. It would be so tempting to disconnect the effect from the cause, that I don't know if I could do it. The lamp would probably sit darkly on my desk because or my disobedience to the laws of nature.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Correspondence chess is kinda funny. You wait, and wait, and wait... You are so anxiety at seeing the game progress often clouds your judgment, and makes you do thing without thinking them all of the way through. I have Won 8, Lost 4 and drawn 1 game in the last week or so. About half of them where lost on a real boneheaded mistake by me or my opponent. It is actually quite disappointing when you are engaged in an epic battle, and all of the sudden your opponent hand the game to you, just when it is getting good. It is not quite as disappointing as when you hand the game to your opponent.

You would think that having a day or two to think about a move would make you more careful, but I think my natural response is to be overconfident when I have been staring at the board for hours or days.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nathan, (3) loves to play chess. He asks 4 or 5 times per day if we will play with him. Usually his attention span is about 12 moves..

He understands the proper movement for each piece, He gets a little confused on pawn captures, and every once in a while I see him try to move a knight diagonally one space, but I think he is doing this intentionally, just to be a Turkey.

What I find super interesting is that he has actually discovered and taken a liking to the Dragon openings, which he discovered on his own. For an example, check out the Black position He understands opening theory quiet well... He moves the pawns that allow his pieces to be free to move. Castling is a major priority for him. Interestingly, I used to love to use those Bg7 openings when I was a kid.

He had no idea how to form any offensive attack at all, Nor does he know how to defend one. Still pretty cool for a 3 year old.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just installed Firefox 2.0. Looks like my spelling just improved dramatically. It does spell checking automatically. Woo Hoo!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I added a widget on that allows you to send me instant messages from fingertoe.com.

Meebo is pretty slick. It is an website that logs in to all of your instant messenger accounts and allows you to interface with them all from a single interface.

Since it is hosted on a website, there is no software that needs to be installed, and you don't have to worry about any of the typical security and firewall issues with other instant messenger clients.

I am able to log into ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and gtalk/jabber all in one place. The downsides are having to devote a browser window to meebo, and not being able to do file transfers.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am a lousy speller... The lack of integrated spell checking has been one of my pet peaves with peeves as well as Movable type. Now there is SpellingCow, which allows you to have a gmail-like spell checker in any form by pressing on a shortcut on your bookmarks bar.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, here are the items in my Nerdy Pipeline:

I switched over to Comcast Digital Voice. Comcast is offering TV, Internet and Phone service in my area for 33 bucks each for a year when you buy all 3. This isn't too nerdy, but it is new. I got to torture my poor wife by making her watch ultimate fighting with me.. (She actually was on the phone the whole time) I am canceling my ViaTalk service. Their service was fine, but it is not necessary since my Comcast line has unlimited long distance.

I have been working on a program to compute trajectories on long range shooting. Not sure I would be able to miniaturize it to the point that it would be useful in the field, but it is a fun programming problem to de-rustify my skills.

Julia starts school Next week, and I have volunteered to help facilitate their chess club. I started teaching Julia to play chess when she was 3, but we lost momentum pretty fast after she learned the names of the pieces. Her school has kids K-3, but everyone except the Kindergartners already know how to play.

I am getting ready to test out Gmail for domains on one of my community websites. That should be an adventure!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This website is pretty crazy.

We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

It mines the more popular blog services to see how people are feeling. You can look for people of a particular gender in a prarticular city who are expressing a particular emotion. It also will tell you about the weather in their city at the time that they posted.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of my college fraternity brothers has an interesting set of math videos on Youtube. Here is an example:

Perhaps adding special effects will be required in order to reach the generation being raised by their X-box's.

Be sure to check out some of Bernard Finnigan's other work on his website. He is most famous for being on an E! special for 2 seconds. A video of him in his star trek uniform flashed on the screen as they introducted William Shatner's "Get A Life" SNL skit as being the Seventy first most unforgettable Saturday night life moments.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It looks like CoComment has upgraded their system so it should now track comments of non-cocomment users! This will be a big improvement.

coComment blog What'new?

If you have a blog, and you haven't tried cocomment, I would recomend it. Basically it is a centralized system that keeps track of the comments that you place throughout the blogsphere. This makes it easy to find all of the converstions that you are having on the web.

My Outgoing comments section on the right is run by CoComment.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well I have been using ViaTalk for a couple of months now, and I am pretty satisified.

I have been very happy with the availability of their network. So far, every time I have wanted to make a call, I have been able to. When I used Broadvoice in the past, there where some pretty big issues with their network going down.

We have a phone number in Eugene Oregon, where my wife's sister lives. Since most folks are using cell phones, it really isn't too much of a hassle having an out of town number. They have numbers in Spokane if we want one, and we could even port over our regular phone if we choose to.

The call quality has been acceptable. It does seem to be a little bit degraded from our land line, but that could be related to the wireless phones that I am using. I have noticed a slight echo once or twice, as well as a pause or two in a call. I have never had one drop.

Overall, I am quite satisfied. We have an additional fully featured phone line with unlimited long distance for less than I was paying for long distance before.

I wish that ViaTalk had a speed dial feature. That seems like a strange oversight.

Next, I plan to build an asterisk box so I can manage my both my land line and the ViaTalk line from my end.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looks like the last visitor to my geocache has a run in with a Bear!

(GCQCXR) Day Mountain View by fingertoe and daveygravey

Hope that doesn't scare other folks way!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Looks like Jeff hit the Jackpot on free web apps!

one step closer… � ZOHO — 12 incredible, free, web applications

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got some money for my birthday last month, and I decided to use it to try to appease my appetite for aviation.. I invited my friend Dean along to watch, and he wound up taking a ride as well. He took his digital camera, and taped quite a bit of his flying. I got quite a bit of practice flying the glider. Dean complained when we got there that he had never flown inverted, Which one of the pilots was happy to remedy for him.. (I was pleased to remain right side up for the most part) As you can see from Dean's video, we had quite a blast.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been evangelizing Flickr lately. I love it. I love that it is so searchable, and that it is all RSS enabled so I can subscribe to all photos bearing a certain keyword.

Here is the collection of my latest convert:Flickr: Photos from Gr8Pics8 I am quite impressed!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We didn't think of this when we where in college, we were too busy shooting cannons.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via BlogRodent

Here is my Personal DNA report:

Here is the full report

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Wednesday at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Julia and I watched the Nova episode on the DARPA challenge yesteryday. She seemed to really enjoy it. Which made me pretty happy. Another few years, and I can teach her to program Basic Stamps.

For those who don't know, the DARPA challenge was a contest to create vehicles that where capable of driving themselves over long distances through desert terrain. 5 vehicles managed to navigate a 120 miles course through the desert within 10 hours without human input. Last year's challenge was substantially less successful with all of then teams failing to finish.

Julia's analysis: "This is like The March of the Penguins but with Cars!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been using Blinklist for quite a while now, and it keeps growing on me. I had previously use del.icio.us, but never really got into it. Blinklist seemed a little more polished, and a little more explicit about how it could be used. I took some of their suggestions, and have not looked back.

I like the Tagging system that is emerging. I disliked the traditional hierarchical system of filing stuff for a long time. It seems that we spend a lot of time figuring out the perfect place to file something, and when we go to retrieve it, we have to go through the same process again, usually coming up with different conclusions. As a result, we are spending too much time filing, and too much time retrieving. Rather than trying to become more organized, it makes sense to me that we use computer technology to manage our disorder. That is what I feel the tagging system does.

One of the nice features of the social bookmarking is the ability to view my bookmarks from multiple computers. With Firefox, I can create a live bookmark to my Blinklist RSS feed, and even if I bookmarked something at home, It will show up at work. Or Vice versa.

The other neat thing is that I can watch what other people are bookmarking. If I notice someone else shares interests with my I can subscribe the rss feed on their bookmark page, and leach the good stuff out of their web browsing.

The only real downside right now is that a majority of the folks who use these are early adopters. As a result, there is Way too many links to stuff like Ruby, Ajax, and Linux, but there are substantially fewer links to things like Bible study sites, Aviation sites, and cooking sites..

If you are not a computer nerd, please sign up and share your normal links. It is really easy. (Really!_

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every time I have been to the bookstore lately, I have been drooling over the Asterisk: The Future of Telephony book. I built an asterisk box last year, and it has been working fairly well. Once I worked through the bugs, I haven't had to mess with it much. Still, there is a ton of stuff that I don't know. I learned what I needed to learn in order to get it working in the environment I had. I would like to know all about the different kinds of telephone lines, all of the different configuration options etc.. While I would like this, I have no need. In our current financial situation I can't justify investing in knowlege that I am not going to be putting to use.

Anyway, I was quite amazed and surprized to find this:

Asterisk Documentation Project - Project Information

I now have the entire book in a PDF format on my computer. Thanks O'Reilly, I owe you one!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a really cool app that generates Suduku puzzles using images setected randomly by flickr tag.

sailplane sudoku

If you are clever you can get it to use really pretty pictures instead of numbers:

bendelaney sudoku

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am getting hooked on Flickr.

There are thousands and thousands of pictures out there to browse through. Some really good artists have photos available. You can also browse the photos by tag. Every page you can generate seems to have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to with your feed reader.

I subscribed to feeds from several Sailplane pilots (My current infatuation) and Ben Delaney a photographer that likes to take photos around my hometown.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My freind Russ is building a waste oil burning furnace.

The concept is pretty cool. It uses a Babington Ball to vaporize the oil so that it can be burned. Basicailly they pour oil onto the top of a metal ball, the oil turns into a film as it flows around the ball. The ball has a microscopic hole in it that is leaking 10 Psi air through it. The wind evaporates this film and creates a burnable oil/air mixture. The rest of the oil drains into resevior, and is then pumped repeatedly until it encouters the microscopic hole and is burnt off.

I set up a blog for Russ to describe his project, and he seems enthusiastic about blogging, so watch and learn!

Russ's Babington Ball furnace bloghttp://www.chaotic.info/russb/

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got a nice little present in the mail today from Sporty's. they sent out the first DVD of from their private pilot's course. It is pretty much a teaser for the entire course, but I learned a ton from the 170 minutes worth of instruction. It is pretty impressive how thorough they are. Nathan enjoyed watching with me, and Andee showed some interest as well.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you work off shifts, It is only a matter of time before you get obsessed with Sleep. An obsessed Reighley man is pretty dangerous.

Last night I saw this Alarm clock that is coming to market. I also noticed a simular wristwatch. The idea is that these monitor your sleep cycles, and wake you at a time that you are ready to wake up. Typically, you go through several sleep cycles during a nights sleep. If you wake up at the end of one of these cycles, you feel well rested an rejuvinated. If you are woken up in the middle of the cycle, you feel groggy and tired. If you need to get up by 6, these alarm clocks will wake you up early to prevent you from having to be woken up in the middle of a sleep cycle.

That got me thinking. I wonder how hard it would be to build a computer to monitor my sleep? When I am asleep during the day, my wife is always stressed when she has to wake me up. Running a small business, it is not uncommon for me to have to provide tech support to my customers in the middle of the day. When they call, if I was being monitored, she could know if I was in a state of sleep that it was approprate to wake me from. She could also see how productive my sleep has been, so she could make better descisions about whether she could wake me up.

I see home model EEG (Brainwave monitoring) machines for 1K or so. Sleep labs also use EOG (Eye movement sensors) and EMG (Muscle sensors). I wonder what these alarm clocks are using? I would guess they are using a simpler measurment (Movement? Heartrate? Tempurature?)

I have also considered getting a sensory deprivation tank to rest in. I have used one before and it is definately an interesting experience. Basically you float in 93.5 degree water that has been saturated with epsom salts. The water is exactly skin tempurature, and there is no light, no sound, and no smell. After a few minutes, it is kinda like your brain is floating out in the middle of nothing. Using a float tank is relaxing like nothing else that I have encountered. With my budget, and floorspace, I don't think this is a real option. I also don't know of anyplace to float in Spokane. I had to go to Seattle (a four hour drive) to try it, and it wasn't cheap.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 2:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My spelling is terrible! I read a lot of my blog posts, and it is pretty embarrassing. Sometimes I have noticed that I get a lot of traffic from people who don't know how to spell. Part of the problem is that I am lazy. The other part of the problem is that my blogging software is relatively bare bones, and doesn't have a spellchecker or fancy formatting options.

When I want to be tidy, I often type my entries out, copy and paste them into my word processor or email client, spell check them, then copy and paste them back. This is not a great solution, but it works when I do it.

The point of this post is to test out Writely, a free online word processor. It has a spellchecker installed, and will publish directly to any blog that accepts Blogger, metaWeblog or MovableType APIs.

We will see how it works. I am not too impressed with the spellchecker yet. It doesn't have good enough suggestions for poor spellers like myself! It also doesn't spank me for capitalizing words improperly like Word does. Hopefully it will get better with time.

Posted by at 2:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have played a bit with some social bookmarking websites, but have never been terribly impressed. I just signed up for Blinklist however, and I think it may be worthwhile. What impresses me is that you can query for any tag, and your query will have an RSS feed. I notice that if you click on the rss feed, it gives you javascript code so that you can append your links right into any webpage. I am sure this will be very useful. I am not positive why.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have been playing a lot with the Suduku puzzles lately. In the last few days, I have been considering writing a program to solve the puzzles for me. I feel like I am getting pretty good at them, but I am sure that there are methods that I have not thought of yet.

If I proceduralized the process of solving them into a computer program I think I could experiment to figure out which methods tend to be most effective.

I am thinking I will use bitwise flags to store the possibilities. For a nine by nine suduku, I would use the binary number 0000 0001 1111 1111 to represent a cell that has no possibilities eliminated. Each digit represents a possibility 0000 0000 0000 0001 would mean 1 is the only remaining possiblity, 0000 0000 0000 0010 would be 2, 0000 0001 0000 0000 would be 9. 0000 0001 0001 0000 would represent a cell where 9 and 5 are the only possiblities.

The process would work something like this: I would scan through the grid, and for each known value I found I would turn off the appropriate bit for each of the cells in the same row, column and square.

After all of the eliminations where processed I would scan through the grid again, looking for cells that only have one bit left standing. In each of these I would insert the proper number, then I would run the elimination routine again. This process would repeat until the puzzle is solved.

Once I get this running, I could run different procedures to see which methods work best. I can record the number of steps it takes to solve the puzzles, so I can test the algorithms to see which are most efficient.

Binary is really useful. It is kind of fun to make your brain work that way every once in a while just too feel the millions and millions of synapses that you usually don't use flick on and off.

Sorry to be such a nerd. I tried to talk to my wife about this, but she kinda rolled her eyes at me. I had to explain It is like there are 9 light switches in each cell, and you turn them off when you know that their number is eliminated. I think she might have started to get it. (I am not sure she started to care) ;-)

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have been playing quite a bit with WikiMedia lately. This is the software that runs the Wikipedia.

The fraternity house that I lived in when I went to college closed it's doors a couple of years ago due to low recruitment, and financial issues. The house was sold, and the chapter no longer has a presence on campus. As a result, there is a certain amount of loss for alumni. We no longer have a home when we visit campus. We don't get a newsletter each year keeping us connected.

The fraternity does plan to recolonize in a few years, and it would be nice if the chapter's history had a human feel to it. Enter WikiMedia. This is software that can be installed on a PHP/MySQL capable webserver that allows a community to maintain webpages. Now members can post all of their nostalgic stories and experiences on the Wiki, so that their fellow alumni can read it, and so that the future colony will have our experiences to learn from.

WikiMedia does have a bit of a learning curve. I have been encouraging people to post what they have, and not stress too much about the appearance. I frequenty go through all of the newly edited pages and tidy up.

So far after a week we have 4 contributors, and several more who are saying that they plan to. I think we already have some worthwhile content. I am hoping that it will pick up steam as the content gets better.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 3:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)