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Only Six Men Are Islands

danvk — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:24:24 +0000

A conversation at lunch today reminded me of one of my favorite trivia questions: what’s the most isolated any man has been in history? By “most isolated”, I mean that his/her instantaneous distance from the nearest other person is maximized.

Think about it for a minute or two, the answer’s below the fold.

The short answer: Alfred Worden

Here’s the longer version:
It’s got to be an Astronaut or Cosmonaut — there aren’t many ways you can be more than 50 miles from any other man left in the world. And how would you know, anyway?

If it’s going to be an Astronaut, the Apollo program immediately jumps out. But those ships all had three people, right? True enough, but they separated for the lunar landing. Two went to the surface, leaving the third alone in orbit. Just what we want! Now we’ve got a lower bound of about 2100 miles and we’re down to six people (the commanders of Apollo 11, 12, 14-17).

I’m a little sketchy on the details from here, but I assume it all comes down to the particulars of the landing sites and orbits for the Apollo missions. The Guinness people did their research and, according to Wikipedia, Al wins at 2,235 miles. For scale, that’s roughly the distance from California to Washington, D.C.

Adium 1.0 is out!

danvk — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 05:50:51 +0000

Go pick up your copy of Adium 1.0, the new release of the greatest IM program ever. It’s Mac-only and it’s beautiful. I’ve been using it with only one complaint for at least 4-5 years (yes, it’s been in beta that long). That one annoyance was non-functioning AIM file transfers, which they claim to have fixed. We’ll see, they’ve claimed that before. Here’s what it looks like:

I’m using the “Concise” layout with the “Decay 2.0″ color scheme. I enlarged the font from 9->10 pt, reduced the spacing to 3px, and added a 6px gutter on the left. I think it looks good, very compact and understated, but quite clear and useable.

Update: Despite looking great, file transfer is still AWOL. Shoot.

Colbert and Wikipedia

danvk — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:02:58 +0000

Last night Stephen Colbert took on Wikipedia again, asking his viewers to edit the Reality article to say “Reality has become a commodity”. He was hoping to reprise his previous successes with the African elephant article, but it didn’t work out so well for Colbert. Check out the article history. The article became “reality becomes a commodity” at 11:39 PM EST, just as Colbert gave his report. Within one minute, the article was reverted and protected so that only administrators could edit it. There’s been no damage since. An article for wikilobbying, the day’s word, also appeared but it was immediately deleted. Wikipedia doesn’t let ordinary users view deleted articles’ histories, so I have no idea what this one said.

In the end, the articles were vandalized for less than one minute total, and the guy couldn’t even get Colbert’s phrase quite right. Colbert definitely won the African elephant round, but I think this one goes to Wikipedia. It’ll be interesting to see if Stephen C mentions this again and how he spins it. Nice work, Wikipedia!

The Wave

danvk — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 18:37:23 +0000

Who would have guessed? The Wave wasn’t invented until 1981, and it even has its own priority dispute! I’m taking Crazy George’s side over Rob Weller’s, since he has so much more vested in this.

Sharing Articles from outside of Google Reader

danvk — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 01:41:30 +0000

I’m slowly developing an instinct to share any items I enjoy in Google Reader, but this means that I often find myself wanting to share an article from outside of Reader. I’ll stumble across a site, (usually from reddit or A&L Daily) enjoy an article, and want to share it. But I can’t, because I don’t subscribe to that random site’s RSS feed. Here’s a workaround:

Add the “Subscribe…” link from Settings -> Goodies to your toolbar, or use this link: Subscribe… there.
When you find an interesting story, click “Subscribe…”
Find the article you want in the RSS feed and hit Shift-S to share it
Close the tab/window. Don’t hit subscribe!

I haven’t found any other way to “preview” an RSS feed in Reader like this w/o subscribing. Here’s to a useful, obscure feature…

As always, you can subscribe to my shared items using the link on my Blogroll.

Four things

danvk — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 07:56:58 +0000

Is Computer Science really science? Interesting discussion here and here and here, kind of. I’m not sure what to think on this one. It obviously depends on you mean by “science,” but Theoretical CS has always struck me as far more similar to Math than Science.

If your Macbook Pro mysteriously stopped sleeping when you closed it, try downloading the combined 10.4.8 update from Apple.

I really like Anselm Kiefer. I would have linked directly to the San Francisco MOMA page on him, but they just had to make it all Flash. Jerks.

I also really like C++, particularly after reading about Boost.Lambda. Just like most other languages, it’s all about introducing useful abstractions. Unlike any other programming language I know of, it usually does this with zero performance degradation over C. More specifics when I start writing about Boggle…

Has Rice removed my web page?

danvk — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 07:05:55 +0000

I visited http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~danvk and was greeted with a 404 File Not Found page. Has my Rice home page been taken down? I don’t know whether this is temporary or permanent, but as a precaution, I’m going to begin moving my old site’s content over to danvk.org.

Programming languages over the years

danvk — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 06:09:26 +0000

This blog is about to take a decided turn for the nerdy…

Last weekend I discovered a disk image of my old circa 1995 Performa 640CD DOS-Compatible Mac. Man was this a trip down memory lane. It was a cool computer. Who ever said that the Intel macs were the first that could run Windows? The Performa had a 68040 for the Mac and a 486 for the Intel. You hit Cmd-Return to switch between the two. I’d learned to program before we got this computer, but not by much, so that disk image had some of my earliest programs on it. I tried to figure out when I’d used each language. Here’s my pre-high school list of languages:

GW-BASIC I’m guessing fall 1994 to December 1995. Rumor has it this was the last Microsoft program that BillG wrote himself. In retrospect, it’s an incredibly bad language. Lots of goto’s and no functions! So I moved on to the vastly superior…
QBASIC Jaunary 1996 to at least October 1997. Functions! Subroutines! I still remember the ASCII codes for drawing lines on the screen (179=vertical, 196=horizontal). Then my friend David Brown gave me the fifteen-disk (!) installer for…
Visual Basic 3 mid-1996 to at least February 1998. It Then I found out that I could write programs for Macs after all
REALbasic October 1997 to August 1999. This one was a little less well-established, but at least I tried to do something about that.

After all this BASIC, it’s a wonder I turned out OK. As Mr. Djikstra said, “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” Well that’s a bit harsh! At least VB and RB allowed objects.

The real unanswered questions for me in here are

When did I learn C? I think I made a few abortive attempts before I figured out what a pointer really was
When did I start using Perl? I found Perl scripts from as early as 1997, but I don’t know if I actively worked on them.

Now I’m excited to try and extract a disk image from the 386 I learned to program on and the Powerbook I used in middle school.