Okay, webmeister paranoidkoala asked me to do an update so here it comes.
A couple of links from slashdot I come across Wendy Seltzer's blog. An american lawyer of the enlightened and knowledgeable kind, she now works for the Electronic frontier foundation. She has links to a couple of really interesting articles, I read Content is not king and Privacy, economics and price discrimination on the Internet, both by Andrew Odlyzko. Good papers. Particularly the first one should be hit hard into the soggy heads of phone company directors, who should have learned the lesson long ago.
I'm learning to use Tom Lord's versioning system Arch and wow, it's nice. Seems easier to use than CVS for CVS-like stuff, and in addition it can be used in more advanced, cool ways. It's a little quirky, but ultimately user-friendly. Tom Lord has his ideas. Once you get over his naming conventions (filenames like =README and ,,what-changed.hello-world--mainline--0.1--base-0) they make a lot of sense and are rather convincing. I've decided to support the project with a meagre amount through moneybookers, described as "an euro-friendly alternative to PayPal". So now you can send me money through my email address, which I unfortunately can't publish here because of the omniprescence of spam-harvesting email-bots.
Oh, perhaps I'd mention, I bought a new computer yesterday. Pentium 60, 64 mb ram, 540 mb HD and cd-rom. 60 NOK at a flea market. It turned out to not work, alas, I think it may be the power supply, but we know the guy who sold it (he's the localy infamous "football priest") so perhaps we can convince him to give us another cabinet :-)
It annoyed me that it didn't work, actually. I was hoping to practice network setup and OS installation on it, perhaps use it as a dumb terminal. That would come in handy with my computer engineering studies at Høgskolen i Ålesund, or "Ålesund University College" as they call themselves in english.
Right now as an initial challenge we're building LEGO mindstorms Robots to traverse a line, avoid an obstacle, lose the line and find it again. Tricky. I wonder if very many will succeed. I work with Nasr from telemathics and Hala from my own class. We had severe trouble constructing a robot that would A. Be fast B. Manage to follow the line reliably C. Not spontaneously self-destruct. In the end we have settled on the painfully slow design that the other groups are using. It turns out that the latency of the OS isn't good enough - fast bots run over the line without noticing - and this problem is eliminated with a slow bot. Line following was a LOT easier with that one.
It also strengthens our resolve that it hasn't self-destructed yet.
It was my birthday on the 27. I'm 22. Linus Torvalds was 21 when he started work on Linux. Sigh. Looks like I'm getting old already.
OK, enough time wasted. I need to do some work.
PS. Oh, koala, you're the one most likely to be reading this, what was that about java you mentioned in your last message? You learning java? Do tell! You can look at my code examples if you wish, they're a mess, the best I did was my Tetris-clone Russian Blocks and it's still not a good example of good design. Neither is my current pipedream-clone project, but at least I'm still working on that.
PPS. Another of my silly overambitious projects is that I try to write an automatic solver for sokoban puzzles in Scheme. I haven't done it yet, but I've done some interesting things, now it is at least a playable game (with ugly graphics and UI) that can tell you what squares you can walk to, what legal moves you can make and what squares you under no circumstance must push a crate to. It also has unlimited undo and some other stuff. Solver algorithm is right around the corner (yeah right) but I'm afraid it will be so inefficient as to be prohibitively slow.
Posted by vintermann at August 31, 2003 12:42 PM