Four months and no posts? Clearly I need another blog.

That's right! I'm going to start raving about The Singularity here.

I picked up a ukulele a few weeks back when I was in North Carolina. I had been learning to play the guitar, but I wanted to branch out to something different. Little did I know how much of a following they actually had.

There are plenty of chord generators around for all sorts of stringed instruments around, but I knew next to nothing about actual music theory, so I made one for the ukulele. It probably lies sometimes and fails in all sorts of ugly ways. It's based on my understanding of this document.

There are some very entertaining people sharing ukulele videos on youtube:

• http://www.youtube.com/user/jaaaaaaa
• http://www.youtube.com/user/sweetafton23
• http://www.youtube.com/user/ukebucket
• http://www.youtube.com/user/seeso

And I was surprised at how many good sites there were for tabs, chords, and lessons:

• http://www.giantflightlessbirds.com/ukulele/
• http://ukulelehunt.com/ - hehe
• http://ukuleleunderground.com/ - lessons
• http://nwfolk.com/uketabs.html
• http://yirmumah.net/ukulele/
• http://www.chordie.com/ - can show ukulele chord images

I noticed this week's Bigger Than Cheeses was about ukuleles. A recent xkcd strip wasn't about ukuleles, but I'm glad I wasn't the only one who put the two together.

Trying a new trac blog plugin. Apparently I need an "about" post. I imported all of my old posts, and they're still around on the wiki. I might have lost some versions. *Shrugs*.

For no reason that I can remember, I was recently reminded of a solution to a homework problem way back from my first semester in college that I thought was creative. Having not had anything to say here for four months, I thought it would be fun to dig up the code and take a look.

The challenge was to rotate a vector in place using constant extra memory and less than O(n²) moves. There was very little additional information. I remember scratching my head for a while and then coming up with this crazy scheme involving the greatest common divisor which I drew out in great detail with boxes and arrows explaining how everything would move. I was disgusted that I couldn't arrive at a way to remove the gcd function entirely.

Now that I look, I see it is an early problem in book Programming Pearls. Their solutions can be found here. Algorithm 3 is the closest to mine, and they indeed don't need to calculate the gcd ahead of time.

Oh, and I was sloppy with whitespace and some other details back then.

/* Euclid's algorithm for calculating the greatest common divisor of two numbers.
        Taken from page 58 of "Data Structures & Algorithm Analysis in C++ Second Edition" by Mark Allen Weiss. */
int gcd(int a, int b)
{
        while (b)
        {
                int r = a % b;
                a = b;
                b = r;
        }
        return a;
}
/* Rotates a vector i steps, using minimal moves.
        This requires an "extra" calculation of the greatest common divisor of i and v.size(), but this algorithm
        still wins out over rotating v one element at a time i times, because this is O(n) while the latter method is O(n^2) */
template<class T> void rotate(vector<T> &v, int i)
{
        int size = v.size();
        int factor = gcd(size, i);
        i %= size;
        int p;
        for (p = 0; p < factor; p++)
        {
                int n;
                T temp = v[p];  // Pull out one element so we can shift everything forward.
                for (n = (p + i) % size; n != p; n = (n + i) % size)    // Until we get back to where we start, shift each element forward.
                        v[(n - i + size) % size] = v[n];
                v[(p - i + size) % size] = temp;        // Put back original element.
        }
}

Bargle!

I have been recommending reading material weekday morning for a handful of people for just over five weeks, now.

I make no claims to any of it being interesting, relevant, or entertaining, and I am not even sure how it will proceed from here. For the most part it has been programming-related articles with a mix of random things that amused me from the Internet.

http://groups.google.com/group/cory-can-read

It has long annoyed me that Thunderbird sometimes treats the '>' characters in excerpts from diffs as reply markers and draws a blue line instead of the actual characters from the E-mail.

I finally found some talk about how to disable that feature here.

Put this in ~/.thunderbird/*.default/chrome/userContent.css:

  blockquote[type=cite] {
    padding-bottom: 0 ! important;
    padding-top: 0 ! important;
    padding-left: 0 ! important;
    border-left: none ! important;
    border-right: none ! important;
  }

Set the following options:

  user_pref("mail.quoted_graphical", false);
  user_pref("mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support", true);

And the bars go away. Along the way, I noticed that if format=flow is included in the Content-Type header, Thunderbird does the right thing. So, the source of these E-mails is partly to blame, but I am happy that there is something I can do about it for now.

Hat Quest

I don't know what got into me, but I got a hat and made a little adventure game about it.

I have not allowed comments in a long time. Let's see how well this works out...

http://www.unprompted.com/share/tge.jpg

Thanks to movie nights on Thursdays, MST3K Mondays, and going out to see movies on Fridays, I have been watching a lot more movies than I previously did. Here is a list of movies that I can remember:

• The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension
• Amores Perros
• Big Trouble in Little China
• Clerks II
• Conan the Barbarian
• Crank
• District B13
• Drunken Master II
• Hudsucker Proxy
• Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
• MST3K (Rifftrax) - Star Trek V
• MST3K - Hobgoblins
• MST3K - The Day the Earth Froze
• Mission Impossible III
• Scotland, PA
• Snakes on a Plane
• UHF
• V for Vendetta
• Wordplay
• X-Men III

http://www.unprompted.com/projects/attachment/wiki/Updates/PotatoVillain/psnowman.jpg?format=raw =? http://www.unprompted.com/projects/attachment/wiki/Updates/PotatoVillain/pvillain.jpg?format=raw

At least I no longer suffer from allergies. I only suffer when I am not taking a copious amount of antihistamines. And then only when my ensuing itchiness, despondence, lack of sleep, and inability to focus on anything get in the way of what I am trying to do.

Dear The Food Industry of America,

Feel free to take the following ideas to do with as you please.

Sincerely,
Cory

http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/transformers.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/singstar.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/guitarhero.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/cowbell.jpg http://www.unprompted.com/share/review/uhf.jpg

Why?

That is what I get for eating lunch with a bunch of programmers.

In about a week, VV is moving its office across the river. In a musical experience never to be duplicated, we got the band back together for one final performance at the old place.

Ten days of classes left, and I get spam like this:

Good jobs require a universityy education. Now you can get one in just a few days, and you'll also get that paper on your wall''

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Read what the reviewers are saying...

• http://ds.ign.com/articles/667/667731p1.html
• http://www.gamespot.com/ds/sports/tonyhawksamericansk8land/review.html?sid=6139957
• http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/launchreview.asp?reviewid=642968

Then see what players are making.