Messages

51

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« on: September 12, 2008, 03:41 AM »

There's a lot of interesting things here: http://askanexpert.w...nExpert/Welcome.html. It's really worth reading if you're interested in modern physics.

Each proton beam flying around the LHC will have an energy of 7 TeV, so when two protons collide the collision energy will be 14 TeV. Lead ions have many protons, and together they give an even greater energy: the lead-ion beams will have a collision energy of 1150 TeV. Both collision energies have never been reached before in a lab.
Energy concentration is what makes particle collisions so special. When you clap your hands you probably do a ‘collision’ at an energy higher than protons at the LHC, but much less concentrated! Now think of what you would do if you were to put a needle in one of your hands. You would certainly slow your hands down as you clapped!
In absolute terms, these energies, if compared to the energies we deal with everyday, are not impressive. In fact, 1 TeV is about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.

Here's the sort of official info about black holes: http://askanexpert.w...HCblackholes-en.html.

TPReal.

52

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« on: September 11, 2008, 12:10 PM »

One of the more material articles I found:
http://www.livescien...919_black_holes.html

However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

Maybe it's true, maybe not. Probably they couldn't say "The chance of a black hole eating up the whole planet is only about 0.5% each day, so please please, let us try."

53

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« on: September 11, 2008, 11:37 AM »

If there is/was chance of such disaster why france & switzerland will allow this experiment to happen in the first place? Dont you think they are the first one to die if such thing happen,isnt it? Why they will risk their life just to find out Big-bang? ...

-mahesh2k (September 11, 2008, 11:21 AM)

I think that scientists are so curious about the Higgs boson that they don't care too much about disasters and other things. And their official statement is that no disaster is possible, of course, so Switzerland and France can feel reassured.

My guess is that they in fact know that creating a by-product in the form of a black hole is very unlikely but possible. But admitting it would be a bye-bye to the LHC experiments and the Higgs boson, so they just keep it a Polichinelle's secret.

And if the disaster really happens, nobody will complain anyway Not in Solar System.

TPReal.

54

Living Room / Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« on: September 11, 2008, 02:16 AM »

Good to have the latest info.

http://hasthelargeha...oyedtheworldyet.com/

Have a look at the page source, how neatly they check if the world has ended or not. Only I think it's a bug that they don't detect the actual reason of the end of the world, in case of it happening

55

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome -- a new browser coming (in beta) in a few hours

« on: September 03, 2008, 06:24 AM »

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

http://tapthehive.co..._Google_s_EULA_Sucks

56

General Software Discussion / Re: Google Chrome -- a new browser coming (in beta) in a few hours

« on: September 02, 2008, 04:07 PM »

Hmm, it has no integration with Google Bookmarks. I hope they're going to add it later.
The word 'Google' is marked as misspelled.

I'd like it to be more customisable. And to have lots of extensions, of course but I guess we're going to wait for it. I'm going to give it a try, but it's definitely not the right moment to switch to Chrome yet. But I like the feel of it (the lack of clutter on screen, for instance), and the fact that it starts as fast as a flashlight, and I'm already waiting for it to come out of beta.
Which may take a long time however - Google Documents are still in beta.

57

General Software Discussion / Re: Your most used SPECIAL programs

« on: August 15, 2008, 02:17 PM »

My special programs:
Google Desktop - for keeping things, notes, calendar, ... in an accessible place.
Vidalia and Friends - for tampering in suspicious areas. See what I found last week: http://modelarz.com.pl/. Yummy (I could get some e-mails from their database using benchmark SQL injection), but it's better to be safe than sorry.
DOSBox - for my favourite games, like Prince of Persia 1 and 2.

And finally the most important tool I use all the time:
Ruby - I use it several times a day at least, for writing short programs to automate things I do, or just to do some calculations in irb (I don't use Windows' calc anymore). I can't believe I could live without it

I must have a look at the Input Director, sounds very interesting. And they say it has the shared clipboard option - I hate the frustration when you want to simply copy a line from one PC to another, and constantly bump into the idea of using the clipboard.

TPR.

58

Living Room / Re: The InfoWorld Programming IQ Test

« on: August 15, 2008, 01:37 PM »

The history questions are for computer science students, who I am not. I got 60.
The 'P ? NP' question was really funny

59

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / Re: Tim - Image to Text Converter

« on: April 10, 2008, 12:02 PM »

Hello. Did you download the libraries I give link to in the first post? Put them in the program's directory or in windows\system or however it is called on vista.

60

Living Room / Re: Do you collect anything?

« on: April 10, 2008, 05:43 AM »

Oh, I forgot about old programs I have the "latest" MS-DOS (6.22) installed on one of my drives, and a collection of old games. And I have also Windows 3.0 installed (7 or 8 floppies) and I wrote quite a few programs in Delphi 1 on it

I also used to have 5inch floppy drive installed in my computer and I used it from time to time, mostly for fun. But once we had to do some homework for school, and give it to the teacher on floppy drives. I didn't have time to do this homework, and I did it very poorly, so I recorded it on a 5inch floppy and said to the teacher that my 3inch is broken, but well, here's the floppy, what's the problem. He said to hand it in when I have my 3inch repaired so I had a few days extra to finish my work.

But my changed my computer to a laptop last year so now I can't use the drive anymore... And now I usually play my old DOS games on DOSBox and not on real DOS.

61

Living Room / Re: Do you collect anything?

« on: April 10, 2008, 04:57 AM »

I used to collect playing cards, I have about 50 packs (only full regular packs, 52 cards + jokers). But later I stopped collecting them, now I just own them

62

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: January 27, 2008, 01:31 PM »

Hello.

Let me point out one more improvement you could make to the program When you play 10x10, it's hard not only to recognize the images on the board, but also the images on the clues, so they should also be zoomed when the zoom option is on. It would help a lot, I think, and shouldn't be very hard to program.

I also think that maybe you could give less clues? I think almost always some clues are redundant, it would make the game more difficult and interesting especially if you removed some of the < > clues, if possible. Just an idea

TPReal.

63

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: January 24, 2008, 04:35 AM »

One bug I have found is that once some cell is solved, you can still right-click on this value in other cells, and select it as a possibility for other cells in the same row. This should not be possible.

are you sure this is true? my experience is that once you solve a cell, it eliminates this image from all horizontal compatriots.  i don't think i have experienced your bug.

-mouser (January 24, 2008, 04:14 AM)

Yes, it does eliminate them, but you can turn them on again by right-clicking the place where they were. And it leads to some more buggy behaviour:
Start a new game, left click randomly in cell X until you get a right answer, then turn the image back on in cell Y by right-clicking on it, and then right-click some other image in cell Y (if you get a message, click another), and the whole cell will suddenly get solved.


Well, you're right that the ability to experiment is not that necessary here. But I must say I feel uncomfortable with the program when I know that my mistakes are irreversible And also it's the matter of the first impression of the program - it seems very "severe" at first, before you learn how to play it. But I agree if it's a lot of work, maybe it isn't worth it.

64

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Deductoid puzzle game

« on: January 24, 2008, 04:06 AM »

Wow! That's a really good game! It's nicely done, and, what is most important is that the solution is always deterministic. I'm really impressed!

One bug I have found is that once some cell is solved, you can still right-click on this value in other cells, and select it as a possibility for other cells in the same row. This should not be possible.

Also let me suggest a small change, which, I feel, would make the gameplay a little better:

I'd prefer the game to allow me to right-click wherever I want, even if my choice is wrong. Only left-clicks should count as mistakes. Another change that would have to go along with this, is that if there is only one (say) Lion remaining on the board (because I right-clicked all the others), it should not automatically become my final choice (I mean, it should not automatically get left-clicked, as it gets now). I should have a chance to select another Lion and unselect this one, and finally, when I'm really sure that the choice is right, I would left-click the Lion to commit it to the cell. Then, if I'm wrong, I would get a missclick info.

One reason for this suggestion is that it would be a solution to this:

When you play a game like minesweeper, which is also a "constraint-based" logic puzzle, you are able to temporarily try things by marking tiles, without actually committing to your choice.

With deductoid, every click you make is absolutely final -- you see immediately whether you are right or wrong and and basically you are told the correct answer if you got it wrong.  That makes it not quite as fun as it might be otherwise i think.  just my 2 cents.

-mouser (January 15, 2008, 06:50 PM)

Another reason is that if now you want to right-click some image but you have a muscle tick or something and you accidentally click its neighbour, you might 1. get a mistake penalty, whereas a chance to correct your muscle tick would be more fair, 2. get an unfair piece of information, because if your right-click was a mistake, then surely... And then you either left-click this image and know that this was simply unfair, or try to ignore the fact that you know it is the correct image for this cell; both possibilities being a little spoilers.

Now it also happens sometimes that I just right-click some image, and there is a chain reaction of images getting automatically selected. I'd prefer to left-click them at my own pace, hiding unnecessary clues as they get used, and so on, and not suddenly waking up with a completely different board than it was a moment ago

I must learn for an exam at the university, but one must know what is important in life and what is not. The exam must wait now

65

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / Re: Tim - Image to Text Converter

« on: January 15, 2008, 10:56 AM »

Hmm, try to change color mapping so that the line is more steep, it improves contrast. Look at the histograms to decide where the line should lie. You could also play with the color sliders but even I do not understand fully how they affect the resulting image
If you still think something does not work like it should, you can send me this image, or post it here, and I'll try to do something with it.
TPR.

66

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / Re: Tim - Image to Text Converter

« on: January 02, 2008, 03:45 AM »

I'm glad you like it

Character density algorithm

Calculating the density of characters was rather easy in Borland's IDE. Let im be an image, then:

Code: C++ [Select]

1. im->Canvas->Font=font_you_use_for_conversion;
2. int width=im->Canvas->TextWidth('x'),height=im->Canvas->TextHeight('x');

Now we have the size of a character. The font is monospaced so I can use 'x' or any other character. Now for ch being each character in turn, I clear the image, then print the character on it:

Code: C++ [Select]

1. im->Canvas->TextOutA(10,10,ch);
2. int counter=0;

Then in loop where i changes from, say, 0 to width+10 and j from 0 to height+10:

Code: C++ [Select]

1. counter+=im->Canvas->Pixels[i][j]&0x0000FF;

Finally, the density of ink for this character is:

Code: C++ [Select]

1. 1-(double)counter/255/width/height

Note that the area that you check inside the (i;j) loop must be greater than the character width*height rectangle because a lot of characters exceed this size. The size is used only to determine the horizontal and vertical distance between characters.

Note also that just counting black pixels in the loop is not a good idea, because some fonts, especially small sized (like 2 or 3) include also some gray pixels which also have to be counted in.

Finally I cut the input image into width*height rectangles and for each of them I calculate the density of ink in a similar way as I did it for characters (only now I have to take into account all colors, and also the color weights) and for each rectangle I use the character that fits best.

This is not the actual code of the program, but I think it is more or less correct and shows the main idea

67

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / Tim - Image to Text Converter

« on: December 28, 2007, 01:58 PM »

Tim - Image to Text Converter

The program converts an image (jpg or bmp) to a text, which looks like the image in grayscale. You can choose any monospaced font and any font size you want to format the text with, and also any set of allowed characters. The result can be saved as text and then you can format it correctly in a text editor, or you can save the image of the text already correctly formatted.

The program was written in C++Builder 2006 and might need some dll's and bpl's to run. They might be available for download here: http://etonne.110mb.com/files/libs.zip
Put them in the program directory, or in your system directory.

68

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / Re: The N.A.N.Y. Programming Challenge for 2008

« on: December 27, 2007, 04:30 AM »

I've recently finished a simple, easy to use, fun and useless image-to-text converter, so I think I could post it for NANY (once I write a short manual for it), so count me in.

69

Living Room / Re: Taking "digital" notes during a lecture

« on: December 24, 2007, 03:50 PM »

Thanks for your ideas.
I think I'll learn LaTeX one day, it seems to be the best idea of all those. But for now, at least for some simple equations, MS Office 2007 is good. The new MS Equation is much better now than it was in older versions of Office.
TPR.

70

GOE 2007 Challenge Downloads / Re: SMAU - GOE Challenge 2007 Entry

« on: December 09, 2007, 10:45 AM »

Hello, Wizards!

I'm sorry for the fact that you have to download this library zip, but I somehow cannot link them into the program. That is, I can link them in so that they are not needed to run the program, only the program doesn't work very well. It throws an error ('The class already exists') on all command that create small windows, like ShowMessage or InputQuery. I have no idea why this is happening, but it is. I've given up investigating the case. If you have any ideas, please share them

TPReal.

71

Coding Snacks / Re: Volume control by time

« on: December 07, 2007, 01:56 PM »

Hello.
I found a very interesting and potentially useful freeware program NirCmd:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html
It can change volume (changesysvolume or mutesysvolume parameter). If you want it to run it at some given times and on given days (like monday to friday only), you could try using [SMAU]:
https://www.donation...ndex.php?topic=11167
TPReal.

72

GOE 2007 Challenge Downloads / SMAU - GOE Challenge 2007 Entry

« on: November 29, 2007, 11:56 AM »

[Simple Multi-Alarm Utility]

Here's a program I made for the contest. Maybe not very creative, but I'm going to use it a lot!

[attachthumb=#1][/attachthumb]

Description of the program: http://dcmembers.com/tpreal/SMAU.HTML

Some libraries might be needed to run it: Libs

It might still have a bug or two... should you encounter any, please try to reproduce it and tell me. Thanks!

Your suggestions are welcome.

TPReal

73

Living Room / Re: Computing. A Goal in itself, or a means to an end?

« on: November 19, 2007, 02:15 PM »

The topic describes my problem, clearly expressed. For me, programmings is mostly a goal in itself, and doing things that I don't need, but they are fun and it's nice to see that they can be done, is consuming most of my effective time Fortunately, from time to time I also write something useful, at least for me. But now, as we have the GOE ongoing, I realise that I don't have any good idea

74

Living Room / Re: To wide-screen or not to wide-screen

« on: November 06, 2007, 03:01 PM »

Hello.

I've recently bought a new laptop, and it is wide-screen. I didn't want it to be but they produce mostly wide-screen laptops now. At the beginning I was skeptical about this, but now I got used to and I can say it isn't any worse than a normal 4:3 screen (those screens now seem for me to be almost square ). I tested a number of games, and most of them can be switched to match the monitor's real resolution, so they are not stretched, and the rest of them are stretched by default, but in my graphic card's (nVIDIA) driver I found an option to lock the ratio so that the view just doesn't use the whole width of the screen. Or you can disable resizing completely, and then the image doesn't touch any side of the screen.

On the other hand, when viewing a text file, or writing code, I sometimes miss some height, while there's a lot of unused place on the right side. But you can put there the Start bar if you wish, or in IDEs like BDS you can use this place for Object Inspector or Project Manager, which I wouldnt put there on 3:4 because they would make the code less readable for me (I don't like narrow code editing fields).

So to sum up, if you already badly miss height, consider buying 4:3. Otherwise, I'd recomment wide-screen.

TPR.

75

Living Room / Taking "digital" notes during a lecture

« on: October 24, 2007, 06:11 AM »

I've recently bought a new computer, a notebook. I'm a student so I thought about using the computer to take notes during the lecture. But it's a technical university, so there's always a lot of mathematical mambo jambo on the blackboard, and that's my problem: I do not know any program that could be used efficiently to take notes during a technical lecture.

I'd like to have a program, where I could write a text like this:

Determine the stability:
[x1';x2']=[2 3;5 2]*[x1;x2]+[0;2]*u
y=[2 4]*[x1;x2]+1*u

or similar, and the program should display a nice formatted text and the mathematical expressions with matrices. Also things like sqrt x, or x^2, or x/2, and similar, should get a nice, mathematical and readable look.

The Microsoft Equation program (installed with MS Word) is very very inefficient, because to write anything you will most likely have to use your mouse several times, and this is much slower than just typing the formulas. The tool in OpenOffice is no better for me (and I dislike the whole OpenOffice thing also). So my question is: do you know any tool that would do what I described? Or do I have to write it for myself?