Recent Posts

2001

Post New Requests Here / Re: Chess Snack #1!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 05, 2013, 02:54 AM »

Update - I can Kudge half way there with Crafty, but I'll still take comments!
 

2002

Post New Requests Here / Chess Snack #1!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 05, 2013, 01:36 AM »

Okay, I seem to be pretty good at these little concepts that hover right between the "coding snack / coding lunch" line.

This one at stage 1 seems simple enough, and then the implications get a little hard. So it's a useful discussion, though Mouser can move it to Developer Corner if he wants.

The idea is just a chess "legal move generator". At snack level it purposely doesn't care about the moves. It just takes a new game and cranks out a list of moves (important to be savable and printable!) So then you can make one of the moves, and hit "go"' again, and it then runs the new legal moves from there. Not all that hard is it?

I forsee a bit of time could disappear into GUI. But there's resources out there, and I can't imagine any run of the mill board set being all that hard to use.

The purpose of it is theoretically (above the snack level) to run all the moves *one ply depth increasing* at a time through some chess engine. It "simulates" my/someone's style of play as a patzer. So for example presuming I am "chess awake" I can stop most (but not all!) 2 mover combos. But then I fall off a cliff! So at 1 ply, my move looks fine, 3 ply looks fine, running on "intuition" etc. But then I am noticing about 5 ply a *lot* of the moves crash because of something that's "not in my head".

So I'd like some thoughts if the first part sounds snacky enough. I am content that later I'd probably have to commission the "1 engine step" as some kind of plugin to an existing engine. Edit: It works best as "1-Click" (Sorry Jeff Bezos!), aka just click on the piece and watch the move list appear, rather than keep having to click "go". Additional fun would be generating say a 5 ply move list deep all at once, then you click a piece for his reply to "prune" the whole tree. So okay, I am just having fun! But in the world of things, all this isn't "that hard". I just love feature creep! : )

2003

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Right Click any file and create New Folder by its Name

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 05, 2013, 01:24 AM »

I magically had this working again out of a total fluke ... and then I moved the folder again and it went back to crashing!

2004

Developer's Corner / Re: Free Online Educational Offering: Major or Minor in Computer Science at Saylor

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 05, 2013, 01:19 AM »

Wow, okay, a couple of angles to go for here.

1. "But how much is it worth?" It may be true, but that's *brittle* - it can't hold true forever. (Maybe until the NSA stops spying on us?   ) In other words, as long as it was at least tied to actual professors who legit knew their stuff, they can fiddle with the "value pricing". But these kinds of things are starting to catch the public eye, and they are just at the point they can't be forgotten again. Not forever. So another angle is to get someone to start companies hiring *only* people from MMO (Is that the term?) courses. (Legit companies, not scams - you can expect someone will try to bury this stuff under scams too!) 

2. Improve the quality pronto. Because as noted above, people are going to go down in Logical Fallacies in order. So if they can gripe about bad quality materials, ... take that gripe away. Get your favorite 5 grumpy real profs to make/fix the whole degree's worth of courses *including* the real world stuff that so often gets left behind. A Special Lectures seminar is *crucial*. One day do a "stop the zero day" lesson. One day do "Issues in UI" (and for whatever else we hate them for, Apple basically wrote UI 3.0") Your choice of 18 more seminars taken from real life. Maybe it's "Pick 20 of the following 85 seminars"!

3. Copyright mess. Get recordings of the real lectures of the name brand schools! Get them to play the "Marginal Cost" game (zero)! So if you now even have the real lectures, (with simulated office hours etc), you squeeze the snarks even more.

Timeline wise, I think they can stall this meme until after the 2016 Prez elections, and then I think it will explode about 2018.

2005

Living Room / Re: Short Sell Nokia NOW! :P

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 04, 2013, 09:24 AM »

But weren't the reasons Steve Ballmer is getting ditched, is that he "didn't get" the new scene? So is Trojan Horsing Nokia really the answer to "leadership"?! So I guess I was mildly interested in who they picked for new CEO, but I guess I'd be a bit dismayed if it was Steven Elop!

2006

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 03, 2013, 11:59 AM »

sez it all!

2007

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 08:56 PM »

A few more signs:

               

2008

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 07:29 PM »

Here are some "simple" funny ones.
         

         

This next one is terrifying!


         

         

2009

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 07:07 PM »

Here are some more signs! I think more of them are photoshopped than the site lets on, but hey! Why not? At least the concepts are great!

In honor of Edward Snowden! This became my profile pic!


The Runner Up:


This one is for Renny!

2010

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 06:59 PM »

In honor of Edward Snowden, I changed my avatar pic!

I'm going to look for some fun signs to put in my next post.

2011

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Review of Zeus Edit

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 05:57 PM »

... I discovered Zeus, and the price is right, and the feature set is right- I'm just hoping that it lives up to the hype on the site.

-wraith808 (September 02, 2013, 05:22 PM)

What kind of thing would you consider a "deal-breaker" that would lead you to believe that it doesn't live up to the hype?

2012

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on September 02, 2013, 05:55 PM »

Here's this week's winner for me - I had no idea the BeeGees had an "early" period! It's also a unnerving mix of the lyrics and the overall tone.

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=Dq6YmSVAOG8
BeeGees "I Started a Joke".

2013

Living Room / Re: Kiss Encryption Goodbye... :*

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 31, 2013, 04:40 PM »

But up until 9-11 at least as a pasty white guy the feds stayed out of my way. You know if you did anything seriously stupid of course you risked getting in trouble, but the silly stuff was viewed as silly and treated as such, maybe with a warning from a cop that "hey, ya know, putting chewing gum in a guy's exhaust pipe could cause some nasty problems, so don't do it, mmkay?"

But now if you teach someone to beat a polygraph they want to send you to *jail*!!???

Never mind that several TV episodes go into it! I think I can recall at least three shows - Chuck, Lie To Me, and Alias that had scenes about that!

2014

Living Room / Re: Help Proofreading a submission

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 29, 2013, 10:14 PM »

What is the deadline and for whom?

2015

Living Room / Re: Dopamine Driven Game Design

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 29, 2013, 04:22 PM »

I think it goes even broader to the internet as a whole. I think Internet activities as a whole are Dopamine boosters. The trick is to decide what that means in the long term holistically. I don't yet have an answer!

2016

Living Room / Re: HELP PLEASE

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 29, 2013, 03:47 PM »

As a simple thing you can do in many programs such as browsers is "zoom". So look under Vew Menus and then you can zoom your way to a larger size. There are also keyboard commands such as control and the + key that zoom in as well.

2017

Living Room / Re: Help Proofreading a submission

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 27, 2013, 12:35 AM »

I dunno, I got a text file okay...

2018

Living Room / Re: The effort in xkcd comics

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 10:59 PM »

How long that one took? How about Time ("play" it here) or Click and Drag?

-rsatrioadi (August 26, 2013, 08:14 PM)

Well I phrased it wrong, but that's what I meant - those were the epic ones, but it was just today's as a "midline" that happened to inspire me to make the thread.

2019

Living Room / Re: Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 03:33 PM »

I saw somewhere that Russia says they didn't want Snowden, but that he was indeed on his way to Cuba when (I think?) they denied him so he got stuck.

2020

Living Room / Re: Nonplussed - Windows 7 random BSODS

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 03:29 PM »

What other hardware does the user have at home? I recall reading about a Microsoft kernel/driver engineer who at one point had similarly crazy problems, and he found out that his external harddrive had a bug in its driver that caused such BSODs. (He also managed to get the bug pushed to the vendor and fixed, so that specific one shouldn't be an issue anymore).

Regardless, I can well imagine it being some sort of weird interplay. One wonky USB port, one wonky device, or maybe just some mutual sneaky dislike somehow. It wouldn't be the first time the problem was sneaky like that.

-worstje (August 26, 2013, 12:58 PM)

I'm going to borrow this comment.

I'm fighting my feeble memory and losing, but I had a case at my old job sorta like this.

Blah Blah, comp works, then all of a sudden it started bsod'ing, so it wasn't power supplies etc. I swear it was a *software program* that did it, and (don't hurt me if I mangle this vague reason) but it was something like the program interacted in a weird edge case with the driver, so then it became a "driver problem" causing the bsod. And if I had to pick a driver, I'd say it was maybe the video driver dealing with dual screens and maybe a program that didn't have that properly supported.

2021

Living Room / Re: Are Creative Commons Licenses Even Enforceable?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 11:19 AM »

Ah, but then would their song ever have become popular at all without that CC license? Would the artist die as an obscure nobody without that exposure? What he does with his free fame after that is up to him. Releasing an album and taking advantage of the free publicity he got from the movie to sell it, would be the intelligent thing to do.

I think that CC license would have been him betting he would be famous if he had the chance to be heard by the masses. How could one bet better?

-app103 (August 26, 2013, 10:23 AM)

Of course! I agree!

I was just trying to make a hypothetical argument on why the concept wouldn't hold up under a "strict" test.

2022

Living Room / Re: The effort in xkcd comics

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 10:57 AM »

Well, if you look at the spiders bit, he's saving some time there with variations. But either way, that still likely took the better part of a day.

-Renegade (August 26, 2013, 10:16 AM)

I think y'all are right with that and the script, but it would have taken me a couple of hours just to find all those questions and have them be funny.

And a few of his map ones are just epic!

2023

Living Room / The effort in xkcd comics

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 10:09 AM »

Xkcd is a slippery thing. It "looks simple" ... because it is drawn to be simple.

But Randall M sometimes saves time on a few "quick" strips, so that it looks like he can spend *hours* on other ones!

Can we get a vote on how long this one took? Holy Wall of Text!!

"Questions"
http://xkcd.com/1256/

2024

Living Room / Re: Are Creative Commons Licenses Even Enforceable?

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 26, 2013, 10:05 AM »

We are talking about you being able to take a CC-BY licensed work of art, ... and then later not being able to prove that contract existed in the first place, or that it allowed commercial use, or the creation of derivative works.

-app103 (August 26, 2013, 05:44 AM)

I both want to "assume good faith" while giving a wink and nod to malice. But I sorta see the "proof it existed" as "sorta the easy part" in the sense that me-as-reuse-artist saw *something* to even think they were in CC-land at all. So for example doing a "Save-Page-As--Webpage-Complete" with a timestamp should "sorta work". I know, you can get all fancy about how to certify it, but let's stay simple "in this paragraph" so we can go to the next batch of issues down.

I'd hope that a CC-BY license should be one of the easier ones to use. So far they seem to be holding up, because in the few early cases, it seems they started boiling down to rather simple other aspects. Club Owner Club owner #1 said he was using only CC music, but he was mistaken and/or bluffing, so he lost, but only to the extent those other songs got in there. Another one ended up being about Personality Rights and not CC.

But when Club Owner #2 proved he used CC music only, he won.

What we need is a crispy case where someone uses a CC-BY song, maybe in a movie, it goes viral, and then the owner gets grouchy and tries to wiggle out of it. CC-BY is essentially about exposure, an implicit "piggy back on your marketing" tradeoff. So in the rare case someone hits it out of the solar system, that "exposure only" will have to do, with no $, too bad you didn't bet better on yourself.

2025

Living Room / Re: Help Proofreading a submission

« Last post by TaoPhoenix on August 25, 2013, 11:03 PM »

I'll try. Where's a good link to download from?