Screenshot compositing, made with free software
Since I bought the Nanonote, I have been finding new uses for it. Music player, note taker, voice recorder. I can also use it to start learning Python again, or Perl, which are (together with Lua) the languages currently installed by default.
After my first successful port (gnugo), I decided to try something else, and while idling at the train I thought that pMARS, the portable Memory Array Redcode Simulator was probably a good bet.
As I promised in my previous post reasons for re-inventing the wheel as a programmer, here I collect 8 reader reasons for re-inventing the wheel from comments on the reddit thread and on page comments. They are in no particular order AFAIK.
You need a faster wheel: Embedded software is the prime example of such. Average 10 cycles, worst case 15 cycles is not good when your system can explode if you do not attain 14 cycles at most.
The command line. That small place, where a lot can happen. And more so if you are a Linux user… How to maximize it? Where to harness its power?
I discovered commandlinefu.com a few years ago, while looking for a way to do… something. I don’t even enter that often, although it is a brilliant place to discover how to do X in Linux/UNIX.
Among its all time greats I found some gems, and some others I discovered elsewhere, or even I made up.
The ‘broken windows theory’ is a widely known theory, based on folks knowledge (which have been also tested in real life).
Consider a building with a broken window. If this window does not get repaired, other windows can break (over time, or by vandalism). In the long run, someone may break into the building, becoming a squatter.
Or a more usual situation. If some litter gets accumulated in a sidewalk or a lot, soon more litter will accumulate, until people start leaving whole bags of trash.
Since I bought the Ben NanoNote, I thought I needed to port something to it, as the biggest point with the NanoNote is developing to it, as its wiki says.
David Reyes, from Tuxbrain did a great work by porting gnuchess to the Nano and documenting it in his blog.
Of course, I want to port big things, but I’m not a great Linux guy, just average, so this tutorial makes a great starting point.
Stochastic hill climbing: Sisyphus pushes an image Last year, Slashdot published this interesting piece of work: Genetic evolution of the Mona Lisa. The idea is to approximate an image by a certain number of semitransparent polygons, randomly chosen. I liked very much the idea, and as every year I try to come up with some Christmas postcard related to maths or programming I gave it a try. So I wrote a LISP version… way too slow.