This evening I was bored at home, and decided to have a look at my old Lisp raytracer… a project that just went idle a year ago. I picked up another programming project I had idling for a long time (an emacs lisp project, to interact with my console-based fractal drawers). I had a coding breakthrough that time, and managed to advance quite a bit in a little time, so today I tried again.
Sometimes I feel like a character from a RPG (or NetHack), where you have a certain level and experience, and as you advance killing monsters, your experience points go up, your level eventually rises and your enemies turn harder.
I guess life (or at least a mathematician’s life while doing his thesis) is more or less like this… Enemies appear, you overcome them, and as you advance, they get stronger, bigger and thicker.
Stephen Wolfram (owner of Wolfram Research) has released (after announcing it in March) Wolfram Alpha, a kind of web search aimed at natural language and intelligent answers. JME pointed me to this question:
Taken from Wolfram Alpha
The strange thing about it is that is is fully written in Mathematica (or so they say, 5 million lines of code). Strange indeed, Mathematica isn’t a particularly fast or “comfy” programming language.
Around 1/2lf of the moments in which I look at my headphones to put them in, I pick them “switched”, i.e. I have (L)eft, I see an L and my head says (L)ight, then I see the other one, and it is (R)eft. Today I found out (R)eft is the past participle of reave, which means more or less “to rob”. But usually, in the presence of (R)ight there is nothing (L)eft.
There is a plain and easy way to download YouTube .flv videos (which you can watch with VLC Media Player, or in a Mac with Quicktime Player and additional plug-ins).
To do so, you need the Safari Web Browser (Mac or Windows). Go to your desired page hosting a Flash Video file, and select Activity in the Window menu. There you will find the files being downloaded in the web-page you are visiting… double click the bigger one (as usually flash videos are the biggest files in YouTube pages, if you can’t find such a big file, check for the .
Last weekend we had a quick trip (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) to Madrid. Being a Barcelona lover, I thought I would hate the city. I was amazed after walking over there, having a look at all the monuments and museums (the tourist thing), and then going for dinner and supper, some tapas and a beer. Madrid surprised us with this… in Barcelona is quite hard to find a cheap and good place to eat… or not so cheap, but not tourist focused.