Another One Bites the Dust

I think I'm back in the game. My score is now 74.

Project Euler Status Report

Today I cracked not one, but two Project Euler problems: numbers 76 and 63. Woo-hoo! For the longest time I was stuck, but persistence finally paid off. My score is now 72.  I should not have been stuck for so long, but it is what it is. I'm not the best Project Euler competitor by a very long shot. I don't have great knowledge of  number theory and algorithms, but I'm working on it. Now, at least I know what "partition" means in number theory.

Knowing the correct math terminology makes it much easier to research solutions. I need to spend some more time with a number theory text, pencil and paper. I never thought I would spend time on this kind of math...

By the way, yes, the "private email" listed in the image will connect to me. It's not the best way, but it will work. 

G-men on SNL

Tina Fey enumerating Betty White

You can watch a very funny census skit from Saturday Night Live on Hulu, at least until it isn't there any more. For the record, Tina Fey's shoulder bag and ID appear authentic, but the clipboard isn't. Real live census enumerators will have an oversize 3 ring notebook binder, which doubles as a writing surface. If Tina was a boy, she would have to be wearing a necktie, but since she isn't, I believe her outfit is acceptable for a temp "g-man".  She should probably tuck in her blouse to look more professional, but that's really not my call.  I wonder if she's really earning a little extra money working for the census, or if the NBC prop department is just really good.

I'm now a Man in Black, but without the flashy thing.

I am finally working again. I work for the federal government of the USA, albeit on a strictly temporary basis.  Although the USA has no Official Secrets Act, I am nevertheless sworn to secrecy and thus can't tell you much, on the pain of fines and imprisonment. Really! It's too bad, because I'm getting some really funny stories from this job. C'est la vie. I think it's OK to tell you that I made $US 77.5625 today (before taxes). Cha-ching!

I have no flashy thing, but I want one. A Pilot G2 pen is a poor substitute. Even if you load it with a Mont Blanc cartridge. Government issue ballpoint pens tend to self-destruct and leak ink. The government will disavow any knowledge of (or responsibility for) your ink stained self, including your clothing. I found one of my father's old pocket protectors; it not only gives me a warm feeling (I really miss Pop) but it protects my shirts from federal blue ballpoint pen ink. The government issue number 2 pencils and the federal blue pencil sharpener do kick ass.

I don't get to ride in a helicopter, or carry a firearm, or any other weapons for that matter. I don't have a car with a siren or lights, either. Everyone should feel much safer knowing that. I do get to wear a spiffy non-photo ID card on a lanyard around my neck. I also wear a shirt and tie, and I don't wear sneakers or jeans, so I look almost professional. If you close one eye and squint a bit.

Life is good, for now. Best of all, tonight was taco night. And did I mention the $77.5625, before taxes?

PAC MAN turns 30

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of PAC MAN, and Google celebrated with a working version of the game in in the logo of their search page. Of course I inserted a few coins, just like the good old days. Play it while it's still available.

Update May 25, 2010:  Since everybody loves PAC MAN, he's now a permanent fixture at  http://www.google.com/pacman/. Go there and insert coin now!

My Life as a Ronin II: Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy

The story of Theresa's HP Netbook continues.

Brian eventually gave the now working HP netbook back to Phil, who gave it back to Theresa. It was working well. We put it through it's paces, and everything was good. Windows XP was singing bel canto.

Brian kept the netbook for a few days, and played with it a lot. He liked that little HP, and would love to get his hands on one. (As they say, it's not in the budget.) He dragged it all over town, computing up a storm... well, at least he watched a lot of storm and tornado videos on it. (That's his thing.)  He was smitten, and wants get something just like it, except he wants to install OS X on it. This is possible on some models. Not legal, mind you, but possible. Steve Jobs is so pissed.

The netbook was working well, really, until the Theres-in-ator got her hands on it. The HP then became "goofalized". I have no idea what happened. (Some people should avoid computing devices.) Brian emailed me that he had it again, and that there was an "incident", and it now wasn't booting correctly. Brian's stock repsonse is "hardware problem, it's broken". I emailed back my stock response -- boot into safe mode and fix the beast. He tried, no joy. Eventually he showed it to me at the office, a.k.a. Starbucks. It was really goofed up, and I frankly, I had no idea how to fix it. It would boot up, but nothing ran. Safe mode was no help here.

This was going to be a royal pain. Phil and Brian were talking about using it for target practice. I thought that would be a waste of a good machine. My contention was it's probably just a software problem, and that we should fix it.  Brian and I talked about reinstalling Windows XP. You would think we could sort that out, but nope. No way. (We're pretty useless I guess.) We had troubles. (Not to mention that Theresa didn't have Windows XP media, even though she paid for a license when she purchased the machine. Brian had a Windows XP disk of some sort -- insert pirate sounds here -- that we were working with.)  It's possible to install Windows XP from a thumb drive (Google says so), but you have to jump through a few hoops to do so and Brian and I didn't make it through. Aw, snap!

To save the HP from being used for target practice I offered to put Linux on it. Theresa's files were on a SD card, while Windows was on the internal SSD. We could install Linux on the internal SSD, and just leave the SD card alone. Since Theresa is a windows user, so I wanted a easy to use Linux distro.

I chose Easy Peasy for her. It's very point and clicky, really easy to figure out, but under the hood it's a robust Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Just the thing for a girl who breaks Windows. Although it was originally designed for Asus eeePC netbooks, [1] I was betting that it would run on the HP. One nice thing about Easy Peasy is it has all the goodies installed from the get go. As the website puts it:

EasyPeasy is a simple netbook operating system, but still provides you with the codecs and drivers you need for running most music and video right out of the box.

You should read that as Adobe Flashplayer and and things like mp3 codecs are already installed. Some Linux distributions adhere to GNU philosophy, and you have to futz around to install things required to get more music and video choices on your machine. While we're the subject: play ogg, OK? It really is a good thing. Even if you run the proprietary stuff, use and support free and open source software. It's good to have choices. 

 

I got things working with Easy Peasy: audio, web cam, wireless networking. It was only slightly annoying. The wireless chipset is from Broadcom, and to work with Linux, it requires the firmware to be downloaded from a manufacturer's site on the internet. It seems that the firmware can't be included in a Linux distro, which is a shame. It's real hard to download firmware from the internet while sitting in Starbucks if your wifi ain't working. I had to drag it home to connect to my local network over a cat5 cable to get the firmware. While annoying, it worked well. Almost easy peasy lemon squeezy. And I got a little exercise walking, too.

Brian, who is enamored with Mac OS X, really liked Easy Peasy. He downloaded it at home and wanted to install it on a windows desktop box that he uses. The Easy Peasy user interface is really designed for netbooks; I know I wouldn't want to use it on a desktop machine. I pointed him to wubi, which would install the regular Ubuntu Lucid in peaceful coexistence with the Windows OS already installed on the machine, much to the annoyance of Bill Gates. He downloaded and ran wubi, and a bunch of hours later (he was working over the Cricket modem), it finished installing successfully. The cool thing was Ubuntu recognized and used the Cricket modem. I wasn't sure if that was going to happen, which was one reason I recommended wubi. Before this Brian was talking about buying Snow Leopard and turning this machine into a hackintosh. We'll have to see if he continues down the hackintosh road, now that he has has Ubuntu. You know that Brian is broke, and Ubuntu is free (as in beer) as well as free (as in speech), while OS X is neither.

George saw Easy Peasy, played with it a bit and loved it. Now he wants to install it on his HP netbook.  I'm not really trying to convert people to Linux, but I seem to be doing so anyway. Go figure.

A few hours later:

[1]  When I wrote this, I thought that Easy Peasy was once called eeebuntu. I was wrong. According to Wikipedia:

Eeebuntu (not to be confused with Easy Peasy, formerly known as Ubuntu Eee) is an operating system for netbooks. The current version is based on Ubuntu, newer version will be based on Debian Unstable^[1]. Eeebuntu was designed originally for the Asus Eee PC line of netbooks.

I think Ubuntu eee was what I think I used to run eeebuntu om my Asus eeePC 900, but I'm not sure at this point in time. I know I ran one or the other, and whichever one it was, it was darn good. Both were originally intended to run on Asus eeePC computers, but now work on a variety of netbooks.