It’s been a while since I posted anything new, but there are currently three post drafts and another concept languishing. I’ll get around to those sometime. Here are some vector images to pass the time.
This was a little for-fun project that I built: a Python module/script that can be used to semi-randomly generate words, based on Markov chains.
Background, implementation I was inspired by recalling the story of the Automated Curse Generator, which seemed like something that would be interesting to implement for fun in my own time, as it did indeed turn out to be. In short, the module examines input text and generates a graph with edges weighted based on character frequency, then traverses the graph to generate a word.
To generate the chains, the module builds a directed graph based on the seed text, where characters are linked to all the characters which are known to follow them, with edges weighted according to the percentage of all following characters any particular character consists of.
Because I have nothing better to do right now, it’s a good time to dump the interesting links that I’ve been accumulating.
While radioactive hunks of matter are often portrayed as glowing with a green tinge, we all know that’s not actually true.. unless there’s Cherenkov Radiation involved, as in many nuclear reactors- that’s not green, though. Glowy. Also radioactive. Google have (for now) won the suit against them by Viacom regarding copyrighted content being uploaded to YouTube, which is good news for everyone except maybe Viacom. It’s still fun to read choice excerpts of correspondence involving all sorts of mudslinging in the case (warning: lots of curses).
After putting up with the lack of support for Windows 7’s jump lists in PuTTY for a while, I finally got tired enough of it to do something. Nothing as cool as patching PuTTY to do them itself, but I wrote a wrapper which indexes the saved sessions, allowing the user to select which ones should be included in the list.
From the project page:
PuTTYJL is a wrapper and patch for PuTTY written in C# for .NET 3.5 and Windows 7, adding support for the new Jump Lists, allowing you to create jump list entries for saved sessions in the registry and optionally just launch the wrapper to start a default session in PuTTY.
I’ve been slowly working towards putting together a new PC build to replace my current one, a Core 2 Duo- based system I built about three years ago, which is starting to show its age. In the interest of comparison shopping, I put together a spreadsheet and some charts looking at the newer Intel (i5/i7) and AMD (Phenom X4/X6) processors. Turns out that Intel’s Core i5-750 seems to be the best deal in processors for what I’m looking for in a system at the moment.
Raw Data Clock speeds are in MHz, TDP in Watts, and cost is price in USD at newegg as of 5/3/2010.