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The Geek Syndrome where computer programmers get their charm from.

aspergers syndrome information

I've already got two systems hubbed to the network (primary Windows desktop, secondary Linux server), and I haven't had the need to network the laptop into the mix yet. Mainly because I can unplug the uplink on my hub, plug in the laptop, assign it an IP address (it's amazing how many times I've assigned it the same IP address as my main box, even though I should know better), and then download the files I need.

Since I'm on 3rd floor in Founders, I can't get (reliable) wireless access from up here. On good nights, I occasionally find myself signing onto IM from my room when doing misc crap on the laptop. Usually there's no signal, or it's so bad as to be unusable. (But good enough to repeatedly toggle between "connected" and "unconnected" in the systray.)

I'm debating whether or not I recognize you from your pictures. I'm not sure, so I'll play it safe and guess no. Damnit, you got a better /. UID than me! *hmph*

If you're going to the school I think you are, you're mostly right about the laptop stuff. On their site it states that you can use your laptop for roaming & in the dorm ONLY if you first register it in the dorm network. They still shut off your port if you try to use that laptop on any other port in the dorm, although you can use any port in academic buildings or the campus center.

And don't get me started on the issues involved with hubbing two or more systems in the dorm... (There's a reason why I only use my laptop "on the hill".)

If Microsoft provides Open Source software,
then they should be allowed to show up.
If they do this
~stuff~, then no.

"Moore's Law" has been bastardized beyond belief. Take an opportunity to read Moore's Paper (1965), which is basically Gordon Moore's prediction on the future direction of the IC industry.

The only concession my school (as a whole) makes for grading is that we have no D or F grades. Instead, if you do worse than a C, you get the equivalent of an F, called instead a "NR" - no record. That's right, if you fail a course, it doesn't appear on your transcript. It's certainly saved me a few times, and it's encouraged me to take classes that were very challenging.

In February of 2001, Sega announced that they would focus solely on making games for other systems.

"Indeed, Sega has fallen, they are down, posting quarterly losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fourth time in a row, but they are not out. In fact, Sega's future appears to be a bright one as the company is now officially third party. From now on, Sega will only be making games for other companies' systems."

Read the entire article here.

You're quite right. I guess I clarified my point a little better in my journal entry.

I do like Linux. I think it's closer to the general public than it's ever been before. I also haven't used KDE in quite a while, so I believe you when you evangelize its ease of use.

I'm not a big fan of Windows. I'd rather use Mac or Unix, especially for development purposes. However, I think it still has a few bonuses over *nix, which are lessening with time:
1) more people know how to fix (or at least "fix") problems that the average luser might have. (The only live people I could go to with my Linux problems were my friends here at my school, who were big *nix geeks.)
2) You don't have to know anything special to install a new program. (This is generally much better in Mac than in Windows, but both tend to be better than Linux). I don't think most users can be bothered to learn apt-get or how to compile & link source code. The problem compounds itself when an application needs libraries which must be obtained seperately. And precious few binaries exist for Linux (last I checked).
3) Compatibility. I don't like it, you don't like it, but most people and most businesses still run Windows. My mother is upset when she can't run a (Windows) program a friend recommended, or when she can't open a specific version of Word docs which choke on Word 2001 (for Mac). The problem seems to compound itself with Linux, which is still rather poorly supported by larger software corporations.

As far as learning & usability - we're going to need to find our way to a middle ground between the condescending tone of Windows and the steep learning curve of Linux. (In my opinion, Mac is close - it makes the simple things simple, but lets you do the harder/complex stuff as well. You can feel free to disagree.)

So true, so true...

Although I don't think my school will let you get away with that... However, I think very little of my knowledge will wind up making me "competent".

I'm guessing so. TADS is indeed the language he developed. It's still being developed, in fact, though these days it's available for free.

The original C source for TADS used 8-character variable and subroutine names, in order to compile on an old and restrictive C compiler. (Watcom, perhaps?) So maybe Mike learned more from Chuck's Power Koding than you mentioned.

Unfortunately, his original D compiler was written in BASIC, which he ran interpreted, so compilation was slow. In order to speed up the interpreter, he used the sort of "source code compression" that is illustrated at Chuck's Power Koding - removing any unnecessary spaces, using long source lines and having as few actual lines as possible.

(This kind of ancient interpreter didn't use byte codes - if you looped ten times, you'd parse the loop's source code ten times!)

We suggested that he rewrite his D compiler in D so he could get it to compile faster. He decided to do that, and worked really hard at it but got it working after some time.

As a complication he improved the language, but it meant that his old compiler wouldn't compile the newer kind of D code. I think what he did was make two revisions of the D-written compiler, one written in the old syntax that would understand the new, but could be compiled by the BASIC version and then an update that was written in the new D that could compile itself.

It was a sort of mix of Pascal but with lots of convenient stuff like BASIC string handling mixed in. I don't think the language would have made any computer scientists happy - D was designed to suit Mike's personal style.

He used it at first to write an Adventure-style game (a text adventure) that he and another friend designed.

Later he wrote a text-adventure compiler, where he could write a specification file for a text adventure, process it, and an executable file for a text adventure would be generated.

He didn't have to get a real summer job because he was selling these generated games to game software publishers!

Mike was an amazing programmer. He taught me a lot of what I knew about C and x86 assembly early on.

This was all on 640 kb 8088 DOS PC's that were outfitted with whizzy 10 MB hard drives. The students in the computational physics lab were expected to use the hard drives only during class, and to store their personal files on floppy when we weren't actively working at the PC's.

So his D language compiler would fit on a floppy. The old 5 1/4" inch kind, that really flopped. I think they stored 360kb.

I wonder whether we would all be better off if programmers designed their own personal languages just to suit their own personal styles. Yes, there would be portability problems but wouldn't we be more productive?

I got my own chance to hack a whacky compiler. This was a team effort though and I was just a contributor. Star Sapphire Common Lisp manages to run a complete common lisp environment with MicroEmacs on a 640kb DOS 8088 PC.

The way it does that is by swapping to an 8 MB backing store file. But the 8088 doesn't have an MMU, you say? That's right - we operated the virtual memory manually, by writing C code that would explicitly get or put each lisp cons from or into the VM system with a function call.

It made it ... interesting ... to operate on complicated data structures. I designed the implementation of the lisp scoping rules, among other things.

Oh yeah, and I was the source code control system and project manager. We didn't have a network - networks were way too expensive in 1986. What I did was wait until late when all the other programmers went home, copy the changes off all their machines onto floppy, integrate them on one machine and then copy the new release onto everyone's PC.

Kids these days. Don't know when ya got it good.

I am SO sick of hearing that.

Does anyone understand 'spectral response'? Lets have a 30 second lesson on what 'the eye' sees

The eye can see 3 colours and a 'standard' group of british men are what makes up the CIE Standard Observer. This was arrived by taking 2 monochromatic lights in combination until any projected colour could be created and matched. If you note the Tristimulus graph you can see there are some negative lobes- how can one have negative lobes when you are talking intensities of light added? Because in order to make those particular colours, the 3rd light had to be added to the other side of the screen, in essence 'diluting' the colour to ap point that the colour could be matched.

OK, we've now got an example of what the eye can 'see'- when you have black pants that look brown under tungsten, you are seeing an example of "metamerism". This is when two colours have the same 'colour' but appear different under different lights- I've seen my Red car look purple under street lights, for example.

No camera can beat this except with extremely good colour management- in fact, if it were easy (and it is, just not easy ;P) then you'd not have the problem of a purple flower that photographs pink (Rochester, NY, has an Lillac Festival- if you photograph a purple Lillac it comes out Pink if the camera is a cheap digital)

I could go on and on and on but PLEASE do not call this camera 'like the eye'- all it does is address colour moire issues which on higher end cameras are already being addressed by complicated interprolation algorithms.... which is why you don't see them on your cheap $45 640x480 webcam.

Well, my school was just happy to announce that they are the first university in the world to use Segways. Campus police is using them for patrols (I haven't seen this yet, but I hear they're out there), and the press release even says they plan to use them for tours. Tours? Come on...no one wants to follow one of these around unless the whole damn tour group gets them.

Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.

For example, WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) and RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) are both fine schools.

I go to WPI.. and aside from the guy/girl ratio, I like it (well, I ended up beating the ratio and finding a girlfriend anyway, but I was as surprised as anyone.. the ratio is pretty damn bad, heh). A couple bad classes, but nothing horrible. And none of the stuff you seem to be going through. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a school to attend. Especially if you're a girl (I know, it's slashdot, what are the odds of finding one of *those*? probably worse than at WPI. :P )... I still have plenty of single friends who would like to see the ratio move a little more towards balanced. :)

I go to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and we just recently had a debate about mandating laptops in college. Trick is, they're not included in the fees. So you could theoretically buy your own, but that's still at least $1500 extra you have to shell out. The debate was very interesting; I'm not going to try to cover it all here, but if you follow the link above, you will find survey results, minutes, and even a video of the debate. Very interesting stuff, good debate. The basic point is, a laptop is nice, but it's definitely not a requirement and would be a waste of money for a lot of people.

I go to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and we just recently had a debate about mandating laptops in college. Trick is, they're not included in the fees. So you could theoretically buy your own, but that's still at least $1500 extra you have to shell out. The debate was very interesting; I'm not going to try to cover it all here, but if you follow the link above, you will find survey results, minutes, and even a video of the debate. Very interesting stuff, good debate. The basic point is, a laptop is nice, but it's definitely not a requirement and would be a waste of money for a lot of people.

But of course, this is only useful if you live in East. MA.

Credit where it's due. The original version of God Rest ye CS Students was written in the mid-1970s, for the PDP10 at Worcester Tech, along with a bunch of other hacker songs.

I'm not sure if that makes this a "new" idea. In a paper Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, wrote in his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he proposed, "in detail a railway line between Boston and New York, in which the cars were run in an evacuated tube and were prevented from metal-to-metal contact with the guide rails by electromagnets." This quote is from a Goddard Biography by Edward Pendray. Goddard estimated a Boston to New York travel time of 10 minutes.

I neglected to post a link to the license I mentioned in my previous post. Check out section 6(a) of the following license:

Microsoft® Campus License Agreement

Basically you're just totally incorrect.

Great post! I went to school with the guy who swallowed Liquid Nitrogen. Don't do it!

Removing a balloon "cateract"

Why does this one work? The laser has to go through the outer balloon as well as the inner. Why don't they both pop?

What exactly are you qualified for? I have no idea. Why isn't there a resume on your web page? When I saw your comment, I looked to see what you were about. I couldn't tell other than that you play trombone.

Make it your job to get a job. Think like a hunter.

Damn, my link to the press release didn't come out before.

Sounds like the WPI Plan to me. The idea behind Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA has been the balance of book knowledge and hands on learning since it opened in 1865.

In the 1960's they decided to radically change how WPI students learn and prepare for careers. The current implementaion of the plan involves three significant projects that you must complete before you graduate. The first is in humanities called a Sufficency; you take 5 related classes and then create a project, such as write a research paper, perform a recital, or design a stage set. The second is to relate Technology to society called the Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP). Many students complete this project overseas, helping governments and non-profits develop soemthing important. And the last project is your senior thesis called the Major Qualifying Project (MQP). This is, obviously, in your major and should correlate to your primary focus over the years. Increasingly, students are working with companies to complete this. And, there are no required classes. There areas of study that you have to do, but there is always a choice on which exact class you take.

There must be something to this as companies such as Mitre and GE continue to recruit WPI undergrads. Hopefully Olin College will be able to get a foothold and produce the same caliber, if not better, students. Now if only they weren't in WPI's back yard...

I got confused about the 34 part too, though. but after some google searching, I found some things (including a wierdly titled Salvation army page... Anyone care to explain the 34 here?).. but max age for ROTC is 30, but " waiverable to age 34 in certain circumstances"...
most importantly, apparently the max age for enlisting in the army is 34 years old, according to this table (incidentally, it's the same for the navy, but 27 for the AF and Coast guard and 28 for the Marine Corps [a.k.a. Uncle Sam's Misguided Children]/USMC)

The problem is that I cannot figure out how to bypass the Linux kernel's TCP/IP stack routing optimization. All the combinations of routing table modifications and iptables that I've tried still don't make the packets flow out the interfaces and on the wire instead of within the stack.

Nor could I. I spent the past year working on a thesis-like project for undergraduates building a new queueing mechanism using the Linux kernel. Using only one 300 Mhz processor and saturating two 100 BaseT interfaces would suck down about 1/3 of the CPU, and I found no way to bypass the stack. FreeBSD and OpenBSD can do it transparently if you want to give them a try.

The reason for that was not so the high g force. The problem was that the high g force started and stopped immediately. Modern (or better well designed) coasters are build so that the forces gradually build up and gracefully go down without aprupt changes.

That's why the loops in modern coasters are more elliptical than circular and don't have straights before and after the looping. Actually a looping in a modern roller coaster consists of two spirals (clothoids) joint together in the highest point.

Read more about the roller coaster maths/physics here (with great picutres ;-), here or here if you are interested.

This is actually kind of old. I just did a project for my school at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. One of the companies we spoke to had been using these as part of their safety program for a while. It sounded really funny. My partners and I thought something was lost in the translation. It's pretty funny to see it turn up again here.

Although this is probably correct (uranium salts are common in the coal), the coal burning keeps the radioactive uranium nice a dilute.

Nuclear waste tends to be a bit more concentrated.

People also have a unhealthy fear of low-level radiation, based on studies assuming if a melt-down or nukes going off makes lethal radiation. Then radiation at any level is bad.

You need trace amount of many minerals, etc. that will kill you if absent. You are just as dead if you get high (toxic) levels of these same chemicals.

Drinking 2 six-packs a day rots your liver. Drink a glass of alchohol with the evening meal is generally considered beneficial (the alchol itself, not just the stuff in wine).

There are honest scientific studies that show that low-lever radiation has a health benefit. Poliitically, few agree with this. Try here if you are interested.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke held a webcast interview with my school a little while back titled "Imagine in the Future: Visions of the World to Come." Clarke and some others talked about their expectations for the next 100 years. You can watch the video (Windows Media only) at here. It was a pretty interesting discussion.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke held a webcast interview with my school a little while back titled "Imagine in the Future: Visions of the World to Come." Clarke and some others talked about their expectations for the next 100 years. You can watch the video (Windows Media only) at here. It was a pretty interesting discussion.

One of the things I have been finding out a lot about recently is aspergers due to living with the daughter of an expert.

We ahve been toying with ideas about links between people suffering from high functioning aspergers syndrome and people who work in professions such as IT, especially development. This is mainly because with aspergers the only major outward impairment of the individual is with social interraction and social awareness and this coupled with tendency to obsess over repetitive detail means that aspergers sufferers fit the mould of good programmers.

I don't know enough about the syndrome to know if it is passed on through genes, but one could postulate if there is a group with a higher than average make up of the disease who are breeding amongst themselves it might possibly lead to a significent level of new cases compared to the national average.

Even today a lot of aspergers cases are misdiagnosed as straight autism.

Here for more information on aspergers and the differences between it and autism

The tree is located in the CCC shop (CCC = College Computer Center), which is the place A) where WPI computers that break are repaired (I think student computers can be brought there if they were bought via a WPI sponsored vendor, but I'm not sure...) and B) where Network Operations is located (making this slightly funnier IMHO).

For the past couple of years, there has been a tree in the CCC shop which is decorated with computer parts. This year, Paul Reitchel and Chuck Anderson decided to make those parts actually work. So they powered up the board with a power supply at the bottom of the tree and set it up to play Christmas songs via a web interface (although the speakers were, while not off, turned down to inaudiable when I swung by the shop - it was already popular enough around campus to drive everyone nuts, which doesn't surprise me).

Also, a "Christmas" tree has ornaments, lights, tinsel...christmasy things...

It does have lights, and, again, it's in the CCC shop, so it's decorated with hardware mostly as a joke. (Plus, if Chuck gets around to X10-ing the tree lights, it'll really be "Linux powered" - I think the fact that it plays music via the board is makes it "powered" enough... How would you use Linux to power a tree? Make it rotate or something?)

And if you want to see something really funny, take a look at the I2 link upstream/downstream graphs. You can see when the story was posted on the daily graph at about 20:00 EST.

(Plus the idea of NetOps taking up more than the maximum allowed bandwidth per system is a rather amusing idea to a WPI student...)

The tree is located in the CCC shop (CCC = College Computer Center), which is the place A) where WPI computers that break are repaired (I think student computers can be brought there if they were bought via a WPI sponsored vendor, but I'm not sure...) and B) where Network Operations is located (making this slightly funnier IMHO).

For the past couple of years, there has been a tree in the CCC shop which is decorated with computer parts. This year, Paul Reitchel and Chuck Anderson decided to make those parts actually work. So they powered up the board with a power supply at the bottom of the tree and set it up to play Christmas songs via a web interface (although the speakers were, while not off, turned down to inaudiable when I swung by the shop - it was already popular enough around campus to drive everyone nuts, which doesn't surprise me).

Also, a "Christmas" tree has ornaments, lights, tinsel...christmasy things...

It does have lights, and, again, it's in the CCC shop, so it's decorated with hardware mostly as a joke. (Plus, if Chuck gets around to X10-ing the tree lights, it'll really be "Linux powered" - I think the fact that it plays music via the board is makes it "powered" enough... How would you use Linux to power a tree? Make it rotate or something?)

And if you want to see something really funny, take a look at the I2 link upstream/downstream graphs. You can see when the story was posted on the daily graph at about 20:00 EST.

(Plus the idea of NetOps taking up more than the maximum allowed bandwidth per system is a rather amusing idea to a WPI student...)

It depends on what you mean by portable. If a laptop is "portable", then you can run SNES, old dos games, NES, gameboy, SEGA, PS2, etc. emulators on your laptop.

If you mean a gameboy is portable, it's only a few more iterations until we get there. Right now, I run PocketNes and it works great! Genesis and Lynx emulators also exist. I haven't tried Lynx but the Genesis one is still too slow. If you are willing to run Linux on your iPaq, you can run SNES. As for people who want XT, there is even an 80186 emulator! That means you can run DOS on top of WinCE! They even have screenshots of Windows 3.0 running on a PocketPC.

In short, I am amazed at my iPaq. These things are actually powerful enough to be classified as PC's. These 200Mhz handhelds are what sat on desktops in 1997. Check out Gateway's homepage as of 1/1/1997, they are selling P166's.

Someone else mentioned it but said they weren't sure, so I'll explain it more exactly:

Sites that specify font sizes as something concrete (ie, points or pixels) cause most browsers (read: Internet Explorer) to fail to resize the text. My webpage lays everything out via CSS (as in, no tables, but a menu on the left and content on the right). (No comments on usability please, I use it for myself and I can use the thing - actually, I think the base layout works fairly well, but my color scheme probably will piss off people who aren't me :). Also, a word of warning: if your browser does not support CSS and HTML4.0, the page will look funky. It'll render quasi-alright in Lynx (the menu currently comes first - maybe I should fix that) and it'll layout (almost) properly in Netscape 4, but the fonts will be all screwed up. Ignoring an off-by-one bug in Moz, it renders fine in both Mozilla and IE.) I use points to specify the layout since I would hope that specifying it in points would allow a browser to scale the font and don't want to play the "match layout with percent font size" game that I'd have to play otherwise.

Specifying font sizes as percents allow IE to properly scale the font. Specifying the size as points or pixels causes IE to keep the text size static when "zoomed." (Mozilla scales the font reguardless of point/percent, but I haven't tried pixel - my guess is that it would scale it as well.)

Personally, my view is that when text is "zoomed" the point to pixel conversion should be scaled up - IE doesn't scale the points and Mozilla only scales the font sizes. (Again, if you look at my webpage, I think that when I scale the font size up, the layout should scale along with the new font size since the font size and the layout are both specified in points. It doesn't scale at all in IE and Mozilla just makes the glyphs larger/smaller.)

Arguably, the fact that IE doesn't scale the font sizes larger is a bug in IE and not an issue with the web developers. But YMMV, I suppose it would make sense to redo the webpage to work around bugs in the most popular browser, especially one that makes pages illegible in it.

We still need a camera, a script, actors, props, costumes, sets, and a budget, but we've got a basic story line going... If you're interested, then you are insane.

I'm talking about this.

And yes, they do moderate: I remember Hemos telling the WPI ACM that they spend time moderating down the trolls after a story goes live.

And yes, they do moderate: I remember Hemos telling the WPI ACM that they spend time moderating down the trolls after a story goes live.

Nonsense! They are incurable skeptics! I saw it, I really saw it. Too bad I didn't carry a camera, so I have my friend draw it according to my description.

Scary, isn't it?
&nbsp_
/. / &nbsp&nbsp |\/| |\/| |\/| / Run, Bill!

However, I would agree that Java should not be the end-all language. However, the CS program at the college I go to starts with Java in the introductory courses and moves on to C/C++ (with optional assembly) for the more complicated courses. I think that this probably combines the best of both worlds - CS majors start on Java which covers up a lot of the complicated issues so that they can learn the basics of programming (conditional statements, object orientation, recursion, and the like) without having to worry about the annoying stuff (low-level I/O, memory management).

Once a CS major has been through the introductory courses that I skipped :) he then moves on to the C/C++ courses that I also skipped :). From here the CS course then gets into specific disciplines - procedure based programming, object orientation, Scheme, and Prolog are all taught at about the same time to give the CS majors a broader knowledge of programming. The final courses are on specifics, like operating systems, graphics, networking, and other stuff that can get complicated.

Basically, I don't think you should completely discount Java - a project I'm working on right now is written in Java. Oracle's most recent database tools are all in Java (that'd be the configuration utilities, not the actual DB itself - client side stuff, no server stuff). I'm doing some Java servlet/JSP/XSP stuff right now. Java has a very strong presence in the buisness world and you shouldn't discount its usefulness like that.

--

Has anyone had any experience in collecting data like this? What did or didn't work for you? Anyone actually convince the Sys Admins to let you snoop mail headers? I'd love to hear what sucesses or failures you've had.

This fall, I will be attempting to conduct a similar study on group connectivity at WPI (Worcester Polytechnical Institute). Although mostly un-planned at the moment, my goal is to map the inter-relationships of students and faculty to each other. As a small (~3000 student) technical school, the marketing department loves to claim how close a community WPI is. I plan to see whether their claims are true, or if they're just more marketing BS.

In any case, let me know if you've ever collected data for connectivity research before. I'm open to all ideas.

To e-mail me, wave a wand, and make spam be gone be gone.

Woohoo! My School is famous once again. Go here. Better than MIT (they are lifeless losers), because we DRINK.

Notable changes:

• A couple scoring rules for "bad" headers
• Scores for bad credit? no credit?
• Mail sent in compliance of "Section 301" of some law that says it's okay to send spam.

Too bad no one will read this. :)

This is all you need to know. My config is actually kind of amusing. I've picked up various rules from various people along the way, so most of it isn't mine originally. Here's what I use minus some personal information:

The lameness filter got me... Get this here.

Why bother porting or emulating when you can write for both platforms natively at the same time? This is what the SDL library is for. It allows you to write a program once and be able to compile it natively for each platform (Linux/Windows/Mac/etc). If developers started writing games to be cross platform they could release the game on all platforms simultaniously. Here is a research project on designing cross platform software: http://www.wpi.edu/~mongoose/mqp/latex_doc/mqp.pdf

Designing and writing a cross platform application is not difficult. Actually the main problem that the research found was the companies didn't want to write applications for Linux because they didn't want to have to support Linux. Linux was too hard for companies to support do to all the various distros, writing the code though was the easy part.

I did a large research project for my college on Cross Platform Software Design. The goal was to find out why companies weren't creating games and applications to run on multiple platforms. Developers were running into a lot of different code level problems and one of our conclusions was that the SDL library handled almost all of these coding problems in making a portable game. The project can be found online in .pdf format here.

As a side note, the biggest problem people had in creating a cross platform game is supporting non-Windows operating systems.