Fearthepenguin.net

Now that I’ve started by Intermediate Algebra class,  [hey gimme a break, I haven't done algebra in 18 years!], I came across this and found it worth posting.

Math is easy!

It looks like skynet is almost ready to takeover the world. Scientists in Japan have made some pretty impressive breakthroughs in high-speed robotic hand manipulation!

The video below shows the hand spinning a pen, bouncing a ping-pong ball, tying knots, moving a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing up a cell phone and catching it!

You can check out their website for more information.

I know that 99.9999% of the people who will ever read this site don’t care, but for the one guy who does, www.fearthepenguin.net is now ipv6 enabled! Hopefully I’ll soon figure out how to have the webserver tell you if you are using ipv4 or ipv6 when you connect. Until then, you’ll have to take my word for it. :)

Open Source Windows Software

There are plenty of “What’s the best open source Windows software for …. ?” on the ‘net but since I’m often asked what I personally use, here’s a list along with my reasons for choosing that option:

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Here ladies and gentlemen is the worlds worst dice-rolling program in Python… Ok, maybe it isn’t the worst. But it’s one of my first complete Python programs [or programs of any language] so I’m sure there are lots of ways to improve it. This is a CLI program that will ask you how many dice to roll, and how many sides, then it will print out the results. There are currently no limits set on the number of rolls or sides.

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There was a fairly decent storm going by just to the south of me, and to the west was a nice sunset shining out of another, smaller storm. I got some great color out of these, while to the south it was grey and foreboding…

It’s a sad day. This poor forgotten server has been acting as a caching resolver for 2441 days [over 6.5 years] without being rebooted. Unfortunately that means it’s also been running 6.5 years without being patched or updated.It’s running Solaris 8, an expired copy of VxFS [filesystem], and a copy of Bind 8.3.4 that was compiled in 2002! Lou Gehrig would be proud.

So with little fanfare, this server is officially being decommissioned today. Lets have a moment of silence for this uncomplaining workhorse of a server.

NOTE: I posted this review on Amazon.com. I wanted to go ahead and post it here to. This is an incredible book and a great read! I highly recommend it.

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A bunch of people keep asking me what I thought about the Star Trek movie. In short:

It was great!

Ok, so it wasn’t Shakespeare, and it focused a bit more on the action and less on introspecitve philisophical questions that I loved about the series; but the end result was a fun summer movie that I think did a great job in giving a new life to this story.

It’s definitely worth seeing, even if just to watch Karl Urban absolutely *NAIL* his performance of Bones. :) He even had the arms-crossed, hunched back stance down perfectly.

Yes there was a teeny bit of Sylar in Spock, but mostly, Zachary Quinto did a good job with the character, and easily held his own when standing face-to-face with the legend that is Leonard Nimoy. I can’t imagine what it’s like to play such an iconic character while standing in front of the guy that made the character so iconic.

The only real problem I had with it was the early scenes of a young Kirk doing stupid things. I know Kirk is supposed to be kind of reckless but the Corvette* scene was just stupid. But once the movie gets past this, it’s a fun ride.

So go see it. I want to see more like this. :)

* Edit: I originally put “Mustang”. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’d much rather see a Mustang go over a cliff than a vintage ‘vette. :)