A Dolphin’s Journal of Events

My GPS broke, so no more war driving here.
The serial to usb converter in the cable broke, and as ussual I didn’t bring a soldering iron.
Isn’t it odd that your stuff has to break always on trips when you don’t have tools with you?

Moving on, we found a we like. 5 bedroom, 4 bath [One bedroom is really a office]. It has CAT5e running through the house, and a finished basement. I may take the basement, since the house is on a hill and the back of the basement is exposed enough for a door and full windows [so it doesn't really feel like a basement].
Down there is enough room for my office and bedroom and general areas. I liked the layout of it. Expecially with all the services down in the basement. There’s also a full-house generator! [though it's really only hooked up to a few circuits.] Problem now is to find out how much our house is worth.

Next up, college. There’s not many colleges in the area where we are moving. Most of them are 60 miles or more away. Means I have to get a dorm [I don't want to] or see if I can arrange my scedule so I only have to go 3 days a week [not really wanting to drive for a hour every day.. really]. Plus it’s a little late to sign up for most of them.. which is a pretty big problem that we can’t do much about at the moment.
If all goes bad, I’ll ramp up and advertise my custom pc building service, see how much I can make at that and wait for next year. If that doesn’t go well, there’s a few tech shops around here I can see if I can get a job at.
I seriously don’t want to stay with my parents for too long, which is also why I’d like to get the entire basement of this next house, to feel a bit seperated from them I suppose.

That’s it.

Driving up to New Jersey to look at houses. Laptop and gps equipted as always. WiFi map:

[ignore everything except the line to Northern Jersey]

Total Networks so far: ~1,600

Sadly I didn’t get my new antennas that I ordered last week. Would have been fun to use a 14 dB yagi around the hotel. :> Also ordered new connections and adapters for my current antenna since the cable connectors are having.. issues.

We look at houses around Philly tomorrow, so we’ll see how many networks I pick up around there.

Also: Kismet + 800 networks + scrolling = massive lag.

More later!

A bit more info on the programming contest me and my friends are doing.

The Rules are simple:
- Must take a word list of any length and turn it into a string as short as possible.
- Case-sensitive, cannot change cases
- Must run in a reasonable time frame on a P4 [a week at the most] with a 4.7 MB word file.
- Every word in the list must be found in the string

Once again, the goal is basicly to do something like this:
- Take sudo desu doing grin
- And form desudoingrin

See how that works?

If you want to join in, go ahead. The word list we’re using is this one. Programming experience is [obviously] required.

The purpose of this? Nothing really, just something interesting to do.

Prize: Nothing! Ain’t that nice.

As for me, pass two of my script took a little over 23 hours to complete on my laptop [string searches are FUN]. Of course I messed up the results: “241574 has been reduced to NULL.” Fixed and ran on a faster machine, and it managed to shorten the word list down from 241574 to 177954. Not much of a improvement from pass 2, but it makes coding pass 3 easier, slightly. I’ll likely combine the passes into one or two later on.

As for anything else interesting: Nope, nothing. I’ve been playing online games and of course I haven’t done anything remotely useful lately. Except open a bank account, I suppose that’s something.

Just a silly contest between me and my friends to create the shortest string of letters possible including every word of a word list put in. Basicly you select any word in the word list and search the string of letters for it, you’ll find the word.

Right now I’m just working on a sample set of 241,574 words or so.

My program so far can just read the text in and remove words that are contained within other words. [ie. The, Then] The first stage which is the rough loading stage takes about 212 seconds and knocks the word list down to 198,901. If the word list was really large, we need all the memory we can save from the beginning.

The second stage checks through everything and at the moment is still going. On my laptop it’s fairly slow. The fun thing is, it gets faster as it goes along. Words that match are removed entirely, meaning 1 less word to check every time.

And etc. I’m gonna go sleep while it’s processing on my laptop now.

Sensationalist titles rock.

For those not “in the know”, Digg.com founder hosts a weekly “podcast” titled Diggnation. A friend and some other people have been mirroring the videos of it on their site, Diggdown.

This logo is promptly displayed on Diggnation’s site:

Now, here’s what was delivered to my friends earlier this week:
http://www.iggdown.net/pdf.pdf

Fun how people still PDFs for legal stuff. Adobe has a strong arm in this market!

Jokes aside, they are being asked to stop providing the mirror of the videos, as well as remove trademarks and association from DIGG / Diggnation.

Now, you see that logo near the top of this page? That’s a Creative Commons licence logo. To me, that being on their page basicly tells me that anything you find on that site [videos/pages/images/text] is Free to copy and Distribute as long as you do not alter it and do not claim ownership of it [as well as cite the author]. Obviously this doesn’t cover trademark issues, but it puzzles me why they would claim copyright infringement.

Diggdown has already renamed their site and begun to remove trademarks from it, but so far they seem to be focused on continuing to mirror the videos.

One thing I didn’t mention was that Diggdown gives users video downloads before the offical release date. That’s why they are upset. Thing is, if they didn’t want that in the first place, they probally shouldn’t put the Creative Commons on their site.

Alright that’s my couple of cents. I’m gonna go tell them they should seek some legal advice and perhaps write back to get clarification on some things [creative commons stuff].