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Clever Stencil

I ran into this stencil on the side of a fire extinguisher box at Reed College and thought it was delightful.

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More Mandelbrot

I just recently revisited the M-Set code from my Perl Snippets post. The code I had was pretty ugly, so I decided to rewrite it in Python. The result is not only a lot cleaner and easier to understand, but it’s also a lot faster:
$ time python mandel.py > \dev\null
real 0m0.051s
user 0m0.036s
sys 0m0.010s
$ time perl mandel.pl > \dev\null
real 0m3.518s
user 0m3.463s
sys 0m0.029s

You [...]

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A useful calendar in Conky

Since I got a new desktop a month or so ago, I’ve been running Ubuntu as my main operating system, and am using Conky for a nice heads-up-display. There are a lot of articles on the web about both Ubuntu and Conky, but one thing I couldn’t find a good, accurate how-to on was getting [...]

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iWork Autosave

So I had the wonderful experience this weekend of losing over 1,200 words of work on a paper because I forgot to save it regularly. I was really, really sad about that and really bummed that Pages, my word processor of choice (I love the formatting tools), doesn’t support either autosaving or document recovery. However, [...]

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Perl Snippets

I’ve been getting into a mood lately that makes me fiddle around with fun Perl stuff, but sadly school’s picking up to the point that writing anything up isn’t going to happen. However, I have a couple short scripts that I’m just dying to share.
Just Another Perl Hacker
I figured that it was about time in [...]

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Make a Money/Card Clip

So the other day I finally got tired with my (awesome) wallet and decided to make something new. I ended up choosing a money clip. Not only would it be a nice, high quality, metal object living in my pocket, instead of a crummy, dirty wallet, but a money clip is good looking, classy and [...]

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GPSd under OS X

So I recently picked up a cheap GPS module on Amazon. It was about $30 with shipping, and I got a neat little dongle which connects over USB to my computer and communicates with software. It didn’t come with support for OS X (although interestingly enough it shipped with Mac OS 8 and 9 drivers), [...]

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Genetic Algorithms in Perl

Inspired by recent genetic algorithms floating around, I decided to try my hand at implementing one in perl. I’d thought for a long time that it would be quite difficult, but really it’s quite easy. My biggest hangup was dealing with data structures, but once I did that, it turns out that all you really [...]

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Synchronized Presidential Debates

I just ran across what is probably one of the cleverest and scariest analyses of the presidential debates I’ve seen this year. It’s ridiculous to see just how similar everything they say is. It’s kinda a shame that the debates were such a place for the candidates to simply spew their canned points to the [...]

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Fast and Simple Stock Quotes Using Perl

One of the things that makes perl so powerful and fascinating is the huge number of modules that are available online, especially through the CPAN repository. Today I stumbled upon one called Finance::Quote, which does one thing, very simply: it retrieves stock (or mutual fund) quotes. You feed it a ticker symbol and it gives [...]

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