blokus

I just played my first games of Blokus last night. A very interesting game where you have pieces shaped like all the Pentominos and 4,3,2 and 1 inos, and you have to try to put down all your pieces. Your pieces can only touch by their corners.

Lots of interesting strategy in this game.

It's very interesting with multiple players, because you can quite effectively gang up on other players to make sure they don't win, which limits the search space for the remaining players.

Excellent learning and strategy game that has lots of deep math in it.

consulting service ad

I just was reading one of my Ruby on Rails server extension errors, and the first advertisement on my gmail account was for Ruby on Rails programmers. Second was for EC2.

Now, that's the totally best place for small consulting companies to get contracts. You can just put up as many of the ads as you need for new contracts, then bring down the ads.

testing

Program testing is not to prove correctness. Yes, totally, testing is just there to help us program, not to prove correctness.

degenerative web page

degenerative is an interesting art project where the characters in a web page are randomly changed after each visit.

paul rand

fb

An excellent article on Bokardo Social Design about how Facebook is brilliant but evil. I heartily agree. I will now be careful to only browse Facebook through a browser where I only do Facebook from now on.

svn merge

Go back in time with "svn merge"

svn merge -r 30:31 file.txt 

riot prrl

lisp/perl

From the mighty mighty xkcd

earthrise

New picture of earthrise from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft.

moonbow

Moonbow

pasta al forno con asparagi

pasta al forno con asparagi

(Baked Pasta with Asparagus)

From "The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces" by Diane Seed

400g Penne or other short pasta
1kg asparagus
1 stick butter
a little chicken stock
salt and black pepper (freshly ground, of course)
1 1/2 cups ricotta or similar curd cheese
1 tbsp olive oil
1 1/4 cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese
3 eggs

Wash the asparagus, remove any tough stalks and cut into short lenghts.

Melt 3 tbsp butter in a pan and cook the asparagus over a low heat for about 20 minutes. Every so often, add a little stock to keep moist. When the asparagus is cooked, season to taste.

While the asparagus is cooking, process the ricotta cheese with the oil. Cook the pasta for half the time stated on the packet. Drain and immediately toss in the remaining butter and half the freshly grated cheese.

Butter a deep oven dish. Make a thin layer of pasta, then one of asparagus, then one of pasta again and then one of ricotta. Repeat, finishing with a layer of pasta.

Beat together the eggs and the remaining cheese and pour over the top. Sprinkle with black pepper. Bake in a medium oven, 350F, for 20 minutes.

page breaks

How to put page breaks in HTML print documents (For work I'm doing on the sunshineorganics.ca page:

page-break-before: always

And from htmlgoodies
always tells the browser to break the print page after this element always.

auto is the default. You're telling the browser to do what it would do anyway: Page break where the page ends.

left is not supported by any browser yet. It is used if your printer will print both sides of a page, like a manuscript. If the page is a left-facing page, use this attribute.

right is what you use if it's a right-facing page.


And an interesting, if scary one automatically print a web page in Javascript with:

window.print()

nina

Roses for Nina.

books

In the topsy-turvy world of publishing, books remain a fundamental source of information for developers at Dr. Dobbs journal.

I have found that I really need the physical book to effectively absorb certain kinds of information, and learning computer languages is definitely one of those. I bought the Agile Web Programming with Rails book as a PDF (twice), the pickaxe Ruby book, Rails Recipes and a bunch others. I learned lots from them, and used them as a daily reference for over a year.

Then, I finally broke down and got the books, and I'm amazed at how much more I get out of the paper book. I think one of the big things is that I can chill out on the couch and just slowly peruse it, without all the energy and distractions of the computer. But in any case, I just love paper books, and I would like you to try out that experiment as well, try absorbing a book as a PDF, and then get the paper version.

If you buy your books at Pragmatic Programmers, they give you a great deal on a PDF/Book combo and they're really nice people too.

puf

puf - Parallel URL fetcher

m

(chaotic): Level 17 HP 75(75) AC -3, meditating.

iq

An online IQ Test. Interesting.

titan

Neat random sness fact:

Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, has an atmosphere so dense and a gravity so low that if you strapped wings onto your arms, you could fly.

That rocks.

From Astronomy Cast, an awesome podcast about space.

love poem for geeks

roses are #ff0000
violets are #0000ff
all my base
are belong to you