Recent blog entries for fzort

MAKE TIME

I'm permanently going off-line on IM services. That stuff is too much of a time sink. I'm still reachable through e-mail. Thank you.

Spammers seem to be scripting their attacks. Let's face it, that's not too hard. Maybe we need catchas.

Wolfram Alpha is making me feel in the future. Fun.

Looks like there's a movie coming out about Hypatia of Alexandria, the 4th century Greek mathematician and astronomer who, unfortunately, is less famous for her actual works than for being torn to pieces by a Christian lynch mob led by pious bishop Cyril (who would later become Saint Cyril).

I'd be ecstatic if the movie showed mathematics, but the synopsis at Wikipedia suggests that the odds of that happening are slim. Still, I'm all for movies about martyrs of reason. There's a trailer.

Speaking of mathematics, Wolfram Alpha is out.

Stuff I've been doing outside work

I haven't posted in a while, so here's an update.

• Game coding: I'm writing yet another game. This time I'm working with some talented artists, so who knows. I won't say much about it except that it will feature audible explosions in the vacuum of space. Here's a debugging screenshot of an octree (that stuff really helps). I wrote a firing pattern scripting system, inspired on BulletML, but using Scheme. Here's a screenshot of an editor for a 2D shmup, featuring my hacked OpenGL GUI toolkit.

• Prolog: I played a bit with Prolog, after reading on the 5th Generation Computer project. A really interesting piece of computing history I didn't know about. Prolog is mind-explodey.

• Learning Japanese: it's apparent that my crappy English is at a local minimum and will hardly get any better, so I decided to try something different. Memorized the kana, thanks to Kanatest (I should send the authors a postcard). I'm learning on my own, using this book/CD set, which isn't bad. I'll try to take the JLPT Level 4 by the end of the year.

I'm also studying for a few more Sun certifications, but I guess that counts as work.

Mindless hyperlink propagation

• Wolfram Alpha: I hope this goes Skynet and takes over the world.
• Metacrap: oldie but goldie by Cory Doctorow.
• Fast Geometry Hashing for Automated Astrometry: solving the interesting algorithmic problem of figuring out from which part of the skies a picture of some stars comes from.

[elided]

I gave Go a rest, and have been working on a new game. Here's a screenshot of the in-game editor. It will be a shmup a-la Ikaruga and others.

Maybe I should move my blog somewhere else, since I want to go commercial with it (this kind of game has more followers in Japan, but there seems to be a niche market in the west). Hey, can't blame a guy for wanting to make money doing something he loves, right?

Some numbers

The brain works by activating connections (synapses) between neurons. A human brain can activate about 10¹⁶ (that's 10 quadrillion) connections a second. If we compare a synapse with a floating-point instruction, we could say that your brain's performance is at about 10 petaflops. For comparison, today's fastest computer, the IBM Roadrunner, can reach a measly 1.7 petaflops in a good day (it also occupies 560 m² and draws almost 4 MW - not even a strict diet of Big Macs could possibly top that).

What are you doing with that hardware?

[elided]

ingvar: agreed. Advogato should filter out Twitter.