- The TV series "Friends". Yeah, every single episode of all the 10 seasons! The whole thing is about 35 GiB in size!
- Currently, I'm acquiring the anime series "Robotech". It's 85 episodes and 14.4 GiB, and so far I have about 50 episodes (it's 3 seasons in total.)
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Updated Movie List
Hi people,
Here's the new list of my movies. I updated the last one quite a few times in place, but from now on, I'll post an entirely new list every couple of month or so, or when my collection has changed (grown, shrunk, etc.)
In addition to all these films, I also have the following :
Sunday, June 18, 2006
The Good Guys Make Cartoons Too!
Go and watch that one too. Remember, DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is bad! Really Bad!
The Future of the Internet, or the "why" in "Why Learn More?"
First off, go and watch this flash animation about the "future of the Internet", so to speak. But remember to come back and read the rest. The SWF file is about 1.7MiB in size.
...
Now, what do you think about that? "Net Neutrality" is good or bad? You know, forget about net neutrality. What about the idea of major cable and telecom companies, controling the data that passes over their cables? Is it good or bad? The way it is presented in this animation, the future of Internet depends on it! According to the producers of this clip, if we give those pipe-providers control over what goes and doesn't go on their data routes, the world will become a Shangri-la of blessed connectivity!
Not so fast! The real story is not just that. You see, after the major -- I'm talking billions here -- success of companies like Google, that provide all their services over the Internet, connectivity providers (those major cable and telecom companies) started thinking along the lines that, why should Google reap all the profits? After all, it's their cables (or whatever) that carries the data and keeps the people connected. Basically, they thought that since it's them that connect the likes of Google to their source of income, they should have a piece of that pie too. But they just don't come out and say that. They say that they want to have different paths of Internet-traffic flow for different kinds of applications, but what's really going to happen is that they will be able to give priority to the traffic of anyone they want, say "CompanyEcks", who pays them top dollar for such a priority.
And the other online service providers will be forced to compete too, because suddenly, Google's website will load 10 times slower that CompanyEcks's (trust me, they will find a more subtle and more damaging way) and the people will go the "faster" or "better" service.
Then Google will be forced to pay for priority too, and that will cause the end-user prices to go up as well. In the end, you and I loose. (OK, you loose. I've already lost, because I don't have the power to protest to these kinds of my government's decision.)
So it's not the question of many smart pipes, or one dumb pipe to carry the data. The question is whether to have one indiscriminating pipe to carry whatever information you want, or many different pipes with the good ones carrying the information your ISP wants.
That's why we, the users, have to educate ourselves, so not to choose whichever pop-up window that was bigger. Choose smartly.
...
Now, what do you think about that? "Net Neutrality" is good or bad? You know, forget about net neutrality. What about the idea of major cable and telecom companies, controling the data that passes over their cables? Is it good or bad? The way it is presented in this animation, the future of Internet depends on it! According to the producers of this clip, if we give those pipe-providers control over what goes and doesn't go on their data routes, the world will become a Shangri-la of blessed connectivity!
Not so fast! The real story is not just that. You see, after the major -- I'm talking billions here -- success of companies like Google, that provide all their services over the Internet, connectivity providers (those major cable and telecom companies) started thinking along the lines that, why should Google reap all the profits? After all, it's their cables (or whatever) that carries the data and keeps the people connected. Basically, they thought that since it's them that connect the likes of Google to their source of income, they should have a piece of that pie too. But they just don't come out and say that. They say that they want to have different paths of Internet-traffic flow for different kinds of applications, but what's really going to happen is that they will be able to give priority to the traffic of anyone they want, say "CompanyEcks", who pays them top dollar for such a priority.
And the other online service providers will be forced to compete too, because suddenly, Google's website will load 10 times slower that CompanyEcks's (trust me, they will find a more subtle and more damaging way) and the people will go the "faster" or "better" service.
Then Google will be forced to pay for priority too, and that will cause the end-user prices to go up as well. In the end, you and I loose. (OK, you loose. I've already lost, because I don't have the power to protest to these kinds of my government's decision.)
So it's not the question of many smart pipes, or one dumb pipe to carry the data. The question is whether to have one indiscriminating pipe to carry whatever information you want, or many different pipes with the good ones carrying the information your ISP wants.
That's why we, the users, have to educate ourselves, so not to choose whichever pop-up window that was bigger. Choose smartly.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
I'm Back (T3 Style!)
I lost my phone connection, Internet access and cellphone coverage in various times during last week and this one, due do a combination of mice and stupid people! (Talk about bad luck!)
My Internet is back while my phone is not quite (they both use the same line. How???!!!) I hope I can get my cellphone back too.
Now the point of all this is that if you tried to reach me in the past days, and you read this blog as well, you now know that you haven't been snubbed!
My Internet is back while my phone is not quite (they both use the same line. How???!!!) I hope I can get my cellphone back too.
Now the point of all this is that if you tried to reach me in the past days, and you read this blog as well, you now know that you haven't been snubbed!
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Convex Hull
I don't know how do mathematicians define a Convex Hull, but informally, the (planar) convex hull of a set of point on the plain is defined as the smallest convex polygon that includes all the points.
If you think about it, the verteces of such polygon will have to be in the given set, and the convex hull will be unique (if we add the restriction that no three consecutive vertecs of the resulting hull can be on the same line. Which is not much of a "restriction", because if they are, we just simply remove the middle point of the three and voila!)
So, the problem becomes finding the smallest area, convex polygon one can construct with the vertices from the set that encompasses all the given points.
Finding a convex hull is an interesting problem by itself, and quite useful in many other planar geometry and pattern recognition problems.
Now, many algorithms exist for finding the convex hull efficiently but not too simple (except the divide and conquer one which I'm not going to go into here.) When it comes to implementing, most people may try the naive O(n2), which is not easy to get right in one go (if you're that kind of person who tries that and gets it right in the first try, leave my weblog immidiately. I can't stand people better than I here!)
The other easy-to-comprehend-but-hard-to-implement method is "Graham's Scan", but that needs a special and none-trivial sort. Graham's Scan runs in O(n log n).
The method I'm going to discuss here is a O(n log n), and easy to implement algorithm. I first saw it in a Python book, the title of which I can't remember.
It starts with a straightforward sorting of the points, based on the X coordinate then the Y coordinate. Then, we'll start from the leftmost point (least X) and work our way to the rightmost point, maintaining two lists of points. One is the botton run of the points between the min- and max-X points, and the other is the top run.
Here's C++ code that implements the algorithm:
#define TURN_DIR(p1,p2,p3) (p1.x * p2.y - p1.y * p2.x + \
p2.x * p3.y - p2.y * p3.x + \
p3.x * p1.y - p3.y * p1.x)
#define LAST(cntnr) (cntnr).back()
#define BEFORE_LAST(cntnr) (cntnr)[(cntnr).size() - 2]
vector<Point> ConvexHull (vector<Point> & pts)
{
sort (pts.begin(), pts.end());
vector<Point> lower, upper;
for (unsigned i = 0; i < pts.size(); ++i)
{
while (lower.size() >= 2 &&
TURN_DIR(BEFORE_LAST(lower), LAST(lower), pts[i]) <= 0
)
lower.pop_back ();
while (upper.size() >= 2 &&
TURN_DIR(BEFORE_LAST(upper), LAST(upper), pts[i]) >= 0
)
upper.pop_back ();
lower.push_back (pts[i]); upper.push_back (pts[i]);
}
lower.insert (lower.end(), upper.rbegin() + 1, upper.rend() - 1);
return lower;
}
You should be able to make sense of this code without much difficulty, but be warned, I changed my implemented code to put it here, and I have not tested it (my data structures for points and for return values were different, and I removed the comments! >:-) ) So use at your own risk.
Now, the challenge is this. Can you make it shorter? (It's possible to use recursion to do so, I think.)
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
The Day of the Beast
Since 59 minutes ago, has started the Day of the Beast! (In my timezone at least, GMT +3:30) I just noticed that a few minutes ago that today is 06/06/06. As close to the number of the beast as you can get in each century!
You see, I still remember (with a lot of nostalgia) that the default port for Doom multiplayer was 666. The original Dooms and Duke Nuken 3D were the first games I played on a network (it was experimental, over PPP, but the bandwidth was too low for actually playing.)
Anyway, enjoy today and wait for the antichrist!
You see, I still remember (with a lot of nostalgia) that the default port for Doom multiplayer was 666. The original Dooms and Duke Nuken 3D were the first games I played on a network (it was experimental, over PPP, but the bandwidth was too low for actually playing.)
Anyway, enjoy today and wait for the antichrist!
Friday, June 02, 2006
Wall-socket PC
A very cool thing I saw on Slashdot. It's a thin client PC, with the size of a hand. Just look at the picture. I think all the ports and connectors take more room than the chips!
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