Hardy According to Hector

Uncoffined...
Unkissed...
Unrejoicing...
Unconfessed...
Unembraced...

It's a turn of phrase that brings with it a sense of not sharing, being out if it, whether because of diffidence or shyness, but holding back, not being in the swim of it. Can you see that?

GATTACA

I just noticed that the name of the film is made of only the four letter used to show the four bases in DNA. That is A, G, C, T.

The 2007 ACM-ICPC World Finals

It's finished, with the Warsaw University team, the only team with 8 solved problems, standing(!) at the top. Sharif and Amirkabir teams solved 5 and 4 problems respectively. Good job guys! Here's a more detailed standings at the end of the 4th hour. The problems are all geometric! Not that I could have solved even two, but at least I would have had ideas about them, had I've had attended, that is!

The Burning Crusade

Today (or rather, yesterday) the expansion to the World of Warcraft, titled the Burning Crusade was released. It seems that the expansion has sold around 2.5 million units in North America and Europe only! That's a really, really impressive number. Seems that WoW addiction is more serious than I thought. For those that has been living in a vacuum, WoW is the most popular MMOG (it's a MMORPG.)

Wiki-back-pedia!

The English Wikipedia is back in Iran. I don't know whether it's for all ISPs (I think so) or if it's going to last. I don't even know what might have caused it, but I'm happy. Unless... this was a clever maneuver by them to make us content! What if they blocked off Wikipedia for a couple of days, then reopened it so every one would be happy and forget about all the stupid blocks they have on all those other sites. Now I'm angry and desperate!

A Miserable Failure!

Go to google, and search for "Failure" or "Miserable Failure". Unless you're feeling lucky, look what the first hit is! A really miserable failure! This is no bug, like you'd imagine at first. It's simply a biproduct of the Google page-rank system. I don't really know how it works, but here's an explanation on the official Google blog. Good job to those who've done this anyway!

AMD is Buying ATI!

Oh, my gods! That's big news! It has been in the rumors for some time now, but it was just officially announced that AMD is going to acquire ATI in its entirety for some $5.5 billion! (The number is probably off, because it depends on the stock share value of the companies.) I don't know what I should make out of this deal. I've always liked AMD far better than Intel (that's primarily because of the segmented memory model of x86, (Intel was responsible for that, not AMD) and my problems with it in the early years of my programming! You know what they say, old hatereds die hard!) But recently Intel has introduced its Core 2 Duo processors which just knocks all other processors out of the competition, performance- and power- and price-wise. And I've never hidden the fact that I've always prefered nVidia GPUs. They're just more stylish! (For the record, I have an Athlon 64 3000+ on nForce3 250 with a GeForce 6600.) Of course with the merger, nVidia is going to receive the most heat. Anyway, I guess my next system will be a dual core Intel CPU with a (maybe SLI) nVidia GPU. I'll have to wait and see.

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.

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!

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!

Just Do It.

Just go and search in Google for this: "once in a blue moon over middle C times a quadrillion"! Here's the link for your convenience.

Norooz

Today is the first day of the year in the Iranian (Persian?) calendar. We call this day the "Norooz" which means "new day". As you non-Iranians may or may not know, today is the first day of Spring. More accurately, somewhere between yesterday and today was the exact Vernal (spring) Equinox. Incidentally, Iranian calendar is the most accurate solar calendars that's in use. Of course, that's probably because it's based on year-to-year observation rather than a fixed and relatively simple set of rules. This year was the first year that I wasn't with my family at the moment of the turning of the year. I was en route back from Tehran, from a business trip that got too long.

Dancing Links

I've recently came across Knuth's Algorithm X, and the implementation he calls "Dancing Links" (in the context of a Sudoku solver, but that's a whole other story.) This is a back-tracking method for a wide range of problems (problems reducible to an instance of the Exact Cover problem.) While Knuth's DLX is still not a deterministically polynomial-time algorithm (I just invented a concept! Hurray!) (or is it?) the algorithm is beautiful and very efficient in practice.