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This is really sad. I know for a fact that when I was in eighth grade, I could get to something like the 25th level of Sokoban. Now I can’t even get past the 4th level. Chalk it up to mental weariness or maybe just having my mind slowly drained out of me by formal education—it could be blamed on a variety of things.

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In a heroic last-ditch effort to make my Operations Research class interesting enough to pay attention to, I’ve decided to do my assignments in T_EX. That way, I may end up learning something useful.

There’s some pretty funny stuff you can find if you look up T_EX:

Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with. TeX runs on almost all operating systems.

Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in it. The award per bug started at one cent and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there have been very few bugs and in any case a cheque proving that the owner found a bug in TeX is usually framed instead of cashed.

[…]

TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the “absolutely final change (to be made after my death)” will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.

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At Biola University, the campus wireless network is protected by the Bluesocket authentication system. Basically all traffic is blocked until you visit the login page and enter your ID and password. (Heaven help you if you don’t know what the URL of the login page is…. It tries to redirect all traffic to that page, but it only works about half the time.)

This morning, I was sitting in my mind-numbingly dull Operations Research class, and I came up with a way to automatically log on to the system every time your network is brought up. (If you think that sounds boring, try not to think about what the class is like when you do pay attention.)

Here it is. It works on Macs and Linux.

Maybe it’ll be useful to someone. Under Linux, you install it by adding a line to your /etc/network/interfaces file. Under Mac OS X, well, we’ll just see if André figures that one out. If it’s useful to other people I might put an installer together so you don’t have to mess with things manually.

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Wheeeee—I’m on Biola’s Computer Science page. That’s me on the right demonstrating the advantages of GNOME on tycho in the Alcove where I set up the Linux network with André and Joel. Notice the requisite hand motions; all very crucial to purveying the intricacies of our lab setup.

(We named all the machines after Marathon characters)

FROGBlast the vent core.

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I realized why the English switched to the metric system. They got too confused saying things like ‘pounds per pound’ and the like. You can’t have your weight measurement be called the same thing as your currency; it’s absurd. And they thought money is more important than weight, so they went metric.

(The folly in this will be apparent when you realize that money is not, in fact, more important than weight—you can survive for a while without money, but if you have no weight, you will soon be gone. Still, since the result was them switching from the Imperial system to one that expedites computation, they can be forgiven for such a major miscalculation.)

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