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FineRedMist
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Sigh--downtime
I've contacted the ISP. It turns out the problem is with the phone company and it is affecting a number of people in the Edmonton area. I would like to thank the person who left their wireless network insecure so I could post this.

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Current Location: Home
Current Mood: disappointed

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Downtime on October 1st
The ISP is changing the VLAN (virtual network) I'm on at their end and the IP addresses will be changing. So there is downtime on the 1st for them to change it, and a little bit more for DNS to reflect the changes.
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Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday gaffetheorist!

Current Location: Home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Nostalgia - Dr Draw

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Tiredness evidence
I've noticed I am excessively repetitive when tired.

This message was heavily edited to remove repetition.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: White noise from fans.

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GPS my kitchen
We are getting our kitchen renovated. I'll post who is doing it if I like the results and they don't continue to damage our existing floors too much.

One of the annoyances though was yesterday where they couldn't give us a time when they would be delivering the new cabinets. So it came to mind that it would be cool if a company could provide a generic system of having:
* GPS in every truck doing deliveries with an interface to select the next destination for delivery.
* A server that broadcasts to a user when their up for delivery next (IM, text message, phone call, whatever).
* Possibly include some statistical work to figure out how long it will be for the driver to get to your place (if the deliveries are ordered and you know the GPS coordinates along with average time spent at each location to deliver goods, then you could have a reasonable estimate).

Then people could actually get notified and leave work to be home only when they need to be instead of a four hour (or all day) "window". Most of the parts are already available too. I'm sure UPS and other delivery companies have tracking systems for what is on the vehicle and where it is. It wouldn't be that hard to tie it with a server that tracks progress and the people being visited.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: working

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Godel & Principia Mathematica
First, I will admit I know nothing and that this was a whacked out idea.

I just read an article by Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) in SEED and something he said tweaked a neuron or two and inspired the following:

Remember when you were shown in math (a + ib)(a + ib) = a * a + 2iab - b * b? Well, I was wondering if the "result" of Godel's self-referential contradiction could be treated like i here. Where we give it some symbol but can have interesting consequences when interacting with itself or other types of contradictions like the imaginary part above affectecting the "real" portion.

Anyway, monthly post of crazy thoughts complete.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: working

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Exposing inherited members in C# interfaces to COM
I ran into this today and it was driving me crazy.

I happen to like writing in C#. It's fast and easy and provides a lot of functionality that I use.

In this case I needed to expose the code I was writing to script, in particular VB or Java script. To do so then it made sense to expose the functionality I was writing as COM objects. This is generally quite trivial in C# by simply adding the ComVisibleAttribute to the interface or class. However it only exposes the methods on the actual class, not any methods that are public on subclasses or interfaces.

To clarify then, if you had:
[ComVisible(true)]
interface IBase 
{
    int IDoStuff();
}
[ComVisible(true)]
interface IDerived : IBase
{
    int IDoOtherStuff();
}


And you have an object of type IDerived in script, you would not be able to call IDoStuff(). Instead you would have to implement the classes as follows:

[ComVisible(true)]
interface IBase 
{
    int IDoStuff();
}
[ComVisible(true)]
interface IDerived : IBase
{
    int IDoOtherStuff();
    new int IDoStuff();
}


To expose IDoStuff(). It would be awesome if there was an easy way to explose the members and properties of an inherited class or interface at the same level without having to add a potentially arbitrary large number of methods and properties and maintain them.

If there is such a way, then please, please let me know. I find this solution inelegant in the extreme.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: irked
Current Music: Ambient fans

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Evolution of Religious Belief?
I had already read Pascal Boyer's book on why we believe. It seems though the discussion is garnering more visibility as this graced the postings in /. to a New York Times article Darwin's God.

Now I have fulfilled my once a month posting.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: I Will Survive - Cake

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Congrats Kevin!
Kudos for getting an assistant professorship at the prestigious University of Waterloo :).

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Courage

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Video Games Live
We went to see the Video Games Live concert on Monday night, which was really cool. Maybe even loosened some of the mucus in my sinuses (been sick with the flu for the past week and a half now). It's a touring show that uses the local orchestra and choirs to play music accompanied by a large video screen depicting scenes from the games the music was written for. A colleague has thoughtfully provided a link to some photos from the event at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16973533@N00/tags/videogameslive2007/. The event included a costume contest for game characters and a local programme change to include music from BioWare's Jade Empire.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: flu
Current Music: Sweet white noise of PC cooling fans

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Brain Out of Order
I stumbled across an article in December about various types of memory and thinking and about educating those that had issues with solving certain classes of problems because of how their brain works. For the life of me I can't find the article anymore. Anyway one of the points was regarding sequential problem solving and how some people are good at it and some, well, aren't. I'm now quite convinced I'm in the latter group. It at least adds a whole new dimension as to *why* I suck at certain things.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: Why Go

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Science is like an NP problem?
This was just something that came to mind while at work on the walk across the building to the bathroom (washroom, restroom, loo, WC).

I visualise NP problems as having lots of locally optimal (as in constraining the region to a much smaller area) solutions and one globally optimal solution. Science sits at a locally optimal solution and as we expand the regions of scope of science, it eventually expands to include a new peak that is optimal for the larger region. Science (eventually) makes a jump to that new peak (not necessarily to the top of it)--sometimes climbing down the valley a bit between the two peaks to do so.

Anyway, something my brain connected oddly.

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Current Location: Work
Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: None, sadly. Fixing that now.

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Software Pain
I've been living on Vista RC2 for some time. I had to go back to the NVidia August drivers to be able actually play the games Vista claims it was getting better for (the driver with RC2 is more recent). I finally upgraded to the full release yesterday and discovered that neither the driver that came with the release nor the updated one work for City of Heroes. Resulting in my 2560x1600 rendering to occur entirely in an 800x600 window in the lower left corner instead.

So now I'm back to reinstalling everything again except this time on XP. I think I'll wait a couple of months yet before I consider going back and trying it again. I've really lost faith in both NVidia and ATI for being able to produce a driver that actually work. I've found some annoying bugs in Vista as well (like in install paths such as "c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8" if I select the space after "microsoft" and replace it with a "\" I get an "à" instead). F'n à!

Other gripe--installing Visual Studio 8. Since I installed Office 2007 first, I could no longer select the install path. WTF! So now I uninstall Office 2007 and am installing Visual Studio 8, then Office 2007, then install the office support for VS 8.

In a way, I wish MS still had their products being done in little silos so this sort of interop ordering pain didn't exist. What a fucking annoyance.

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Current Location: home
Current Mood: aggravated

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NeverWinter Nights 2