:: crapweasel ::
the official blog of
Dave Tompkins

RSS Feed

Okay, so tomorrow is my birthday... here is a comic strip about grad student birthdays...

So I'm searching on the net for the exact wording of the monopoly community chest card: "you have won second prize in a beauty contest" and I come across this posting for Absurdist Monopoly and this heartwarmer.

Here is a geeky CS-paper on how Tetris is NP-Hard

We've been having some problems measuring linux cpu time with our new Intel processors with Hyper-Threading. Here is a tutorial on the topic.

This reminds me of when the first dual 486 processor machines came out (~1995?) and the system clock on windows NT went twice as fast as it should have. Quite amusing.

I've had many nicknames over the years -- one of them was Roadkill.

Okay, so I'm surfing the web looking for a good reference diagram for the Duffman uniform, and I came across this page from the Intensive English Institute at the University of Illinois. Strange.

Last night I also played with the CD MIX-1 which the GSS is considering buying. I liked the features of the MIX-2 a lot better. But after looking at their website, I really want one of these MP3 mixers.

So last night I traded in my Rio 800 (which never worked very well) for a brand new Lyra RD 1080. It's pretty cool... when it connects to the PC via USB cable, windows sees it as a drive letter, so you can drag and drop files to it. Here is the catch... it uses .mpy files, not .mp3 files.

But, it's really neat that you can see the .exe for the player right there in the ram of the player. I'm curious to know what processor it is, and how hack-able it is.

Goal #1: write a fast .mp3 <-> .mpy converter.
Goal #2: try to find out what's inside of the thing, and try to figure out how to use it.

Updated on March 16, 2003: I'm now getting about 1 e-mail a week on this whole .mp3 to .mpy converter: I gave up on my RD 1080 -- I think it's a piece of crap... I never got around to working on the converter. I really wish the author of Lyrical (available at the yahoo group: LYRA_RD1080) would just post his source code so that other people could do their own thing. Cheers.

Last night on TV they had a story about a kid committing suicide for playing everquest. Now, here is an article about a man being killed by video games

A great (true) new e-mail horror story.

In-depth Globe and Mail article on Geeks.

Black People Love Us.

Okay... this is really funny. Follow this link and sing along. Trust me... it't a lot funnier if you sing along with the music.

Welcome to my new blog. I abondoned my previous blogs a long time ago, and then for the longest time I no longer had ftp access to the server. For historical purposes, they can be found here: The Good, The Bad, and The Geeky.