07.22.08

This is what I’m talkin’ about!

Posted in Uncategorized at 6:24 pm by luke

I’m writing this on the wordpress iPhone app. Local drafts, quick text entry… This is the kind of lightweight use that the platform is amazing for. There’s nowhere that I have any excuse for wasting time anymore. Waiting for the bus? Turned up early for an appointment? Here’s an opportunity to write down my thoughts for later.

Anyway. Back to studying for my supp exam. Talk more soon.

06.21.08

Tweet, tweet

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:49 pm by luke

Need to mention: I’ve joined twitter. It has become useful, despite the odds.

twitter.com/luketoop if you want to see all the fluff I think of but would hesitate to inflict on you in person.

 

Caffe’ Trieste

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:47 pm by luke

This one counts as an epiphany — I was in Las Vegas for a few days, and felt on the edge of some kind of deep insight into America, but it hasn’t cleared up yet — but I’m in a traditional Italian cafe, watching a performance by a Chinese singer and a black guitarist, while another patron watches youtube videos on his laptop. The multiple levels of meaning are true in fact and true in metaphor at the same time: this place is like some ultimate bricolage. Genetic heritage is subject to cultural and personal values: technology intertwines with emotional and social needs.

This is what San Francisco means on some level — to both its residents and outsiders. This is the freedom of cultural movement that makes this city compelling.

I feel like a big chunk of my understanding of this city has snapped into place. A long and winding chat with another customer here, Michele, also helped a lot. Many thanks, if you’re reading this :)

I’ll be putting up some notes on WWDC in the next few days, now that the dust has settled. I’ve been too busy doing things to write about them, but I feel like it’s a good time to pull the threads together at the moment. Maybe that’s the caffeine speaking. We shall see!

04.03.08

Does news.Ycombinator.com have a sense of humour?

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:06 pm by luke

I had this idea the other day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=153760

which I meant more as a kind of playful thought experiment. I thought people would catch on that it was a joke, but most replies seem way too serious.

sigh

Oh well, I’ll just have to work on my comedy writing skills. It is kinda cool to do a submit and to watch for comments and saves. This karma thing is an addictive game to play :)

03.30.08

Google Talk / Puzzle Competition

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:34 am by luke

Google did a talk and puzzle competition at Adelaide Uni on Friday.

My team did okay for a while, but fell behind at the end: we were 5th out of about 12 teams.

Here are a few tips for those of you out there who go to one of these in the future:

  1. Organise a group. They strongly suggested 5 person teams. You get 6 problems 2 hours to solve them. In addition, one of the questions was highly parallelisable. You can gather with others in the room, but it’s not as smooth.
  2. Look through all the questions before starting. You get bonus points for being the first to answer a question correctly. We just went through the questions in sequence, and each volunteered for questions we thought we could do fastest. We could have played the system by seeing which puzzles could be brute forced by having more than one person work on them at once, and concentrated on them first. Also, given that the groups were 5 people with 6 questions, question 6 was usually left until last, and so could have been easy pickings for bonus points.
  3. Don’t be afraid to get clues. There are 2 clues per puzzle, each costing 25 points: the first was just a basic hint as to how to solve that kind of puzzle. The second hint was for people who had done a lot of the working out, but who had not had the flash of insight needed to solve it. I was doing the logic puzzle, and hit a brick wall at one point. I agonised for ages, then went for the first clue. It was just a basic hint as to how to solve logic puzzles, and so didn’t help me at all. Clue 2 pointed out a subtle point spread among several statements in the logic puzzle setup, and with this one I got a solution in a couple of minutes. Ideally, I would have gone for a clue earlier and only asked for the second one, then helped out with another one of the puzzles. The 25 points I wasted cost us at least one place in the rankings.
  4. Get some sleep, coffee and puzzles. It’s more fun when you’re rested and alert! Next time this comes around, I’ll also spend some time in the week before doing other puzzles and challenges to get me in the right mindset. 
  5. Look for the twist. These are done by smart people in a playful mood, so puns and subtle hints abound. What is difficult or different about this problem that might also provide the insight into a solution? What might be a counter-intuitive leap or contrarian process that could get the answer? How could you re-express the information so that patterns would be more obvious.

That said, it was actually a lot of fun. Get a few friends with the right mindset, and you’ll enjoy yourself immensely. I’m going to plan ahead next year!

11.11.07

this is really nice…

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:47 am by luke

I’m writing this from my ipod touch. Punctuation is a little bit of a pain, but it’s behaving very well for somerhing so small. This could replace my laptop for many purposes!

09.24.07

I just gave a Quartz Composer presentation…

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:17 pm by luke

And it was a bit of a workout. A presentation is so open-ended that you can throw as much time as you want into it.

I think I got what I wanted out of it — to enthuse people about making custom visualization projects within their applications. We’ll see what comes from that! I may even make it to CreateWorld in November…