Harry Potter and nethack

by Tim Faircloth on Oct 30, 2007, 4:27 pm

It seems like I often try to squeeze two subjects into one post. I think it’s because I each subject doesn’t seem to be post-worthy on its own so I conglomerate the two into one post. In any event…

First, we have this guy, who got a Dumbledore tattoo on his back before “the announcement”, and now his buddies are teasing him because Dumbledore’s gay.

Wait, wait, let me get this straight. Getting a tat of a character from a children’s book is cool, but when that character turns out to be gay it’s suddenly not cool? That makes no sense.

In other news, there’s this guy, who sought out to get the “highest possible score in nethack”. At first I was confused. How is it possible to kill every monster in a dungeon game where everything is generated randomly? There’s always another monster to kill.

As a side note, I’m an avid nethack player and some of that transcript was over my head. That’s a Five LEDs link, ladies and gentlemen. Hell, maybe even five and a half LEDs.

After doing some math and thinking a bit, I realized that it isn’t possible to get any more than 2147483647 points, since that’s the upper limit of a signed two’s compliment integer (lower limit is -2147483648).

I don’t really have anything more to say to this than “wow”. This dude spent 700,000 turns playing nethack. It’s a shame he couldn’t ascend, but I think his choice of death — “snu snu” — was greatly comedic. Props if you know where the term “snu snu” came from.

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Ten thousand boxes

by Tim Faircloth on Oct 29, 2007, 10:26 am

You’re invited into a room containing 10,000 boxes. One of them will kill you, but all the other boxes contain $1,000. How many of them would you open? (ruthlessly filched from the pages of reddit)

For the rest of this post, I’ll make two assumptions. 1) The author of this conundrum meant “$1,000 apiece”, not just “$1,000” and 2) you’re allowed to keep the money from the boxes you open.

Keep in mind that you’re invited to the room. That means you probably can’t leave the room (at least not with anything but money in your hands), and there probably isn’t anybody around to help you in any way. Most of the people on reddit didn’t get that.

Here’s a probability summary:

You have less than a 10% chance to die until after you’ve opened 9,990 boxes.
You have less than a 1% chance to die until you’ve opened 9,900 boxes.
You have less than a 0.1% chance to die until you’ve opened 9,000 boxes.
You have less than a 0.02% chance to die until you’ve opened 5,000 boxes.

Personally, I’d open quite a few of the boxes. There are several things I do in life with a much greater risk and smaller gain — driving, traversing stairs, and walking down the street are a few things that come to mind.

It amazes me how many people say they wouldn’t open any of the boxes. C’mon, what’s the fun in that?

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SHUT UP, Rowling!

by Tim Faircloth on Oct 26, 2007, 9:15 am

I’m sure you’ve all heard that Dumbledore is gay. You know what? I agree with Jeffrey Weiss, who says J. K. Rowling should just shut up.

Honestly. When Tolkein was done writing Lord of the Rings, did he come out and extend his writing in a press conference? No. Does Stephen King do it? No.

Dangit, I’m the reader. I get to decide those things.

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Reddit RSS broken

by Tim Faircloth on Oct 16, 2007, 8:58 am

I was going through my stories on Google Reader yesterday when I ran across an item that wasn’t linked properly. There was a “[link]” in the description of the item, but the item itself had no link. “What’s going on here?,” I think to myself, “I can’t view the article by hitting ‘v’!”.

Turns out that reddit has made a few changes to their site, and they broke their RSS feed. If you click that link, you’ll see what I’m talking about. None of the headlines are links!

So now when I’m checking out anything from reddit in google reader (or probably any rss reader, for that matter), I have to move my hand over to the mouse to click “[link]” in the description of the article instead of using my reader’s built-in keyboard shortcut. As Daniel would say, it separates me from my reader experience (or something like that).

We need to bring this flaw to the attention of the reddit admins, so if you would, just click the little white alien below this post. Maybe we can get this problem fixed.

UPDATE: It looks like reddit has fixed the problem. YAY!

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xkcd

by Tim Faircloth on Oct 10, 2007, 11:59 am

So, if you’ve been under a rock for the past few months, there’s this really cool comic called xkcd that apparently everyone and their mom reads. I’ll bet there’s a link to the latest comic on digg or reddit right now. There’s probably also an entry that says something like “vote up if you think people should stop submitting xkcd comics”.

It’s become an internet fad. No, more than a fad. A fad becomes uncool after a month or so. I get somewhat annoyed when I see four different digg entries for a comic I read first thing that morning… but hey, it is a cool comic.

I bring this up now because today’s comic is one such “overpopular” comic. It’s got several entries on both digg and reddit, and several of my friends have posted to their blogs about it. It’s a simple comic that deals with SQL Injection Attacks. Quite nerdy, but there are several other comics worth noting, like this one, which called for the creation of wetriffs.com — a domain the author had already registered and set up (the wetriffs gallery has a few NSFW pictures in it already).

I’m not sure if I really had a point to this post. I just wanted to link to xkcd again.

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